The Ethics of Wanting
An essay in power, permission, and the pursuit of an unruined life.
I swear I tried my best to do everything right.
I read my Bible every day, memorized the required portions for school and church, prayed for forgiveness whenever I thought I was sinning by omission OR commission (so definitely multiple times a day), didn’t have sex, and did my damndest to reign in my “strong willed” nature.
And still, I felt hollow. Unseen or worse, completely misunderstood.
There’s a specific ache that comes not from failure, but from success that doesn’t satisfy. The kind of ache that doesn’t announce itself with chaos, but with quiet: a dull throb beneath the polished life. A marriage that looks perfect but tastes like ash. A business that thrives on the surface but is secretly starving your soul. A body that meets the standard, but not your own reflection.
Desire doesn’t always enter like fire. Sometimes, it whispers beneath the bones. Sometimes, it’s the absence of hunger that reveals the depth of your starvation.
And yet, we’ve been trained to fear it. Desire, we’re told, is dangerous. Selfish. Shameful. A sign of immaturity or indulgence. We bury it beneath obedience, or worse, we decorate it in spiritual bypassing and call it enlightenment.
What if I told you though, that I’ve since realized all of that was a crock of carefully curated bullshit? That even IF we went biblical with it, I personally don’t believe the Divine would agree, since They’re the reason we have desires in the first place and 99.9% of the rhetoric around it is man made and therefore fallible (… and usually politically motivated)?
The existentialists weren’t afraid of desire for they saw it as a mirror. Sartre wrote that we are condemned to be free, and with that freedom comes responsibility: to choose what we want, and to reckon with the fact that wanting will always make us vulnerable.
The world loves to warn us: if we give desire too much room, we’ll spiral into chaos.
That if we stop obeying the rules, stop policing our bodies, stop performing goodness, we’ll become selfish. But I’ve found the opposite to be true, both personally AND clinically. When a person is lit up from within - fed, free, fully resourced - they don’t tend to hoard or harm. They want to share. To build. To connect.
Hedonism, when rooted in self-trust and mutuality, doesn’t breed destruction. It breeds generosity.
Rather than a threat to the collective, a world where more people are turned on by their own lives, is the vital foundation of one.
I don’t think we’re meant to ascend above our desire as the self-righteous morality police would have us believe. I think we’re meant to dive into it; to make meaning inside its current,
not despite it, but because of it.
Burn, Shed, Begin Again
My own life has seen a combination of burn it all down, phoenix like moments, and slower quiet quitting of that which no longer serves.
And honestly? Neither is easier than the other. It just needs to be done sometimes.
Something in me - the part I’d spent years trying to discipline, stood up like it had just remembered it had teeth. And I swear, for the first time in years, I felt honest.
Not happy. Not healed. (those would come in subsequent waves). Just honest.
And that was enough to start.
If I died today, I could say with no hesitation: I spent my life shedding what was never mine, keeping only what felt holy in my bones, and building something fierce and beautiful from the wreckage.
A life I’m proud of. One I hope my daughters — and anyone watching — will see as permission to choose their own.
When the Life You Built Becomes the Cage You Can’t Name
Maybe you know that ache too.
Whether it’s felt like a dramatic collapse or a slow rot. The rage that simmers beneath your perfectly curated life. The part of you that’s sick of smiling, sick of settling, sick of pretending this is enough.
Maybe you did everything right. Said thank you when you wanted to scream. Played nice so no one would call you difficult. Shrunk your appetite, your brilliance, your goddamn soul, just to make other people comfortable.
And still… you’re starving.
Not necessarily for more money (although many of my clients go onto exceed their previous ceilings). And definitely not for a better brand of numb.
But for something real. For something that makes your blood move. Especially if you’ve been told that hunger is dangerous. That wanting more makes you “selfish.”
I’m here to say fuck every bit of that. And to remind you that ache isn’t a flaw at all, it’s your fire refusing to die quiet.
So, in closing, let me leave you with this thought:
Be good if you want to. Be undeniable if you don’t. ;)
- Tamara
A personal invitation
P.S., Blood, Bone, and Desire is coming. My goal is a living, breathing ecosystem for the ones who are done asking for permission, but not sure how to claim what’s next.
I built it for you but it was born from me. Every threshold I crossed, every identity I burned, every desire I dared to follow, lives in this work. And until the doors officially open, I’m offering something more personal.
If you’re ready to stop circling your own life like a ghost… If you want to sit across from someone who’s already crawled through the fire and mapped the terrain… I have a few spots open for 1:1 work.
No coddling. No placating. Just the sharp, sacred work of remembering who the hell you are, why you’re here, and what you’d like to get out of life before you’re done. Email me if you’re interested (hello@tamaradriskell.com).