The Moment You Forgot Yourself

Dear Beautiful Soul,

I've been thinking about wanting lately.

Not wanting in the big, dramatic sense. Not I want to change my entire life.

Just the ordinary little wants that appear throughout a day.

I want to go there.

I want an afternoon completely to myself.

I want to wear that.

I want someone to take care of me for a change.

I want to make something.

I want to feel sexy again.

I want more tenderness.

I want to laugh more.

I want to sit here for another twenty minutes and have absolutely nobody ask me for anything.

That last one may be less spiritual awakening and more middle-aged womanhood. 😂

But I've started to wonder how often we actually let ourselves finish the sentence:

I want...

Because many women become incredibly good at answering a different question: What does everyone need?

We know what needs to happen next.

What needs to be bought.

Who needs to be called.

What needs to be remembered.

What someone likes for dinner.

Who has an appointment.

What deadline is coming.

What needs fixing.

What would make things easier for everyone else.

We become extraordinarily fluent in need.

And somewhere along the way, we can become surprisingly rusty in want.

I've been discovering just how rusty I am.

Over the last several months, I've been making some fairly significant decisions about my own life and work. One of them was deciding to close a café my husband and I have spent years building. And there were all kinds of very sensible questions involved in that decision.

What makes financial sense?

What does the business need?

What will happen to the staff?

What will people think?

Who will be disappointed?

What are we supposed to do?

All legitimate questions.

But underneath them was another one that felt strangely harder to answer:

What do I want?

Not what can I tolerate.

Not what am I capable of continuing to carry.

Not what would make everyone else happiest.

Not what did I once want when we created this.

What do I want now?

And I've realized that I haven't always been very good at giving that question equal weight. I'm excellent at responsibility. I can build a plan around what needs to happen all fucking day long. 😂

But wanting? Wanting asks something different of me. It asks me to consider the possibility that my own desire belongs in the conversation too.

WANTING CAN FEEL STRANGELY UNCOMFORTABLE

I don't think that's because women don't have desires. I think sometimes we've simply learned to interrogate them before we're allowed to admit they're there. Is that practical? Can I afford it? What would everyone else think? Would that inconvenience someone? Shouldn't I be happy with what I already have? Isn't that a little selfish?

And the particularly efficient: Why do you need that? Maybe we don't.

That's the interesting part. Wanting isn't always about need. Sometimes it's about pleasure.

Curiosity.

Beauty.

Adventure.

Rest.

Touch.

Freedom.

Play.

Expression.

Something that makes us feel a little more alive.

And perhaps we've become so accustomed to justifying what we need that wanting something simply because we want it can feel almost suspicious.

And once I started asking the question, I noticed something else.

There are things I want.

I want to spend more of my time building work that feels meaningful to me.

I want to write. I want to have conversations with women that go deeper than the surface of our lives. I want to create Sacred Soul and see what it might become. I want to travel. I want more room for creativity. More freedom. More experiences that make me feel alive.

And yes, sometimes I want the dress, the dinner, the music turned up too loudly and the completely unnecessary beautiful thing. 😂

Some of those wants are significant. Some are wonderfully frivolous.

Some may change. Some may never become anything more than something I enjoyed imagining. But I'm trying not to put them on trial quite so quickly anymore. I'm trying to let the first voice finish before the practical part of my brain arrives with a clipboard. Because for a long time, the questions I asked first were:

What needs to happen?

Who needs me?

What's responsible?

What makes sense?

I'm still going to ask those questions. They matter. But I'm adding another one.

Cheryl, what do you want?

And I'm discovering that the answer deserves to be heard even when I don't immediately know what I'm going to do with it.

MAYBE WANTING IS PART OF REMEMBERING

When we talk about returning to ourselves, I think it's easy to imagine we're searching for some lost identity. Who was I before all of this? But I'm becoming less interested in going backward. I don't want to become the woman I was at 25. Or 35. Or even five years ago.

Those women brought me here.

I'm interested in the woman who's here now.

What does she enjoy?

What does she miss?

What has she outgrown?

What makes her curious?

What makes her feel beautiful?

What makes her feel powerful?

What makes her laugh?

What does she want more of?

What does she want less of?

What does she keep imagining when nobody is asking her to be realistic?

Those answers don't give us a blueprint for our lives. But they tell us something about the woman living them. And I think she deserves to be consulted.

A SACRED PAUSE

Sometime this week, give yourself a few minutes where you don't have to solve anything. And finish this sentence:

I want...

Then finish it again.

I want...

And again.

I want...

Don't edit. Don't make it reasonable. Don't immediately calculate the cost.

Don't decide whether anyone else would approve. And please don't turn it into a fucking to-do list. 😂

Just notice what appears.

Maybe you want something enormous.

Maybe you want something beautifully ordinary.

Maybe you want eight uninterrupted hours of sleep and a croissant.

Excellent choices.

Then ask yourself:

What might this want be telling me about what matters to me right now?

That's all.

No action plan required.

There is something I'm beginning to understand about desire. We can acknowledge it without obeying it. We can be curious about it without reorganizing our lives around it. We can want something and still choose something else. We can discover something about ourselves without immediately knowing what we're going to do with that information.

And perhaps that's what makes wanting feel safer. Because admitting I want this doesn't automatically mean:

Therefore I must have it.

Sometimes it simply means:

This matters to me.

And that's worth knowing.

I wonder how many things women have stopped allowing themselves to want because wanting them felt too complicated.

How many dreams were dismissed before they were explored.

How many pleasures were labelled unnecessary.

How many curiosities were talked out of existence.

How many women became so busy building good lives that they stopped asking whether there was anything else they wanted inside them.

Not instead of the life they have.

Inside it.

More music.

More friendship.

More sex.

More solitude.

More creativity.

More travel.

More tenderness.

More ambition.

More silliness.

More quiet.

More whatever makes them feel unmistakably themselves.

You don't need to know what you're going to do with everything you want.

Maybe some wants will disappear as quickly as they arrived.

Maybe some will surprise you.

And maybe one or two will keep coming back until eventually you decide to pay closer attention.

But perhaps, for now, it's enough to stop pretending you don't want them.

Let yourself hear the answer.

I want...

And see what she says.

IF YOU WANT TO STAY WITH THIS...

I've been thinking about another way we hear ourselves, not only through what we think, but through what we feel.

The tightening.

The softening.

The exhaustion.

The energy.

Those moments when something in us seems to respond before we've even found the words for it.I explored that more deeply in The Journal:

Read in The Journal → Your Body Already Knows.

And what else?