WANTER
Me, desire, and all her refusals
Ever since I was a little girl, I knew I wanted to want. First, I wanted to be born, obviously. Then, I wanted to make a lot of very loud noises with my face. Once that got boring, I wanted to have a proper run around, to test these new legs. I wanted to be good when I realised that it would make people happy and then make them love me, in that order. I wanted to have friends, because I was usually alone. I wanted to be clever when I learned about Hermione Granger. I wanted to be hot from the moment I turned 12 years old.
Wanting to be good was easy. To be good, one must just learn how to be good (whatever that may mean, in the billions of contexts in which there is a way to be deemed good at something) and then keep doing that forever, which causes no problems and is sustainable and actually! also the secret to being happy all the time.
Wanting to be hot was more complicated, admittedly, but nothing a little self-obsession and a lifetime of latent eating and body image issues can’t fix.1
Wanting to have friends was hard to live with until I realised that people like someone who is of use to them (or, more specifically, that the type of person I was desperate to befriend liked being surrounded by people of use to them). The better I was at being told what to do, the more often I was invited to play. Fortunately, this method of surviving playground social politics has not left any life-long scars on my personality or value system or sexual psyche.2
Generally, when I have to have a word with myself, the inner voice sounds like a parent and a child. Which makes sense, I guess, considering that I was (re)born about two years ago.3 The parent-voice is how I soothe the panic, how I guide myself into and eventually back out of the hot, quick tantrums which neither of us enjoy but both recognise to be necessary. It’s how I point out to myself that the walls are not, in fact, closing in, and that I am not, in fact, the most important thing happening, anywhere.
But when it comes to that hungry, base instinct, the voice changes. I’ve learned to deploy a special tone when it comes to the thing that in came kicking and screaming with me, which made itself known from my very first word – “again,” I babbled, laughing like a wild thing, because I’d only just met the world but I already knew I wanted more from it. When it comes to my wanting, I speak to myself like a person and a dog.
The pleasure I find in observing myself as a canine is annoying because the concept of woman = dog??????!!!!!! has become very litfic, very white feminism 101, very Girls poop too! Take that, patriarchy!, which is to say that it was once a new and radical idea, but it has now turned to a cliché. Annoying twice over, then, that it’s such an effective way to break through my psyche. My whining impatience; my gluttony for approval; my life-or-death need to be seen and adored, which haunts hand-in-hand with the please please deep-chest feeling of being six years old and not invited. When it comes to this bedrock, the wanting of it all, I have learnt to be very clear. Put It Down, I instruct myself, and my jaws loosen. Enough, I say, maintaining eye contact to guide the command home. That’s Not For You. Let It Go.
Recently, a friend who has known me for a very long time said, after hearing about my latest disaster, “You just need to figure out what you want,” and it was stunning to hear the huge toothy business of life put so simply. Stunning in the truest sense of the world, like I got flashbanged, like afterwards, my ears needed a second to readjust to the room. Yes, actually. It’s often forgotten between everything else, but that is, ultimately, what I need.
One of the complications of figuring out what I want is that I think I want everything, which does not make me special, but it does make me greedy. I don’t just want my cake and the eating of it (although, really, I don’t trust whatever type of person wants the cake enough to have it in front of them but decides they’re above a taste of it. Boring and concerning, in my opinion. Let’s invite Bella Hadid, shall we) – I do, obviously, want the cake and the eating, but I also want the view from inside the mouth and the extra time to spend counting the teeth. I want the recipe scribbled down in pen and ink, and then I want a YouTube video about handwriting analysis. I want the failed experiments. I want the various colours of food dye dropped into my open mouth to see if the chemicals taste different. I want to be locked in with the earthy, pastoral smell of the chicken who laid the eggs.
Theoretically, there’s no problem with wanting it all, or with talking about it. In fact, I think that more open, loud wanting would do the world some good. The psychic crisis currently daggering the human race is in part due to our shunning of truths, personal and collective. Truths about what is being done to us; what we’ve done to our children; what we’re capable of doing to each other when there isn’t enough of anything to go around. Cloaking ourselves and our wanting in loose, protective irony, or learning to convincingly mimic desire for the things we think we should.
So no, wanting, for all the attention it gets, is not actually the problem. It’s the comorbidities of wanting that are the problem. When wanting gets mashed up with denial – which, as it happens, is my other favoured pastime – hooooooo. Good luck, babe.4
It’s incredibly stressful to want (more on that later). And when I say wanting, I mean the true kind. The aching, childish, selfish wanting. Wanting as in: this is important, as in: I will be deeply affected if I do not get this, as in: this has already breached me and it’s not even happened yet. When I find myself pawing at this version of wanting, an automatic switch goes off inside me. A mechanism fires, something tectonic, something low and moving. This process is beyond my meaning, as is the want original. The grind of an ancient Rube-Goldberg-esque sequence, switches and flicks and drops and buttons, charmingly homemade. Tiny denials in a domino line falling into each other until the huge, final bulbs of a giant neon sign flick on. ‘NO WORRIES IF NOT!’
And so, every want comes also with the performance of not wanting. That small sick flicker in the stomach, and I eagerly restart the long ritual of thought and un-thought. I know not to look the presence in the eye. I know how to point my attention the other way, whistling inconspicuously while I throw something over to obscure the whole thing from view.
Fortunately, I am extremely good at the construction and admin of mental architecture. Give me a thing to want, and I can build you a cathedral in hours. Great halls of logic and probability. Ringing prayers of repeated party lines. Holy books of weighed-up options. Scrolls of ‘for’ and ‘against’, as if I have a say. As if, when the last stones are laid in their places, the hard labour will have burned the wanting out.
But the lie keeps me busy, and I think that’s one of the reasons I keep doing it. It’s genuinely hard work to keep up, so much so that eventually, the admin of not admitting what I want outgrows itself. It bloats; it swells; it gains momentum until the thing I desired in the first place falls secondary to the action of tending to the unwant. It demands being psychically switched on all the time, and so I must check the corners for haunts, my limbs for vampire bites. I must remain ready, at all times, to leap on top of the covered mound, to fight with my body to stop the thrashing hidden creature from revealing itself. Pulling off the mimic of being unaffected becomes the idol which shines at the front of my existence, and it’s so easy to be consumed, because the work is never-ending, because the desire has not been named, and so the threat is unknowably enormous, which means the beams need constant, endless, aching maintenance. Even a hairline crack in my resolve could be the end; a drop of water could flood me. And when I end up feeling tired all the time, it doesn’t make any sense, because I don’t want for anything.
And before you suggest it, no, the desire cannot be named, and no, I won’t try. To name it would require acknowledging it exists, which would mean admitting that there is something out there that I want (truly really properly) which, obviously, would feel – I imagine, I’ve never tried it myself – like dying.
Admitting a want – I imagine – means giving the desire space to unfurl. It means looking very closely at things in the world and conceding power to them. It means stringing myself up and exposing the softest parts and closing my eyes. Here: a knife. Here: me telling you that I would like to not be stabbed, please.
It would mean seeing the full run of my hope. Taking measure of my soul and the depth of the devastation I could feel. Acknowledging that, if it isn’t true, in the end, if the lines really don’t ever cross as they always seem to be threatening to, I’ll be so disappointed that the heartbreak will have ownership over me. Admitting what I want feels like adding insult to injury, like walking the tips of my fingers up a cliffside to count each centimetre so that I’ll know, with razor accuracy, how many seconds I’ll have to rethink all this wanting business before I meet the ground.
I imagine it would shift the horizon on its axis. I imagine it would, once let into the room, be impossible to shut back out. Suicide.
But even this is a lie. ‘I don’t want to admit what I want because I’ll be sad if I don’t get it’ is the sugar-coating around the anti-want. It’s masturbatory in the way that all self-flagellation is. The actual horror of naming the desire is not the pity of failing. It’s the grandeur.
Bad enough to look around and see things that I want, but the real sin which lurks underneath the wallowing is that sometimes I think myself worthy of having them.
Sometimes think myself deserving, even. Might think that I was quite gracious when I didn’t get what I wanted before, when I got so close, when the thing was held by the scruff and hovered over my open hands. That, while it was taken to the next room and quietly put down, the strength of my brave face might have earned me a small token to cash in later.
A different friend who’s known me a long time told me I should try decentring the objects of my desire and look closely, instead, at the incident of desire itself. Obviously this is a ridiculous suggestion. As we know, there’s a zero-tolerance policy for Admitting in this house. But I imagine, perhaps, AT A PUSH, that if I were to try it, it might be a relief to put the weapons down for a moment. It might lead to the realisation that, for all my cleverness, pretending to be unmoved does not actually stop the sorrow, and being sad is enough work on its own.
That, maybe, speaking truth to desire lifts some of the fear. That a small sideward glance at it every now and then – yes, there you are, still standing in the corner – might ease the endless thinking, planning and scheming against my own mind. That I might sleep a little better. That following the thread all the way home might reveal that the terror lurking in the dark is no more than: I want. Which, actually, does not make me anything other than a wanter.
And, really, what other purpose could any of us ever hope to have? There are coffee cups on the moon because the astronauts who wanted to go up there also wanted to be reminded of home. And after they got what they wanted, stood in the place of poets, they wanted so badly to return that they picked up their belongings – objects so vital as to be hauled all the way to space – and left them there, cast them into oblivion.5
I imagine it might be quite life-affirming, actually, to mark yourself as a wanter: that all-consuming, irrational, selfish, stupid, inexplicable drive which is precisely the process which produces all that is good, important, and terrible. The motherboard inside my laptop, the table I’m writing this essay on, the cables under the sea bringing it to you, the very fact that we exist. The desire to go to space, and to spend the journey thinking of what you’ve left behind. Wanters, wanting. Billions of the most important thing happening anywhere.
The irony here is that, of course, I only became truly hot – spiritually, psychically, energetically hot – when I got bored with all of that, and stopped trying so hard
Very telling, I think, that I don’t say ‘being hot was more complicated’ or ‘having friends was very hard’, but instead write only of the desire for both things. Because it never had that much to do with the actual getting. The defining thing was the wanting. The wanting was the whole fucking point
Two years, exactly, on the 28th February, making me a born-again Pisces :}
No, that’s literally what Good Luck, Babe is about!!!
My friend and fellow moonhead Ewan told me this story in a pub a few months ago and it almost reduced me to tears. I’ve only just googled it for the first time now and it’s actually not entirely true. There are human objects on the moon, and not just the spacey debris you’d expect, but also actual, sentimental stuff, like a hammer, and a feather, and a family photo, and some golf balls, and Gene Shoemaker’s ashes, but there’s no record of there being any actual mugs up there. However, the romance of the story and the way Ewan told it is so rendingly real and beautiful that I’m going to continue to tell people that there are coffee cups on the moon. And you should too
So many moments in this I went: "woah".
The casual poetry in the way you write is striking.