On Wanting Out Loud

For a long time I thought wanting was something you did quietly, in the dark, hoping to be guessed.

I was wrong, and the wrongness cost me years.

The grammar we’re given

Many of us — women especially, in the world I grew up in — are taught a passive grammar of desire. You may be wanted. You may be chosen. To want, out loud, in the first person, felt like trespassing.

But a desire you can't say is a desire no one can meet.

What changes

The first time I said a plain sentence about what I wanted — no apology stapled to it — the ceiling did not fall. The person across from me simply listened, and answered. That was all. That was everything.

Saying it didn't make me less. It made me legible.

This is what I want for you, reading this: not a script, not a technique. Just the ordinary, radical permission to say the true sentence. Out loud. In your own voice.