The Shadow Is Where Desire Hides: When What You Should Want, Isn't What You Really Want

Desire series part 4 of 6

This part of a six essay series written in 2024 and fully updated in July of 2025. The full series is linked at the bottom of each essay.

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There’s a particular place where people get stuck on the path to real desire. Right after the work begins to pay off. They’ve named what they want. They’ve gotten uncomfortable and honest. They’ve stopped pretending and started asking. They’ve dipped into the arena, taken hits, asked for more, risked being seen.

And then? Something strange happens.

A shadow returns. A craving they thought they were above. A pull toward something they had already declared unworthy.

It’s confusing, even humiliating. They thought they had moved on.

But the truth is—this is where the real work starts.

The Cage I Built Myself

I was sitting in a suburban therapy office, talking about something I promised myself I’d never do.

Healing.

I used to roll my eyes at the self-help aisle. The twenty-two-year-old me believed that if Tolstoy hadn’t touched it, I didn’t need it. Childhood trauma? That was for people who couldn’t educate themselves out of pain.

But here I was, mid-divorce, losing my mind in a therapist’s chair. A few months earlier, I’d had a panic attack in the shower. And instead of calling a friend, I sat on the bathroom floor researching nervous system rewiring like a mad scientist. You know those scenes in Kill Bill where the woman reclaims her power by destroying everything in sight? That was me—just with travel points, Whole30, and codependency worksheets. I was so fun.

Therapy became my weapon. Weight management, another. Bucket list destinations. Academic accolades. A rotating cast of complex man attention.

I wasn't going back in a cage.

Turns out, I was building a new one.

The Moment I Snapped

By this point, I had read fifty books on healthy relating. I could recite every therapy frame, every communication model, every subtle power dynamic. I’d changed how I spoke to men. I was clear, boundaried, warm. I even sent the men I dated to therapy and hauled them with me to healing retreats. We were going to do this right.

Spoiler alert, it looked better but on the inside my relationships still largely sucked for me. I was like the brick and mortar business owner who has lots of locations but never sees a profit.

One day, I calmly told a man I was dating that I’d prefer he not show up to my house starving, devour half my pantry, and then collapse into TV. I wanted presence. Connection. Actual time together. I didn’t actually say that - I said what I had been coached to say by my book.

He told me that my request made him feel shamed. That he had pain issues. A harder day than mine. That needing downtime wasn’t a crime. That I was clingy. That I was codependent for wanting dates to feel like dates.

He never addressed my snacks.

And I said nothing. I shut down. Smiled. Washed his bowl. Watched the show.

But inside me, something was breaking loose. Because this dance where I finally ask for a small crumb and the other person finds a way to make me apologize for how I made them feel was extremely familiar to me.

Furious at the Frame

The following week in therapy, I sat across from my therapist while we drew polite diagrams about his “need for rest” and my “need for attention.” I lost it.

I told him I was done. No more therapy frames. No more labeling my very realistic needs as wounds. No more pretending that being ignored in my own house by someone that didn’t live there was something to process with a dialectical worksheet.

I didn’t want to be with a man who would rather play my kids Xbox than look at me.

The truth? When I was single, I was hopping on last-minute $200 flights to Madrid. I made friends in castles. I did cool things.

In my new “healthy relationships,” I was managing grown men like picky toddlers who didn’t want to eat their peas.

I’d become the woman clapping for Todd because he remembered to chew before he swallowed. Just one more bite, buddy! Mommy’s so proud!

F*ck that.

The Silent Labor of Modern Boundaries

You know what all that gentle boundary work was doing?

Killing attraction.

I didn’t want to be a tradwife anymore. But I also didn’t want to live inside a slow, grindy, over-processed “conscious relationship” where we healed each other into apathy. Where all conflict was a shared Google doc, and intimacy meant co-regulating through another episode of Succession.

I actually missed men who just shut down when they were mad and had a ten word vocabulary in arguments.

The “healthy” relationships the books told me to want? I hated them.

They were systems I earned my way into. Exhausting trial periods. Relationships where the partner never really changed—but I became so practiced in framing and understanding that I accepted crumbs and long weird talks as co-creation.

I don’t want to earn being heard anymore. I want to be with men, friends, clients and a life who gives back to me because it gives a f*ck.

So I made a decision: I was either going to be a woman who had a life of lovers—short romances, multiple threads of interesting income and if I moved into depth it would only be with people who were good even after the lights came on.

No more performing.

The Shame I Had to Swallow

It wasn’t an easy pivot. For someone raised to be palatable, it was radical.

I had been shamed from both sides.

From the Left: for not hating men enough. For not becoming a cat mom with anti-capitalist TikToks and a permanently celibate nervous system.

From the Right: for not remarrying. For wasting the rest of my fertile years. For not gifting the nation a few more white middle class tax payers.

Madonna. Whore. It’s such a tired binary.

And yet, to break it, I had to own every part of me. Not just in theory—but in the body.

That’s where my work now comes from. Not from a place of moral clarity, but from a place of spiritual collision. I had to make peace with being misunderstood. I had to love the part of me that had failed. The part that still wanted. The part that wasn’t willing to be good anymore.

I had to disappoint everyone, including the part of me that was scared to let go of the rules.

The Split That Keeps Us Stuck

Joan Didion, in Slouching Toward Bethlehem, writes:

“It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want... between the people we marry and the people we love.”

That quote undid me. Because that’s what so many of us do. We split.

We build the marriage. We burn it down. We chase the lover. We hide from him. We get safe. Then we get numb. We pretend we can be sexually free while silently longing for intimacy—or we build domestic life while privately dying inside.

It doesn’t work. It never has.

We are told to choose. Toxic or healthy. Casual or committed. Self-respecting or self-abandoning. But what if desire isn’t found in choosing one?

What if it’s in the middle—in the collision of all of it?

Read the full desire series: Week 1; Week 2; Week 3, Week 4; Week 5; Week 6

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