I wrote a six-part series on desire almost two years ago. It was the my favorite writing I had done up to that point and I think most of it was genuinely useful. But I've been teaching it since then. In zoom rooms, in sessions, most recently in a class called Being Held.
I have been looking at wanting and at the expression of desire for some time now. Not the idea of wanting something. Not thinking about it. The actual thing happening in your body when something you deeply want enters a room or threatens to leave it.
And what I've learned from teaching desire is that I left out the most important part.
I left out the inspection.
In the first essay of that series I introduced the concept of the menu. This is a class I teach in my curriculum for men and women. It’s a simple idea that the most important part of success is being able to judge what is actually on your menu. Which also means grieving what isn’t.
Not the fantasy version of your life, not the internet version, not the version where you've already become the person who deserves what you want. The version where you're standing here, with your actual body and your actual options, right now. Your menu will evolve as you evolve but you can’t starve yourself now. You have to accept and dare I say settle for what you have today.
I wrote that the entire world is designed to keep you shopping off-menu. I still believe that.
But I still saw some people struggle with this. They’d leave partners they deeply loved to chase some city or job leap they had spent decades trying to make right for them. Failing and blaming everything but their own choices.
It is really hard to be successful when all the tools in your workshop were fitted for someone else’s hands.
I have come to believe that I skipped over the thing that has to come before the menu.
How do you even know what you're hungry for?
Because it turns out that most people who come to connecting with desire, including me when I started it, have never actually inspected what they want. They feel desire. They name it. They chase it hard without thinking or suppress it or journal about it or worst of all bring it to therapy where it becomes a story about their childhood and their attachment style and whether they're allowed to have what they want without being selfish or too much or broken in some way they haven't diagnosed yet.
