This is one of those days where I notice a lot of polarity inside myself. Because I do let myself have desires, and I let myself have them often. They just tend to be the smaller ones. The easier ones. The ones that don’t really change anything.
I tell myself I can have the Ben & Jerry’s after I’ve already eaten chicken tenders and fries. I tell myself I can stay in bed for an extra hour and I’ll go to the gym after work. I let myself scroll, rest, check out, delay, and I frame it as listening to my body or being gentle with myself.
And sometimes it is that. But if I’m being honest, those aren’t the desires I’m actually talking about when I say I want something different from my life.
Those are the wants that keep me comfortable. They help my ego feel safe. They let my life stay mostly the same while still giving me small hits of permission and relief. They don’t ask me to expand or change. They just help me cope.
The desires that come from a deeper place feel very different.
They’re bigger. They feel more exposed. They don’t come with an obvious plan or timeline, and they don’t feel easy to justify. I want to be known for helping others in a meaningful way. I want financial security that feels spacious instead of fragile. I want to be a dancer. I want to be a singer. I want to really know Rob Rausch. I want deep, beautiful, fulfilling connections with many people.
When I say those things out loud, I can feel how quickly my mind tries to shut them down. They get labeled as unrealistic, immature, or too late in the game. I tell myself it’s a waste of time to think about them because I don’t know how they would actually happen in my day-to-day life.
They feel so big that I don’t know where to begin, so instead of staying with them, I push them aside. They get filed away into a quiet corner of my consciousness with a mental note that says something like, no way in hell.
What I’m noticing today is how fast that dismissal happens. How easily I allow the small, numbing desires to take up space, while the desires that actually feel alive and meaningful get brushed aside before I even let myself feel them fully.
It’s not because those bigger desires aren’t true. It’s because they’re destabilizing. They threaten the version of me that knows how to survive. They ask me to imagine a life I don’t yet know how to build, and a version of myself I don’t yet trust myself to be.
So my system does what it’s always done. It chooses the desires that don’t ask much of me and calls that listening. It keeps me comfortable and protected, even if it also keeps me small.
I don’t think this means I need to chase the big desires right now. I don’t even think it means I need to act on them yet. But I do think it matters that I tell the truth about them. That I let them exist without immediately shrinking them, negotiating them away, or turning them into something more reasonable.
Maybe this part of the work isn’t about fulfillment yet. Maybe it’s about honesty. About noticing which desires I honor and which ones I quietly exile because they feel too large to hold.
Today’s prompt:
Which desires in my life keep me comfortable, and which ones feel too big to let myself want?
I’m not trying to answer that fully today. I’m just letting myself admit the difference.