Women have a complicated relationship with the word and feeling of “want.” For so many women, it’s hard to allow “wanting” a seat at our inner table. We replace “want” with “should”—do what we think we should do, become who we think we should be. And we’re very good at doing what we “should” do, but over time, we lose touch with the feeling of wanting altogether. So many women haven’t asked themselves what they “want” for so long that the question itself feels strange, blank, and unanswerable.

At the same time, we’re conditioned to believe that allowing ourselves to “want” is selfish and indulgent. Who are you to get to do what you want? is a common sentiment, as if wanting itself is an act of entitlement. Because you “want” something is not a good enough reason to act on it; we need some extra validation or legitimization to get to consider our own wants, if they still exist at all.

“Wanting” in our culture has also been linked with sloth, immaturity, and even danger. The message we receive from a very early age is that if we allow ourselves to “want,” we will end up on the couch, naked and eating bonbons for the rest of time. “Wanting” is presented to us as a process dictated by our fundamentally sinful nature. “Wanting” is linked with the body and its dangerous desires, while “shoulding” is tied to the mind, productivity, and the rational. The “should police” make sure we stay in line and offer all sorts of narratives for what will happen to us and who we could become if we were to trust our “want.” Essentially, we would be playing with fire and tempting fate. On the other hand, when we act from a sense of duty—doing what we “should” do, what’s “right” and “expected” (not just what we “want”), we’re being virtuous and mature, taking the higher road, and doing good. In a nutshell, “want,” as it’s presented in our cultural narrative, is bad, while “should” is good—and makes us a good person.

“Want” is a feeling that comes with a lot of baggage in our culture. But there’s another aspect of our strange and strained relationship with “wanting” that further complicates our ability to connect to what is, in fact, our most primal, authentic, and life-directing sentiment—our deepest wisdom.

The challenge is that we think of “wanting” in terms of what we want. We go looking in our mind for a possible object of our “wanting”—a car, a house, a particular job, a certain amount of money, or some other such external thing or accomplishment. The focus is often on the thing itself that we think will make us happy. And yet, if we want to genuinely restore our connection and open the doorway to our own “wanting,” if we want to tether ourselves back to our authentic self and remember what makes us who we are at center, if we want to consult the wise guide within us, we need to ask ourselves different questions when it comes to our relationship with “want.”

Instead of asking yourself What do I want? try asking yourself What delights me? Or, What wags my tail? Perhaps the question is What would make today a good day? What makes a day feel nourishing and joyful—for me? What kind of day inspires gratitude? And, at the core, What do I like without having to try to like it?

These sorts of questions take the focus off the external object of “wanting” and place it on your individual and unique experience. They shift you from a future orientation, something you’re going to get that’s not here now, to a right-now-centered experience inside you. They turn your focus from outside to inside—move you from an idea of what you want that lives in your head to the direct experience of delight that lives in your body. Quite literally, the feeling of a dog who’s wagging its tail.

If you ask a kindergartner whether she likes a particular person, the answer is straightforward and obvious: She likes him or she doesn’t; she wants him at her birthday party or she doesn’t. Liking is not complicated, nor is the feeling it inspires inside us. In fact, it’s one of the best feelings we get to have as humans. Such simple inquiries and yet so powerful: what do I like to do, who do I like to be with, how do I like to spend a day?

When you start asking yourself these, to some degree, simpler questions, you move out of your head and into your heart and body. If what you want feels mysterious or unreachable, try using different language. Rather than focusing on what you want, instead of combing through possibilities of things and experiences that you could want in your mind, try dropping into your body and marinating in what delights you or what makes your tail wag. Be a kindergartner.

Give it a whirl. If the “wanting” in you remains elusive, don’t despair; walk with and live in these simpler questions. Notice when you feel delight or liking or just plain good. You are probably meeting a voice inside you that hasn’t been consulted or invited into the conversation for a long time. And if nothing changes and you still don’t sense who you want at your birthday party, rest assured, the “should police” will welcome you back with open arms. But my (confident) hunch assures me that that won’t happen.

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that just might be the one that would launch her. When Gwen wasn’t auditioning, networking, or exercising (to keep herself camera-ready), she was writing material, making videos, and submitting them.  And when she wasn’t doing that, she was waitressing and bartending to pay rent on her tiny studio apartment in a bad neighborhood.

Gwen was tough on herself, too.  If she ever wanted to take a day off or just skip an exercise class, she would attack herself: How do you expect to get there if you’re not willing to do everything it takes? You’ll get a day off when you make it.  In her mind, unless she chased every carrot, no matter what it did to her in the process, she would never make it to the top, and worse, she would blame herself for not being willing to do what it took to get there.  But living this way was difficult and painful; Gwen was not only utterly exhausted and overwhelmed with shoulds, but also suffering at the hands of her own internal critic.

After a decade of pushing, her career had stayed at basically the same level.  And yet, her level of exhaustion and suffering had gotten far worse.  Ten years of never saying no had left her weary and bordering on bitter.  And deeply disappointed.  The story she had always told herself, that her time would come, was wearing thin and feeling less believable.  Most importantly, she was growing tired of the life she was actually living — her real one, not the imaginary one that would happen when she was famous.

With a lot of hard work and tears, Gwen was finally able to admit to herself that she didn’t want to keep living such a grueling life, under the whip of an internal slave-driver, or to keep living it on the fumes of a dream.  She wanted a life that she wanted to be living—now.  Her present experience had finally become something that mattered; she had become someone who mattered.  At last, Gwen chose to hang up her comedian’s hat and enter graduate school.

For the first time in Gwen’s life, she wasn’t striving every minute to try to get somewhere else, to become someone else who was more important.  She liked herself and felt at peace for the first time.  She even discovered that she positively loved puttering around doing very little, which, in her previous incarnation, was something she had never known or allowed herself.  Mostly, she was deeply proud of herself for having had the courage to step off the treadmill of striving for success.

And then she met Brendon.  Her new boyfriend was a jet-setter, a successful entrepreneur on the fast track to big things.  Filled with ambition and talent, he also never missed an opportunity to attend an event, network, or just go the extra mile, whatever was needed to score the deal.  He was always chasing after something and usually getting it.  As Gwen described it, Brendon was the male version of her old self, but a winning one.

Shortly into their relationship, Gwen started talking about needing to get back into comedy.  She began making casual references to herself as boring.  Her coursework, which had been fascinating just weeks before, was now dull and mediocre.  For the first time since she had left comedy, she was feeling disappointed in herself.  She felt inadequate, a failure.  The life that had been enjoyable, hard-earned, and courageous, and most importantly, one that finally belonged to her, was now empty and unexciting—far too average for Brendon.  And indeed, she imagined that she herself was far too average for Brendon.

Just two months into her new relationship, the self-worth and pride she had earned in the very difficult process of changing careers, letting go of a dream, and building a new identity, had, for the most part, slipped away.  Gwen had lost connection with what her life meant through her eyes and was now seeing it through the lens of what it would look like to her boyfriend.  How she felt about herself was now defined by how she imagined Brendon would perceive her.  The respect Gwen had built for her own journey was gone, reduced to a few judgments by which her new boyfriend would label it.

As women, this is sometimes what we do—to ourselves.  We ignore, dismiss, and throw away our own experience, what our journey means to us, what we know to be true about ourselves, and replace it with other people’s definitions and perceptions of our life.  We do this habitually, without even knowing we’re doing it.

If we want to break this self-abandoning habit, we have to first become aware of it.  We have to become conscious of our willingness and compulsion to sacrifice our own experience in favor of others people’s versions of it.  Once we can see ourselves giving away our truth, see the suffering it causes us, and see the absurdity of it, then we can stop doing it.  But first, we have to get good and fed up with giving ourselves away.  With awareness and a lot of practice, we can learn to stay connected to our own experience, to stand in our own truth, to define our own journey, even in the face of other people’s opinions, and those who see us differently than who we know ourselves to be.  For now, start paying attention to how and when you give away your own story, and let others write it for you.  Practice taking back your own authority, whatever that means to you.

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