Are you afraid of your desires?

The other day a person sent a question to the (sometimes) weekly conversations I hold on IG and I thought it was worthy to bring it here. Her question was: “I’m so scared to recognize what I actually want that I don’t know what to do”. French Psychoanalyst Lacan’s most prominent theory says firstly that desire is essentially a desire for recognition from the other. In other words, desire pushes for recognition. It is less a question of what we desire as much as it is that we want to be recognized. Lacan believes that this “dependence” on theother for recognition is responsible for structuring not only our desires, but our drives. From the perspective of Buddhist Psychology, our desires can be connected with the causes and conditions of our pain, fears and suffering. Desire is translated as Taṇhā which literally means "thirst". To put it simply, when we cling, when we hold on to what we think we want, it causes some discomfort in us. It’s not so much what we thirst for but how the thirst is driving us. Mark Epstein says: “To free desire from the tendency to cling, we have to be willing to stumble over ourselves.”So, are we afraid of our desires or are we afraid to fulfill or not fulfill our desires?

I really appreciate how she framed her difficulty in acknowledging her fear of what she actually wants. As many of us already have said or thought at some point in our lives, she could’ve taken a few steps back and said: I don’t know what I want. However, she took a risk and here’s where I think thetension lives. Most of thetime we do, we know what we want. However, what we don’t know is if we can sustain our desires, therecognition, the gaze from the other. We aren’t so much paralyzed by not knowing what we want. On the contrary, what stops us is the possibility to fulfill our desires and still be frustrated or disappointed. We might be intimidated by the aftermath: to what happens when we give ourselves permission, when we send the email, when we make the request, when we leave the relationship or when we take the risk to start a new one, when we take thefirst step, we say what we need and want. To recognize our wants is also a way to confirm we are, in fact, affected by the other and in this spacious dance, hopefully, we let ourselves be seen, we understand it is not about satisfaction, we begin to ask ourselves the right questions. We allow for our desires to show more about ourselves than we’ve ever imagined.

With love,
Mari