On desire
Rare is the person who wasn't nurtured out of a relationship with their own desire. Most of us learned early that wanting is suspect, and the word itself got narrowed down to appetite: something a little wanton, not quite respectable to say out loud in a professional room. So let me ask it the plain way. What do you want, when nobody's watching and nothing's being evaluated? Sit with that long enough and you'll notice that what surfaces isn't wanting. Wanting is appetite — the inbox at zero, the new watch, the week away — satisfied, and hollow again before you've stopped enjoying it. Desire is the thing still there in ten years whether or not you ever answered it: the faculty that tells you what's actually yours, and how you know whether a life fits.
Desire you haven't built the capacity to hold will run you into a wall. The wariness you were taught isn't baseless, and feeling a thing is not the same as being able to live it. But desire that's rooted, in conversation with who you actually are, connects you to the most foundational parts of your being. It's where purpose comes from, and it's also, not separately, where intimacy comes from: how you love, who you choose, whether you can be met. You can't sit honestly with meaning, or build a life that's actually yours, without visiting with desire. Most of us were never given permission, or a place. This is both.