When “I Want” is a Radical Practice

There's been a theme for me recently—probably this last year—and it falls at the intersection of truth-telling and our bodies. Or, my body, I guess. I am slowly coming to realize that my body tells the deepest truth. And that my deepest magic, and probably yours, is noting that truth and then speaking it out loud. Gala Mukomolova—formerly of Galactic Rabbit and now a writer at Nylon and co-creator of the Big Dyke Energy podcast—calls this "the need to return to the body as the staging ground for resistance." To say "no" to what our bodies refuse to do any longer. adrienne maree brown, in both Emergent Strategy and her latest book, Pleasure Activism, equally advocates for how our bodies say "yes,"—calls it liberating our desires. 

adrienne also encourages us to "practice [saying "I want" and "no"] with [our] lover/s, so [we] know for sure that [we] can all survive anything that gets said in truth" (emphasis mine). I don't know about you, but that wasn't the house I grew up in. So, it feels both revolutionary and terrifying to claim my wants in this way. Still, of course, this isn't the kind of "I want" that is full of expectation, obligation, or the ills of capitalism (like, "I want everything to my own benefit and at the expense of everything and everyone else" or "I want enough goods to make myself feel worthy"), or even colonialism ("I want what is yours, without your full-bodied consent"). 

Instead, as Audre Lorde might say, it goes beyond simply seeking to just be satisfied by something but to share a joy in the mutual satisfaction between myself and an(other). And there's something here I can't yet articulate, but what I can say is that I’m learning to filter every single piece of my life through a lens of, "Does my whole body say 'yes' to this?" I believe yes is the path to my best work, my best relationships, my best art—at least when those relationships are giving me a yes in return.

So I started
by simply asking,
Does the poem love me?
Are the words themselves
satisfied with their writing?

And then, closed my eyes.
Waited to feel a pull,
an invitation toward the page
a whisper that responded,
"Yes, lover."

And so,
I began to ask
how words felt pleasure.

It was this:
To be scratched into the page.
Drowned in spilled ink.
Wrestled, whipped, wrought.