Ok, so first thing's first: housekeeping.
Today
Activity: Blogging with my Bestie!
Activity Prompt: What are your most intense desires? Do you feel guilty or ashamed of them?
Alone or with partners: Partnered up wih my bestie!
Drink and snack with activity: Tea with Redbreast Lustau
Physical activities log
5 ab roller rolls: Yes
Blogilates morning abs: No- Starting Dec. 30th
Quarter mile walk every hour on the hour, 10-5:
10: Yes
11: Yes
12: Yes (double)
1: Yes
2: No (Grocery shopping)
3: No (Grocery shopping)
4: Yes
5: Yes
Weighted walking: No- Starting Dec. 30th
Shoulder shrugs during the day:Yes (14 at time of writing)
45 minutes of cycling: No- Starting Dec. 30th
45 minutes of weight lifting: No- Starting Dec. 30th
Macros
Carbs: 20/23
Fat: 115/144
Protein: 87/116
Calories: 1521/1850
What is the functional difference between a dream and a desire? I recently wrote about giving up on dreaming for myself after giving up custody of my oldest, but finding my heart in a dreaming space again after being reunited with them four years ago. During the 15 years we were apart, would my missing them be considered a desire? Or a dream? When I talk about the pursuit of liberation for all, how to I categorize that? I'm unsure of how to answer, because I don't know how to contextualize the word. I'm going to look it up. I think the answer I am most satisfied with is that a dream is something we long for as a means of bettering the community, and desire is a singular, selfish want.
I'm very good at selfish longing.
As a child, my days were spent in desire. I fervently desired the teenage mutant ninja turtles to be real. In the quiet darkness of my below ground level room, I whispered their names on a constant loop, wishig that they would appear before I fell asleep. I desired attention from everyone. I spent long summer days outside, running around the forest behind my house, pretending to be a pirate and burying treasure all around the forest and yard. I imagined such grandiose things for myself, and I have to believe that synonyms grow with us. Desire in children is ever present, but we classify it as imagination. I will say that my desire for the teenage mutant ninja turtles felt like something I should keep a secret. I never told anybody about my cartoon turtle ritual, and I suppose that pretty well illustrates that desires are singular and selfish, and maybe a little fuckin' weird.
In elementary school, I desired fame. I wanted to be adored and fawned over. I didn't understand then, though I think I do now, that what I desired was to be desired. Almost every which way, though through I think 7th grade, crushes were little more than like, understanding I liked someone in a way that was not friendly, but not unfriendly, and different from almost everybody else. So I wasn't quite desiring to be desired in every way, but in the ways that mattered to me then? Yes. I played skits in my head that would mak everyone want to be around me, to know me, to fawn at my feet. Each scene gradiose and impossible, but I held on to all of them and yearned for their reality.
High school was harder. I desired so much normalcy and mundanity, because real life was so hard, but in the spaces between the hardness, the thing I desired most was positive visibility. I have always been envious of people who are seen. Positive visibility meant being lusted over and wanted, but more intensely than my elementary daydreams could have imagined. I think this is where I learned that some desires are shameful. On some level, I understood myself as queer, and understood that I desired femmes with a fierce, different flavor. I molded that desire into something else...years of confusion about if I just admired femmes or wanted to be them. I think the truth was partially in there, I wanted to be the pretty femmes I had crushes on, because they were pretty, and I never really was, but really, I was just lusting after them and didn't feel safe enough to say as much. I wanted the safety of being positively visible so I could be wanted by everybody that I wanted. I stayed up at night doing crunches and trying to do pushups, pacing my room for an hour or more after my parents went to bed becaus I desired a body that was soft in a way that was sexy, not flubby and awkward. I did not feel shame or guilt for that desire, that desire felt justified. I knew what I looked like, and I knew nobody would desire that.
My late teens were a dumpster fire where the only thing I desired was out. Out from under my father's thumb, out of my relationship with my oldest's dad, out of my body and into a better one, out of poverty, out of all of it in a way that wasn't death. Transcendence, maybe? But not in a Buddhist way, in the full on fuck suit of perfection kind of way. I desired a perfect body....still, and forever, I have to assume. I desired a perfect face. Perfect hair. Perfect parents. Perfect wealth. Perfect sexuality. Perfectly performing everything expected of me so I would want for nothing and no one. I remember reading something in Cosmo about what men found attractive about women, and through all of the other things that were mentioned, two stood out to me. One man reported that the thing he found sexiest about women was thei laugh, and he recounted a story about being in a bar and playing pool with a woman who had a laugh that rang through the entire room and played in his head over and over and over. That she laughed so earnestly it echoed through her body, and there was something so sexy about that to him. The second share wasn't a story, it was just two lines: her eyes. I have never forgotten either of those things, and I have always desired having eyes that people werer drawn to, and a laugh that was irresistable.
I felt the most pleased with myself and my life when I was desired. It was what I had spent my entire life wanting. Something raw, magnetic, and thoroughly undeniable and unshakeable. I understood that people were willing to settle for less than they desired, and I could cash that in to benefit myelf. For all of that, I was desired, and it didn't quite matter whether the desire for me was genuine. I could pretend it was, and so could everybody I allowed access to my body to.
The throughline of my desire has been to be desired. I have spent my enire life wanting to be rabidly wanted. Pine for me. Lust for me. Worship at the altar of my body and let that shit utterly consume you and burn you alive. That is my most pressing desire. I don't even know if the desire would be for me, or whatever I imagine the perfect version of me, I just know that my most intense desire is to be intensely desired.
As to whether or not I feel guilt, I do not. I do, however, feel a deep sadness over never having this desire met. I don't believe I've ever been desired the way that I need to be. I think desire for me is fleeting, or it morphs into something else, or it just...never existed, and I've always been a placeholder. I suppose the only aspect of my most intense desire that could make me feel anything close to guilt or shame is that I've desired something so wholly unattainable for the better part of forty years, and while desire maybe shouldn't ever be sated, I wonder if my self esteem and overall wellbeing wouldn't ave been better served if my most intense desire was something simpler. Like dominion over all things.
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