Introducing: The Wanting

On wanting it all, being humbled, and wanting anyway.

Why does it feel illicit to say I have desires? Not goals. Not priorities. Not a vision board. Desires.

Years ago, I stood on a stage at some self-help program in Santa Monica, which is the kind of sentence that already tells you a lot about who I was at the time. I was younger, earnest, overextended, still convinced that if I could just become clear enough, disciplined enough, magnetic enough, healed enough, I could bend the world into the shape of my wanting.

The host told me I couldn’t have it all. Not all at once.

And I remember feeling my whole body rise up in resistance. “That’s old thinking,” I said. I believed it, too. I believed wanting it all was a form of liberation. I believed the refusal to choose was the point. I believed the women before me had been handed a false bargain, and that my job was to refuse it.

I wanted it all. And I wanted it all at once. So I tried. And then I was humbled.

Not because she was entirely right. Not because desire is inherently greedy, or women should learn to want less, or “having it all” is some silly girlboss fantasy we should all be mature enough to abandon.

I was humbled because I learned that the world is not built for women to want expansively without extracting a price. The world is not set up for women to have anything without sacrificing something else.

A career asks for the hours your child wants. A child asks for the body that your ambition once lived in. Love asks for surrender. Independence asks for vigilance. Beauty asks for money, time, maintenance, and the shame of admitting you care. Art asks for devotion. Money asks for compromise. Freedom asks for loneliness. Motherhood asks for everything and then acts surprised when you ask for something back. And still. I want. Because wanting is the first step to receiving.

The Wanting is more of where I am than Cultural Currents.

This aligns with my fictional writing, which is about desire. My characters want real, complicated lives, and the antagonist is often the shape of the world they need to wrestle with on their journeys.

This is my inner current. And if I’m honest, Cultural Currents was a bit of a cop out. It was observations of a world I watched from the outside, and now I’m opening my book and inviting you inside my world of solo mom-ing, writing, shopping, and romancing.

I’m inviting you to witness my desire to live the life I want. To have the courage to want and the grace to receive and to be humbled by what still hasn’t happened. And to invite you to want right alongside me.

I don't know the exact shape this will take. But here is where I'm starting. Ten things I want right now, in no particular order of importance or likelihood:

1. A book deal. Draft is ready. Agent is preparing. Almost on submission.

2. To sell my next rom-com. Round of notes coming, we’re getting close.

3. Be in partnership, in love, in romance.

4. For my son to be healthy. For my mother to be healthy. For the people I love to continue to grow.

5. Get rid of the lines in my forehead and around my eyes

6. A good night's sleep

7. A strong body. Hello, SLT, my latest obsession.

8. Sell my Palisades home. Know anyone looking? I loved living there. But I’m settled in BK.

9. These Silk Taffeta shorts that sold out before I got a chance to buy them.

10. To surf more regularly again and for my son to be a strong enough swimmer to surf with me. I miss overcoming that nervousness to feel the ocean's energy, only to be inevitably tossed around by an unforgiving ocean. And the freedom to look like a wet puppy dog. And to remember the miracle of Earth’s gifts.