On Wanting

There’s a beach house on the gulf of Mexico that belongs to one of my oldest, best friends. We spent weekends there throughout high school, the four of us, and it held something specific. The version of us that existed before we knew enough to be careful. We once filled a Kettle One bottle back up with water and put it in the freezer, not understanding that water freezes and alcohol doesn’t. We danced under a full moon to John Mayer because it was that era and we were those girls. We grew up in that house. We loved each other in it.

We went back at 28. All four of us, ten years out of high school. By then we were married. Two had kids. We all had careers and opinions about each other’s lives and a loneliness we admitted only over wine, late, when the lights were low enough. We talked about how hard marriage was. How confusing it was to measure your life against someone else’s and not know what the measurement meant.

I remember feeling like I had finally earned my seat at the table. I had a husband. That was the ticket. I didn’t question that thought. I just felt the relief of it.

On the last morning, one of my friends suggested we write our dreams for the next decade, roll them into the empty wine bottles, and put them out to sea. The idea was that someday a stranger would find them washed up on a shore somewhere, and we had to make that person proud. A time capsule. A declaration. We will do this. We will become this. Someone will know.

We sat together on the bed and wrote. I watched one friend smile as the words came. Another went quiet and still. Another moved through it matter-of-factly, like she’d already decided. I catalogued all of it. Their faces, their energy, the feeling of the room. I was very good at reading rooms.

My pen touched the paper and nothing came out. The pen wasn’t empty.

I didn’t know what I wanted. Worse: I wasn’t sure I was someone who got to want.

My heart was racing. I sat in that room full of people I deeply loved, who accepted me too, which felt so rare, and I still felt nothing where desire was supposed to be. No vision or pull toward anything. I couldn’t let myself dream. I was terrified of the idea I needed to dream. Just a blank, and the shame of it, and the practiced skill of concealing both. So I performed. I moved the pen without pressing it to the page. When the others began rolling up their papers, I rolled up mine. Blank. I tossed a bottle with nothing inside it into the water and watched it go and smiled like I meant it.

That same trip, I gave each of them an engraved necklace. A gold bar with the coordinates of the beach house. “To know where to come back,” I told them, if they ever got lost.

I had given everyone else coordinates. I had none of my own.

—

A few years later I found myself in the living room of the house where the company I’d helped build had outgrown its garage office and taken over the downstairs of the founder’s home. We had just brought in a coach for our leadership team. It was a small group, we were the first ones in. The people who had built something from nothing and were starting to fracture under the weight of it.

The coach drew a circle and walked me through the belief cycle. How a thought becomes a feeling. A feeling drives an action. An action hardens into a belief. And around you go. He told me about a woman who had been betrayed so many times she came to expect it. Then she met someone loyal. He didn’t betray her. She ended it anyway. Her belief had become more solid than the evidence against it.

I sat with that.

What were my beliefs? What was I reinforcing in my own life that wasn’t serving me? The question had never occurred to me. I hadn’t understood myself as someone running a loop. I thought I was just living. But I could suddenly see the wheel. I could see myself on it. Helpless, first. Then scared. Then something deeper and more true underneath both: determined. I didn’t know how to interrupt a belief I couldn’t yet name. I just knew I wanted to.

That wanting was its own beginning.

—

What I understand now, with some years and hard work between me and that morning, is that the blank page I tossed into the gulf of Mexico was a belief so old I couldn’t see it at the time. That I was not someone whose dreams came true. That wanting was dangerous. That naming something out loud meant someone could take it from you, or worse, withhold their belief and let the wanting die of exposure. Somewhere along the way I had learned to stay small. To check the room before speaking. To make sure the approval was in place before I committed to a desire.

Dreaming required a cosigner. And I wasn’t sure I had one.

I couldn’t tell you when it changed. It happened the way light changes in a room. So gradually you can’t name the moment. Then you look up and realize you’ve been living in the new version for a while already.

I started with small things. Gratitude for what was already in front of me. The birds chirping outside. The morning light. A cup of coffee still warm. I wrote these things down on mornings when I had no particular reason to feel grateful, and something in the practice started to loosen. The thoughts changed first. Slowly. The feelings followed. Then the actions. Then one day I made a decision without looking around to see who was watching. Then another.

Three years ago I allowed myself to write things down. This time, an actual list. Dare I say… dreams. What I wanted my life to feel like. The texture of it, more than the specifics. A professional life I would feel utterly fulfilled by. A body I actually lived inside with gratitude. A creative life that was pointing somewhere. A table with people around it who were mine. Love that held. I wrote it not because I was certain it would happen but because I had finally decided I was worth the attempt. That the pen should press down. That the paper should hold something.

I see that list show up in real time. Piece by piece. And every time it does, I understand something I didn’t at 28. Wanting doesn’t put things at risk. Wanting is how they bloom.

The path was not clean. There were years I wouldn’t wish on anyone. There were mornings when the birds chirping outside were genuinely the best thing I had and I wrote it down anyway because I had promised myself I would look for it. There was a bottle tossed into the ocean with nothing inside it, and a woman who smiled like everything was fine and cried later, privately, because she knew it wasn’t. She needed it to be that hard. So she could understand what easy felt like.

The bottle was full, actually. Full of wanting that had nowhere safe to go. Dreams that hadn’t yet learned they didn’t need permission. The practice was learning to write them down in the first place. Pressing the pen to the page. Deciding that what I wanted was worth naming, even alone, even before there was any evidence it would come back to me.

—

I was on a beach in Laguna recently, it was 8 in the morning, I had my hot coffee in hand, and a sweatshirt on against the brisk air. The ocean was throwing light around like it had no idea what it was worth. The waves were crashing like art. The coffee hot enough to feel it land in my chest. I was present to the moment.

Then it moved through me all at once. It wasn’t just the beach. It was the ease of it. A morning with no knot in my stomach. A life I had built, fought for, waited for. One I hadn’t accepted less than.

My body felt free. The footprints behind me and ahead of me were mine. They always had been.

I let my mind drift to the bottle. Wondered if the tide could have carried it this far, to this coast, the one I call home. I imagined kneeling where the water breaks, picking it up. The glass cold and salt-smooth in my hands. Unrolling the paper.

The blank page looking back at me.

And I just smiled. Because I knew what it meant this time. It was no longer emptiness or shame. It wasn’t the woman who smiled like everything was fine while tossing a bottle with nothing inside it. Just open space. Space I had finally filled, slowly, but on purpose, one small true thing at a time.

I looked in the glass. There was a reflection next to mine.

The smile was real.

The stranger who finds that bottle on some shore somewhere will open it and find nothing.

But I know what was in it.

Everything I was too afraid to want.

Everything that came true anyway, once I finally did.

//