wanting your wants

desire and detachment as friendly roommates

“understanding freedom” by @Yosnier_.

o. kindling

i remember being overwhelmed by the world of information as a child.

everyone around seemed to know what they were doing, or at the very least, seemed to be confident in deciding that what they were doing was ‘right’ in some way.

it felt doubly overwhelming to get unsolicited advice.

or to be spoken to in a way where i knew i was supposed to copy what They were doing, to live like They were living.

i wanted to be accepted for who i was.

acceptance, to me, was meant for the authentic person.

i wanted to be accepted regardless of what i decided to do or how i decided to express myself.

i wanted to sing around people who wouldn’t tell me to shut up, to write and dance without being punished.

getting advice from the same people that rejected me was a violation.

it was like: rhetorically, how dare you give me advice? did i ask? of course i never responded this way out loud.

i had to act like a child on the outside despite knowing that a boundary had been crossed.

i could ignore them but i had to look like i was paying attention.

at some point, maybe in my early teen years, i created a simple rule: if the person giving the advice was someone i wanted to emulate, or had a life that was anything like one i wanted to live, i would listen to them and try my best to consider what they said.

that rule soon became an out.

it didn’t take long for me to realize that i didn’t have to listen to most of the people throwing out advice or making judgments.

they could be ignored, 100% of the time.

instead i started to watch them and how they lived their lives.

i noticed many of those same people who were telling me how the world worked, the adults with authority, seemed to have very specific ideas of who they were and how they were allowed to be.

often i saw them watching others with a kind of longing that easily tripped over into jealousy, a type of anger that i couldn’t understand for a long time.

if i had the opportunity to see or ask more about this reaction, it was clear that they wanted something, but for some reason felt like they couldn’t have it.

what their energy was pointed towards was usually one of two things, either related to health, or education.

either they wanted to lose weight or go back to school.

but it seemed that as soon as they voiced or even thought about this desire, they called themselves too old or too stupid or too weak-minded.

it was watching magick happen right before my eyes.

as soon as they cast the spell over themselves, something around them seemed to go dark and stiff.