The Thirst Nothing Could Quench

The question you stopped asking and the reason your body answers it differently than your mind expects.

There is a question that sounds simple and isn’t.

“What do I want?”

It can feel bothersome, but try it. Just sit with it for a moment, the way you’d sit with a guest you weren’t expecting. Notice what happens in your body.

For a lot of us, and I include myself here, something tightens. The question lands, and the mind goes to fetch an answer and comes back empty-handed. Why? Because the muscle that knows how to want, how actually to answer that question, has been dormant for a very long time.

You know exactly what everybody else wants. You could answer that in your sleep, and for decades you did.

What he needed. What the children needed. What the work needed, the aging parents needed, the room needed, before anyone said a word.

You became fluent in everyone’s wanting but your own, and fluency like that doesn’t come free. Part of the cost was the slow forgetting of your own appetites.

So, when the question resurfaces, it feels less like a door opening and more like reaching for a limb that’s fallen asleep. The signal’s in there somewhere. It just isn’t activated yet. It’s easier to not pay attention to it.

What Was Never Built

Here is the harder truth underneath that.

It isn’t that you lost the ability to know what you want. It’s that you never had the conditions to construct it in the first place.

Think about what your full-time orientation was for most of your life. You were the one reading the room. Reading their moods, their needs, their unspoken tension before it became a problem.

You were so fluent in everyone else’s interior weather that monitoring it became invisible to you, the way breathing becomes invisible.

At the same time, you weren’t necessarily neglecting your own desires. But your focus was always pointed somewhere else. And desire, as it turns out, needs a different level of focus to manifest. It needs the question turned inward, consistently, over time so you can practice.

You didn’t get that practice. Not because something was taken from you, but because the role you inhabited replaced it. A role you may have been handed before you were old enough to choose it, and it left almost no room for you to turn inward.

The part of you that was supposed to ask, “what do I want?” and wait, and listen, and follow the answer - that part didn’t atrophy from disuse. It never got fully activated in the first place.

That is the hard pill to swallow. Not that you forgot yourself. But that the leader of your own life was running on almost no signal, for most of it.

And here is what makes that bearable: it also means there is nothing to recover that was lost. There is only something to build that was always yours to build. The signal is still as it always has been. Now you can choose to give it airtime.

That changes everything.

The Anger Underneath

Here’s the part most of us would rather not look at.

When you try the new thing - maybe a class, a modality, a retreat, some practice everyone swears by - and you come away still thirsty, there’s often something hot underneath the disappointment. Screw sadness; it feels more like anger. And you wonder, “Where did that come from?”

But inside, that familiar pattern says: nothing has ever answered this for me, as much as I’ve tried. I still don’t know what I want. It smells like shame.

And it feels like we’re not supposed to admit that one. Anger isn’t a feeling women our age are encouraged to keep in the house, let alone serve tea to. So, we typically file it under “ungrateful” or “negative” and move it quickly out of sight.

But I was hoping you could do yourself a small favor today, and leave that anger on the table a little longer because that anger is not the problem.

That anger is the most honest part of your self-expression right now.

It’s the part of you that knows your search has been aimed in the wrong direction. All those years of trying weren’t a failure of effort. They were a series of attempts to find the answer that would finally quench your thirst. But the spring was inside you the whole time. The anger is your own intelligence telling you the truth your impatience didn’t want to hear.

Don’t fix the anger. Listen to it. It’s pointing you to something.

You Were Drinking from the Wrong Spring

The reframe isn’t to ask yourself to “make peace with never knowing.” That’s just the mind, asking you to sit quietly in the waiting room. But you might be waiting there for a very long time.

Knowing doesn’t work the way the mind insists it should.

Knowing is somatic and retrospective; you find out what’s a yes by moving toward what makes you more alive and noticing your body unclench. You don’t get the answer and then live it. You live it, and the answer assembles behind you.

Read that again, slowly.

You’ve been waiting for “what do I want?” to arrive as a clean sentence in your head - a thought you could finally point to and say, there, that’s it.

But desire doesn’t live in the head. It lives in the body, and the body doesn’t draft mission statements. It contracts, and it opens. It clenches, and it unclenches. That’s the entire vocabulary.

This is what the heart has been trying to tell you. Not by speaking louder; the heart never speaks louder, but by responding. You move toward something, and you notice you can breathe a little deeper. You say a true sentence and your shoulders come down half an inch. You don’t ‘decide’ it was right. You ‘find out’, afterward, by the undoing.

So, the not-knowing isn’t a wall to make peace with. It’s a doorway you walk through in motion. You don’t solve it sitting still. You answer it by living slightly more toward what makes you feel alive and letting the meaning gather behind you like a wake behind a boat.

The Woman Who Made Her Own Water

Toni Morrison didn’t publish her first novel until she was thirty-nine.

By then she’d lived several lives as an editor, teacher, mother of two, raising her sons alone, writing in the dark hours before the workday because there was no other hour to spare. She wasn’t waiting to feel ready.

She wrote, by her own account, because the book she was thirsty for did not exist. No one had written it. So, this yearning, instead of sending her to one more shelf, sent her to the desk.

That’s the turn. That’s the whole thing.

She stopped looking for the cup and became the driving force.

Notice she didn’t do it by getting comfortable with not knowing. She did it by following the thirst all the way to its source - the source being ‘her ’- and making the thing she’d been searching the world to find. The anger of never being quenched didn’t get optimized into joy. It got utilized, and it became her engine.

You can do this exact thing, and it’s smaller than it sounds. You don’t have to write a novel. You only have to stop asking the world to hand you the answer and start asking your own desire what it is pointing at.

What is the book you keep wishing someone would write? Or the conversation no one’s having, the room no one’s making, the work that should exist and doesn’t?

That ache isn’t evidence you’re behind. It’s the most precise instruction you’ll ever get about what is yours to make.

The thirst was never a problem to solve. It was a direction, the whole time.

An Invitation

This week, you don’t need to answer, ‘what do I want?’ You’re not late for that, and there’s no rush.

You only need to do one small experiment. Move, even a little, toward the thing your yearning keeps pointing at. The one you’ve been quietly angry about never finding. Not to arrive but just to move. Then notice your body. Notice whether something unclenches.

That untying is your yes. You don’t have to believe it in advance. You only have to live it, and let the answer assemble behind you.

If this resonates, you already know which direction you’d walk.

You always did.

If this is landing, the next podcast episode - “The Inner Authority,” we talk about how the truth does not rush. Subscribe my Substack for free now.