I keep thinking about desire.

Not in the cute, Pinterest quote kind of way. Not in the “manifest your dream life” way. I mean desire as this thing that lives in the body before language gets to it. Before morality gets to it. Before someone tells you it is too much, too selfish, too sexual, too unrealistic, too late, too ridiculous.

I keep coming back to this idea that my desires are not actually mine.

Not in a disempowering way. More like… they were coded into me. Like they arrived with me. Like they are bigger than my little mind and my little plans and my little calendar. My deepest, truest, most audacious desires were not something I plucked out of the air. They feel more like something I am meant to steward. To birth. To hold. To become the custodian of.

And honestly, that changes everything.

Because if desire is not some random selfish impulse, then maybe it is guidance. Maybe it is the map. Maybe it is the spark right before creation becomes form.

I think about that space we sometimes touch. Through meditation, breathwork, orgasm, dancing, drugs, prayer, whatever gets us there. That bubbly, gooey, infinite place where anything feels possible. And people get high on it because, of course they do. It is amazing. It is the orgasm of creation. Actually, maybe it is the moment before orgasm. The spark before the spark.

But here is the thing I keep realising.

You cannot bring a desire into form if you are not in your body.

You can float around in possibility forever. You can visualise, astral travel, intellectualise your pain, talk about it, analyse it, make a mood board about it. But at some point, creation needs a body.

You cannot birth a baby outside the body. Up until now, anyway. And I know AI is trying to challenge every concept under the sun, but for now, you need a body to grow and birth a baby.

And I think everything else is the same.

A business. A book. A relationship. A new life. A new self. They all need the body. They all need gestation. They all need time that is not artificial.

That is where I think women have been so deeply lied to.

We have been told to create like men. Build. Hustle. Grind. Push. Perform. Produce. But that is not how the feminine creates. The feminine gestates. She lets something move through her. She does not make one arm on Monday and one lung on Tuesday. Her body knows. It just knows.

And then we step out of pregnancy, out of motherhood, out of the one space where people still vaguely accept our miraculous creative power, and suddenly the language changes.

She built a business.
She wrote a book.
She hustled.
She grinded.
She made it happen.

But what if she gestated it?

What if she listened? What if she followed the desire like a breadcrumb? What if the path was laid as she walked?

I keep thinking about how insane it is that women, the literal creators of life, have been told for thousands of years that our desire is dirty. Sinful. Dangerous. Debasing. Something to control. Something to numb. Something to apologise for.

And of course that happened.

Because desire creates worlds.

A woman connected to her desire cannot be owned in the same way. She cannot be managed in the same way. She cannot be convinced so easily to live on crumbs and call it gratitude.

And this is where I keep laughing, because it is so obvious and so ridiculous.

It is like asking a fish to climb a tree.

Hello Mr and Mrs Fish, thank you for coming in today. We are concerned because your son Flounder is very behind in climbing trees. He never leaves the water. What are you doing at home to support his tree-climbing?

And instead of saying, “This is ridiculous, our son is a fish,” the fish parents apologise. They feel shame. They think they have failed.

That is what women have been doing.

We are fish trying to climb trees. Trying to succeed in a world that was not built around our bodies, our cycles, our rhythms, our way of knowing.

And then we wonder why we are exhausted.

We live in artificial time. Artificial calendars. Artificial deadlines. Men do not have an inbuilt calendar, so they made one. But women do. Our bodies already know time. We have moons inside us. We have seasons inside us. We have tides.

And when we live against that, we fragment.

When we come back to it, we become coherent.

That is the word I keep feeling: coherent.

A woman in coherence does not need to force herself into life. She starts to move with life. She becomes more spontaneous. More present. More alive. Her desire does not take her away from the world. It brings her into it.

And the wild thing is, when a woman is full of desire, she is not selfish. That is the lie.

When I am empty, I grasp. I resent. I compare. I contract.

When I am full, I overflow.

When a woman fills herself with pleasure, love, sensuality, nourishment, beauty, rest, truth — she does not go out and start wars. She does not scream in traffic. She does not pick fights with her neighbour.

She gives. She radiates. She creates.

That is the part they never told us.

Desire is not the opposite of service. Desire is what makes true service possible.

Need says, “I have to eat.”
Want says, “I’ll have a sandwich.”
Desire says, “I want to feel every bite. I want pleasure. I want nourishment. I want my body to receive this as beauty.”

And maybe it is still a pastrami sandwich. But now you are in your body. Now you are tasting. Now you are alive.

That is the difference.

I do not want to live from need anymore. I do not even want to live from want.

I want to live from desire.

Not chasing it. Not being ruled by it. But letting it run through my system like a frequency. Like intelligence. Like truth.

Because I think my desire knows something my mind does not.

And maybe that is the most dangerous, beautiful thing a woman can remember.

That she is not here to climb the tree.

She is here to swim.

And when she finally stops apologising for the water, the whole world changes.