the meanest thing you do to yourself is pretend you don't want the life you want

the meanest thing you do to yourself is pretend you don’t want the things you want. you don’t want the life you want, you tell yourself, and you’ve gotten so convincing at it that most days you almost believe your own voice. but i see it, the way you flinch when something gets too close to what you used to want before you decided wanting was dangerous. you shrink the desire before anyone else gets a chance to see it, because if nobody sees it nobody can take it from you and nobody can watch your face fall when it doesn’t work out.

you call it unrealistic before someone else can say the word first, and somewhere along the way you buried the hunger so deep you actually forgot where you put it.

you did this to yourself before the world ever got a chance to reject you, that’s the part worth sitting with. you took the dream apart with your own hands, piece by piece, before anyone else could laugh at it. i’ve done this. i think you have too, more than once, without telling anyone. we decide, alone, usually at some hour when the decision feels less like a decision and more like a fact, that we were never the kind of people things like that happen to.

so the ceiling comes down, a little at a time, so gradually you don’t notice you’re the one lowering it. you stop applying because you’ve already decided they won’t choose you. you stop writing because you’ve decided nobody will care enough to read it. you stop asking the person you love for more because somewhere you convinced yourself wanting more made you difficult, high maintenance, too much.

you tell people you’re content and mostly you’re not lying, you’ve just redefined content to mean whatever’s currently in front of you. you say things like i’m not really a big dreamer, as if that were a fact about your personality and not a decision you made after getting hurt enough times. you watch other people chase after things and think how exhausting, when really some part of you just envies that they still remember how. pretending you don’t want that life is easier than admitting you want it and don’t know how to get there, so you let the pretending calcify into something that looks, from a distance, like peace.

there’s a logic to that safety, i understand why you built it. but underneath it there’s a hunger that never actually left. your body still knows what you denied it even after your mind agreed to forget. you can fill an entire day with sensible things, responsible things, things that look correct from every angle, and still feel, lying in bed at night, an emptiness you can’t quite name, maybe can’t even locate. you ate, you worked, you answered everyone who needed something from you, you did what was asked. and something underneath all of it keeps asking, without much hope of an answer, is this really all we’re going to let ourselves have.

you don’t know how to answer that anymore because the hunger’s buried too well. somebody asks what you want and you genuinely go blank. you’ve spent so long adjusting your desires to whatever happened to be available that the question itself feels almost indecent, like being asked to undress in a room full of people.

after enough years you can say i don’t really care and mean it, or close enough to meaning it that the difference stops mattering. you watch someone else receive the thing you once wanted and feel strangely uninvolved, like it was never yours to lose because you’d already convinced yourself it wasn’t meant for you. you get proud of how little you need. look how easy i am, look how i don’t ask for much. but easy to satisfy and actually fed are two different conditions, and you’ve spent years confusing one for the other, mostly because the first one is so much less humiliating to admit to.

so let me say this plainly; you deserve to know what it feels like to want something without immediately building a case against yourself for wanting it. you deserve to let the desire exist, unexamined, before you decide whether it’s sensible. you deserve to say it out loud even if saying it leaves you standing there with nothing left to hide behind.

want it anyway. want the thing that makes you feel foolish for wanting it. want the life that still feels embarrassingly far from where you’re standing right now. want the love that asks more of you than you’re used to giving. want the opportunity that scares you precisely because you might actually fail at it, publicly, in front of people who’ll remember. want the city, the book, the family, the unremarkable ordinary future you’ve spent years pretending you never pictured.

you don’t need a plan for how you’ll get there before you’re allowed to admit you want to go.

and if it doesn’t happen, let it hurt you honestly. it is a more human thing to be disappointed by a life you actually reached for than to spend years congratulating yourself for never having asked in the first place. at least then the ache belongs to something real. at least the grief is for something you loved enough to lose. at least you lived, for a while, in contact with your own hunger instead of sanding it down until it fit whatever happened to be sitting in front of you.

you were never a flaw for wanting the way you wanted. you were only ever hungry, and hunger was never the thing that needed apologizing for. so want it — the whole unreasonable size of it, without shrinking it down to something more excusable first.

some of what you want will happen. most of it won’t. some of it will arrive looking nothing like what you pictured, and you’ll have to learn to recognize it anyway. some of it will take longer than you have patience for. some of it will break you a little on the way to proving you were still capable of reaching for anything at all. let it. let it. let it.

if this helps or felt relatable, consider buying me a coffee <3