To want something, to find within oneself the power to desire. Everyone wants something, yet some cannot bring themselves to want. Wanting is desire—rather than need. Need is more essential. It feels as though desire is not essential. Most people cannot ask for what they want. They wait for it to be given. Or they seek to be with people who are thoughtful, believing they will receive without asking. For some, wanting means not showing “submission”; for others it signifies weakness, and for some it means they do not deserve it. In our society, many people explain their inability to ask for what they want through various justifications rather than acknowledging their own inadequacy. Instead of wanting, they become caretakers of others’ desires. Defending someone else’s rights feels easier. Because, in truth, they are not asking for anything for themselves. What if they did?
Some people fear wanting. They fear not receiving or being disappointed. They fear rejection. Desire and the self develop in parallel. They confuse wanting with greed. It becomes associated with shamelessness.
Lack of desire exists to fill a void. It is the longing to attain what one does not have. It repairs what is missing. Yet some deny their sense of lack, while others believe their missing parts can never be fulfilled and thus see no reason to want at all. Those who do not know how to want—who cannot want—are in fact avoidant personalities. They avoid even their own desires.
To want is to relate. To connect. It is the opposite of “I neither want nor have an opinion.” Those who cannot desire are often somewhat depressed, feel guilty, or believe they do not deserve to want. They confuse their needs with their desires. Having only what they need feels sufficient; after all, they themselves are never “too much.” The self desires; the self longs. The nourishment of the self is “desire.” Even when it knows it cannot attain something, it continues to desire. If it cannot reach it, it survives on the fantasy. To be able to want is to know that one is not yet complete and is open to growth and development. A person either possesses a grandiose self and thus does not want, or a fragile and diminished self and thus cannot want. Wanting—being able to want—is a measure of psychological development, a sign of striving toward growth.
Lack of desire occurs only in depression. You do not even want to want. As if your mouth is cast in plaster, you do not want to speak. If clouds of hopelessness have enveloped your sense of self, you cannot desire. To want is to hope, and to hope is to want.
Some people believe they are not worthy. That one must first deserve in order to be able to want. And they believe they never do. They live and die serving the desires of others. They think chasing the desires of others will ease their guilt. Yet “guilt” is never relieved by serving another. Being unable to want—and giving up wanting—is the greatest punishment a person can inflict on themselves in life. Bound by excessively rigid boundaries, they drain their guilt while paradoxically deepening their own punishment, believing that punishment is the price of sin.
Those who see wanting as something shameful do not realize the shame they inflict upon their own selves. They weave their identity with shame, carve it with sin. Shame, sin, prohibition… and “what will people say?”
But what does your own self say? It is difficult for people to embark on their own inner journey. Because the disappointments, neglect, abuse, deprivation, and emotional vulnerability they carry within are worthy of being seen—yet create a sense of worthlessness at the level of consciousness.
Like a desert full of desires yet never satisfied. The self fragile and sensitive, its desires alive yet compressed by the person themselves.
At some point, desires mix together. Is this my mother’s desire or mine? Is it society’s desire or mine? Where are my self-boundaries, and how enmeshed are they with the other? How much of me is truly me, and how much is the other’s self within me?
Wanting begins in infancy. With milk, crying, the breast, and affection. If not given, the baby stops wanting. It survives on what remains within. It lives with what it receives, and then it withdraws.
Must one become unable to want in order to want again? Must someone push us from behind to make us want? Or is it the unheard impulses nudging us forward?
There is no end to desire. But the end of giving up desire—the inability to want—is a bottomless dark well.
“I have reached the bottom of my lack of desire,” one of my clients says. “I no longer want to see it. I know the end of not being able to want. While struggling in that bottomless well, I experienced the helplessness of not wanting and paid the price of giving up my desires with an inability to feel pleasure. If I can feel pleasure, if I can want, then I exist. Wanting is the greatest indicator of existence. Wanting is the decision between remaining faint and stepping into visibility. The unseen, the one who does not want to be seen, the one who believes they are unwanted—does not want. Wanting is also requesting. To want is to ask. To want is to act. It opposes passivity and lays the foundation for becoming dynamic.”
