What do you want?
Yes, I’m asking you. What is something you want right now? I’ll wait…
You’re probably noticing there’s a strange little delay as your mind grapples with that question. Does she mean, like, right in this moment? Is she asking what I want for lunch or what I want out of life? How does she know I want something?!
I’ll answer that last question: I know you want something because we are all wanting something all the time. Desire in its myriad forms is how we move through our life. It is literally the fuel of our experience. Think about that. From drinking water to graduating from college, it all started with the signal of desire. Desire is lifeforce, it is a gift given to us by the Creator so that we may set out on the journey of manifesting that desire. You are worthy of desire simply by being alive. And yet, desire is a very loaded topic for us.
Why? Because somewhere along the way, we’ve learned that expressing what we want makes us too blunt, too aggressive, too demanding. Maybe our needs and desires were met with criticism, with overwhelm, or with judgment. Perhaps we learned that it felt safer to handle our desires ourselves without ever sharing them. Regardless of the how, we learned that wanting itself is a problem—something to manage, minimize, or avoid altogether. We’ve gotten so good at not-wanting that many of us can’t even finish the sentence anymore.
That strategy may have worked in the past but I’m willing to bet it’s keeping you stuck somewhere in your present.
Where the Shame Actually Comes From
First and foremost, no one is born with shame. Watch any small child. They want with their whole body. They ask for exactly what they want, out loud, without a shred of self-consciousness. They have zero problem wanting. But then what happens?
It starts simply. A child asks, “Can I have…?” and is met with a look. Disapproval. Frustration. A lecture. And that innocent, natural desire gets tainted with shame. And it isn’t just parents handing it down to their children.
I’ve watched this happen in real time, at birthday parties and playgrounds, the moment one child makes another feel small for wanting what they want. It’s in our culture. We do it to each other, and eventually we learn to do it to ourselves. The disapproval gets internalized until it doesn’t need an outside voice anymore. Now shame does the whispering all on its own: “You don’t deserve it. It’s selfish to want.”
So we go quiet. We become self-sufficient to a fault, building walls around our desires and praising our “maturity.” We tell ourselves we’re being gracious, low-maintenance, easy. But so much of what we call being “good” is really just being afraid of being judged, ridiculed, or even just uncomfortable wanting something out loud. In his research for The Power of Regret, Dan Pink surveyed thousands of people, and one of the biggest categories of regret he identified was “boldness regrets”— wishing you’d taken a chance or spoken up instead of playing it safe out of fear.
This shame of wanting is a thief. It steals our joy and our potential. It isolates us and quietly poisons our relationships, because it keeps the people who love us from ever really knowing us. And let me be clear about what this is not about — it isn’t about entitlement, and it isn’t about demanding the world revolve around you. It’s simply about acknowledging your desires. That’s all.
Shame Is Universal. And That’s the Way Out
If there’s one thing that helps loosen shame’s grip, it’s realizing you are not alone in it. Dr. Brené Brown says there are three things we need to know to overcome it, and I think about them often:
First, shame is universal. We all experience it. The only people who don’t are people with antisocial personality disorders. So if you feel it. Congratulations, you’re human.
Second, talking about it helps. We don’t want to because shame feels ugly. But our shameful secrets grow stronger in the dark. Keep them hidden and they get bigger; bring them into the light and they can’t.
Third, the more we talk about shame, the less control it has over us. The minute it’s shared and exposed to the light, even after a moment of horror and recognition, poof. Its power starts to dissolve.
Here’s what I most want you to walk away with. Shame is not a fact about you. It’s a belief — and beliefs are choices, and choices can be changed. We are all born with self-love and self-worth, and most of us lose it somewhere along the way. But worthiness is not something you ever have to earn. Nobody does. Your worth is inherent — a natural, human right to love and appreciate you, for you. Any shame you carry about wanting is, at the end of the day, disrespectful to yourself. And it doesn’t stay in one neat little box. It spills into how you treat your body, your relationships, your work, the standards you hold — everything.
A Few Gentle Steps to Try
Tell yourself the truth first. Before you ask anyone for anything, just get honest with you. Say what you actually want — out loud, in the privacy of your own head or your own room — without any shame for wanting it. Do nothing with it yet. Just stop lying to yourself about what you desire. The first step to real change is always awareness.
Name how it shows it up for you. Do you care too much about what people think, asking only for what you think is “appropriate”? Do you hold back your desire until you explode and just take what you want? Or have you gone quiet, filling up with a sea of resentment? There’s no wrong answer and, guess what? All of them are okay! You just can’t change a pattern you won’t look at and I’m willing to bet it’s one of these three.
Bring one secret into the light. Pick one want you’ve been embarrassed about and say it to one person you trust. Watch how much smaller the shame gets the second it’s spoken.
If you want to take it a step further: ask. Not aggressively. Not apologetically. Just clearly. The answer to the whole thing, in the end, is simple, and almost embarrassingly powerful: ask.
The people in your life are not mind readers. And you were never meant to spend this one life translating your own desires into perfect little boxes or into silence. Want the thing! Say the thing! Let yourself be a person who wants out loud, without apology, without shame!
You deserve it and so does everyone else. By giving yourself the gift of wanting, you’ll be inspiring others to do the same. How beautiful the world would be, if it were filled with people brimming with the joy of allowing their authentic desires to come to them?
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