The little voice of your desire

Lessons from literature & life on how to listen for it in the noise of external pressures. What do you really want?

In one unusual and blissful class at the GSB—“The Business World: Moral and Spiritual Inquiry through Literature”—students read works of literature and relate the lessons to their own lives. As a subscriber to the belief that literature teaches you, as Wallace Stevens put it, “How to Live. What to Do,” I loved it. This piece is an adaptation of an essay I wrote for that class. And I’m proud to say that I have come far since the first version of it was written in the spring. I hope it helps you listen for the little voice of your desire.

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My therapist stares back at me, understanding but unconvinced. I have just finished rattling off all of the reasons I feel confused and unhappy here, at the GSB. Before she died, my grandmother said that business school would not be a waste because it would expand my consciousness—and learning, no matter what sort, was always worthwhile. But I worry about the direction in which my consciousness has expanded. I catch myself buying into “frameworks,” obsessing about optimization, noticing less and less the beauty around me, feeling less and less the wonder in any given moment. I feel so foreign to myself. Who was she who wanted so badly to know how to describe butterfly wings, who cherished the word “gossamer” that her grandmother gave to her? Who was she who loved more than anything a good sentence, and knew one when she wrote it?

“Okay, so what do you want?” my therapist asks.

The question arrests me, stops me straight in my tracks, leaving me dumbfounded and defenseless. It taunts me with its simplicity, dares me to come up with a reply: okay, little miss smartypants, why don’t you riddle me this? My heart quickens, and my face flushes. I rack my brain, but it’s blank. All I can hear is the tinnitus in my ears from all of the clenching of my jaw. I have no idea what I want. More than that, I’m not even sure I know what wanting feels like. I have no idea where to begin answering my therapist; I don’t think I even understand the question.

“I don’t know,” I whimper. And then come the tears—the wet, hot, angry, mournful tears.

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be perfect. But that’s the same as saying I wanted to survive, which isn’t saying much. I cannot remember what would have scared me into silence in the first two years of my life, which I spent sulking and sucking my thumb until it turned black and bled. In any case, I never did the cute “goo goo ga ga” thing. I just sucked my thumb and bided my time. I wouldn’t speak until I could do it perfectly. I held my silence for two years and broke it only with full sentences. By that point, I had already been dressed in a Harvard onesie.

The fear only intensified. I peed my pants in the second grade because I couldn’t bear to fall behind in a typing game. I collapsed on the floor in the third grade because I received a 19/20 on an auto-dictée and thought for sure that I would never get into Harvard. This was me in elementary school; I’ll spare you middle and high school. But when I finally did get into Harvard—when I had achieved what had been, seemingly from the day I was born, my life’s purpose—I had never been more depressed in my life. I had lived my entire life in terrified service of someone else’s dream, locking my own desire (a dangerous thing) so far away in my psyche and so early that I am still looking for the key.

It was easy enough to numb myself with more pursuits of perfection: a trove of academic accolades, an acceptance to the GSB. But now that I’m here, feeling so ludicrously out of place that even I—typically so blind, deaf, and mute to myself—can’t help but notice it, I cannot run from the austere truth of my life: I have seldom known desire—not the real kind, anyway, the kind germinated by love rather than shame, spurred by joy rather than terror. I have seldom dreamed beyond the perimeter of fear.

“I don’t know,” I repeat, desperately.

“Do you want to try figuring it out?” my therapist probes, gently. She knows that “figuring it out” means letting go of everything that once made me feel safe and now makes me feel miserable; that it means mustering up the courage to step off the tightrope of my life, trusting that the safety net is there even if it was never there before, and I can’t see it; that it means healing my relationship with happiness, and not feeling repulsed by myself when I indulge in it.

“I don’t know,” I say again, crying harder this time so that I’m almost coughing, realizing that, although I can’t seem to bring myself to do it, the only life goal that matters right now is allowing the little voice of my desire to be heard and followed.

Whenever I have not known what to do, I have gone to my grandmother. I would bring a personal problem, and in return, she would bring a poem—she spoke in tongues, that way. The conversation would flow organically from there, and we would often wander to other topics. It could be frustrating—just tell me what I should do! my nervous heart would cry—but she knew not to. Her wisdom was never an answer—a detailed map, with directions to X marking the spot. Rather, it was a deepening of inquiry—a compass I was meant to use to chart my own course, even after (especially after) she was gone. She is gone. Literature is the guide she left me.

So I turn first to Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day, because it is the story of a loser, and I’m not feeling too hot about myself. Wilhelm—the main character who embodies anything but “main character energy”—doesn’t know what to do either. The title of the book—Seize the Day—is an injunction to a character who has for too long yielded his days instead.

Throughout the novel, Wilhelm lacks any agency: he figures himself as “a ball in the surf, washed beyond reach, his self-control…going out.” While he has made decisions throughout his life, they are marked less by conviction than by confusion, each one the result of much hand-wringing, culminating not in the expression of his will, but rather in the collapse of it: “He had decided that it would be a bad mistake to go to Hollywood, and then he went. He had made up his mind not to marry his wife, but ran off and got married. He had resolved not to invest money with Tamkin, and then had given him a check.” Neither his mind nor his body can access his true desires, which, unarticulated, build up a congested, choking pressure. He desperately wishes to regain control of his life, but he looks to Tamkin to “transform his life” and to his father to “carry [him] this month,” unable to stand on his own.

Occasionally, flashes of lucidity strike him. At one point, he is suddenly overcome with love for “all these imperfect and lurid-looking people,” realizing the insignificance of his own imperfections to being loveable, and loved. At another, he remembers a passage from Keats’s Endymion that the woman who nursed him used to read:

Come then, Sorrow!
. . . .
I thought to leave thee,
And deceive thee,
But now of all the world I love thee best.

In plain English, the passage is an embrace of sadness after an initial rejection of it. I think of a line my grandmother often quoted to me, the last line of Coleridge’s “This Lime-tree Bower My Prison” (a poem, basically, about turning FOMO into JOMO): “No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.” Joy is great. But sorrow, to borrow again from Keats, has its music too.

In the end, it is humanity in all of its mundane, ugly, divine forms—“I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide,” and, finally, “I want”—that leads Wilhelm to his ultimate salvation. I want. That definite expression of desire, that sentence I don’t know how to finish, clears the blockage in his system. At a stranger’s funeral, Wilhelm sobs uncontrollably, finally moving “toward the consummation of his heart’s ultimate need”: not to escape suffering, but rather to grieve it and love it, too. For, in God’s eyes, pity is no less worthy of love than glory.

Re-reading Endymion, the lines immediately preceding the passage that Wilhelm remembers strike me as true to my feelings: “Bewitch’d I sure must be, / To lose in grieving all my maiden prime.” But I can’t stop there: I must then invite Sorrow in. Learning from Wilhelm, who got it wrong until middle age, the first step I must take in order to recover the voice of my own desire is to grieve, accept, and learn to love its loss in the first place.

So that’s how a loser did it; what about a winner? It turns out that the answer is the same, that it lies in loving humanity, necessarily including oneself. Siddhartha, of Herman Hesse’s novel by the same name—after a lifetime of searching in vain for his true happiness in various teachings (of the ascetic Samanas, of Gotama the Buddhist) and direct experiences (physical love with Kamala, working in business)—finally finds it not in self-denial, devout following, radical independence, or over-indulgence, but rather, like Wilhelm, in “belonging to the unity of all things.” Just as Wilhelm encounters “the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind,” so too does Siddhartha encounter the current of the river, containing “all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the pleasures, all the good and evil.”

In contrast to Wilhelm—middle-aged and unemployed, estranged from his family, directionless, and next-to-broke—Siddhartha is young, with every privilege imaginable: he is a Brahmin’s son; he spends his days bathing in the sun and resting in the shade; and he is loved by everyone. Nevertheless, Siddhartha, too, is unhappy. Yet while Wilhelm is too paralyzed by insecurity to allow his true self to emerge, Siddhartha—even though he has no idea where it dwells—is determined to find it. He has no certainty that he will find inner peace, yet he knows very well that his pursuit of spiritual truth will require him to let go of everything he has ever known and loved—first his father and the security of childhood, then Kamala and the privilege of riches, and finally his own son and the illusory feeling of control, completing the circle of life. His quest is thus the ultimate expression of conviction.

If Wilhelm’s grief and acceptance is the requisite first step, then Siddartha’s courage is what must follow. Yet, for all my admiration of Siddhartha, his story represents a Platonic leap of faith: I cannot realistically see myself leaving my family behind to wander into the woods and starve myself to begin my journey to self-discovery. But parables were never meant to be prescriptions, words to follow by the letter. Siddhartha himself rejected dogma in pursuit of his own values. The lesson is only this: you must go your own way; trust that you will find it. And know that, in the end, no matter how circuitous the journey, it will have been good.

“I don’t know,” I stammer again. I am grieving now. And I (almost) feel proud.

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Maybe you mistake other people’s dreams for your own, maybe your self-worth feels inextricably entangled with external validation, maybe you believe that you can achieve your way to happiness, maybe you’re exhausted playing pretend all of the time, maybe you want to imagine something different for yourself, maybe you have a tiny, almost imperceptible voice inside you crying out to be heard. Maybe, in other words, you’re like me.

In that case, I’m here with you. From the trenches, here are a few pieces of advice for how to tune in to that little voice, and to listen to what it has to say:

1. Go to therapy if you can access it. A good therapist will coax out who you are denying yourself to be. Let the sorrow in. Grieve. And give yourself lots and lots and lots of grace—you’ll need it to keep going.

2. Start a support group. It’s much more fun than it sounds. Danielle and I, along with another friend at the GSB, started meeting every other week. We called it “Designing Our Lives.” We whiteboarded, we cried, we yapped, we did it all. Most importantly, we held each other accountable to staying true.

3. Set aside time to reflect. Like, more time than you want. No reflecting gets done in the rat race. Think about who you are, who you’ve always been. When have you felt most alive—not when you’ve been most amped up on stress, but rather when all of your best energies were activated? What stories are you telling yourself about why you can’t make certain choices in your life—and are they really true? These are not fun questions (I know), but deferring them is a recipe for a crisis later in life.

4. Use people you trust, people who have known you a long time and have your best interests at heart, as a sounding board. This one’s a bit tricky because your self-definition needs to come from you. But trusted outside perspectives can help, especially as you’re getting your feet under you. My uncle, for example, has been calling me out for years for not living authentically. I leaned on him a lot to remind me of who I am.

5. Get creative, and be expansive. Leave no stone unturned. There are more jobs than consulting, finance, and tech, and as we wrote about in our last issue, you probably don’t need as much money as you think you do. Go through the Financial Visioning activity we laid out there, and then get cracking on your research!

6. Trust your intuition. If you feel like you should be happy, but you’re not—you have the “right” job, the “right” salary, but you’re tired all of the time and something doesn’t feel right—listen to that voice. If your excitement about something scares you shitless—like you’re finally doing what you want, and it feels against the rules—listen to that voice, too. You know more than you think you know about what you really want. Your body will tell you.

7. Then go for it.

If you’ve made it this far, I’m so so proud of you!!! Go get ‘em!!! And by ‘em I mean your dreams!!!