#262: The desire trap

Last month I was waiting on an email. This was nostalgic and a little fun, as my inbox has mostly been a trash can for years. The contents of the email were of medium consequence—I was curious about them for sure, but they weren’t so important that I couldn’t wait awhile. So it was interesting that, as the days passed, I became increasingly agitated, refreshing my inbox several times a day, as if waiting to learn if I had a life-threatening illness. This trick of impatience—where the wait itself seems to ratchet up the stakes—felt familiar. I texted my friend who tried to get pregnant around the same time as me in 2022 and said I felt like I was back in the infamous two-week wait.

For the unaware, the two-week wait (or TWW, in baby-making parlance) is the span of time between ovulation and your period, during which you might be pregnant but it’s too early to test. I shared a bit about my experience with the TWW a few years ago (here and here, and in podcasts here, here, and here), and the gist is that it made me lose my mind. Specifically it made me feel desperate for a baby—a desire that I was, first of all, ashamed to associate myself with, which was a misogynistic bias I had to unlearn, but also a desire that truly didn’t resonate with me when I was feeling more “like myself.” This was endlessly confusing. Was I desperate for a child but just didn’t know it? If I wasn’t, why was I acting like I was?

My recent email purgatory, low stakes as it was, threw me right back into that tension. This time it occurred to me that what I was registering as an obsession with the information in the email was actually just a desire for the wait to end. These desires present almost identically, but are of course quite different. One is a more direct form of desire: I’m eager because I want the information! One is more mediated: I’m eager for the information because I desire an escape from unpleasant feelings of uncertainty. One springs from attraction, the other from avoidance. When the email finally came, I was excited, but more importantly, I was relieved.

The more I thought about this bifurcation of desire the more I noticed it everywhere. Was I actually hungry or did I desire a salty distraction from my work? Did I really want to go to that thing or did I simply want to feel included? Did I really need that coat or was I just bored and looking for a shopping rush? None of these desires are “wrong,” but the latter examples are all performing a little trick: I believe I want the thing itself, when in fact I’m catering to a pathological need I hadn’t fully owned up to yet. I think I’m walking in the front door, but it’s actually a trapdoor that leads me somewhere else.

An example of front-door desire: A romantic crush to whom you’re genuinely attracted; their personality lights you up, you feel real chemistry. Example of trapdoor desire: A romantic crush who makes you feel desperately in love because they’re mysterious and withholding. Again, nothing wrong with someone mysterious, but it’s also worth noticing, as the crush-er, when the draw is spurred on by game-playing—an appeal, perhaps, to your insecurity—versus pure, unmediated attraction. An important aspect of the front-door/trapdoor dichotomy is that both initially present as front-door and are only understood to be distinct in hindsight.

Front-door: Wanting the job because the work appeals to you. Trapdoor: Wanting the job because it will impress your parents. Front-door: Wanting to be friends with someone because you like their personality and get along well. Trapdoor: Wanting to be friends with someone because their approval would make you feel better about yourself. Front-door: Changing your diet to feel better in your body. Trapdoor: Changing your diet to be accepted by your judgemental boyfriend. Whereas a front-door desire represents a relatively transparent relationship between you and your desired outcome, a trapdoor desire is working to distract you from or obscure an unpleasant emotion like fear, anxiety, or insecurity.

Maybe it’s oversimplifying to suggest that our desires are ever perfectly pure and “unmediated.” Still, I think mediation suits the framework because of the outsize impact of media on our modern-day longings; a constant noisy barrier between us and our objects of desire. Advertising is nothing if not the corporate machinery required to construct trapdoor desire. The war machine, the beauty industry, social media, technology in general—each rely on their ability to mediate and manufacture desires and fears that otherwise might not naturally motivate us. If time and reflection can help us parse our true desires from our covert ones, the goal of capitalism is to speed things up enough that none of us pause to ask.

All these idiosyncrasies of desire might explain why it can be difficult, in a quiet or honest moment, to answer the question of what we really want. This is unfortunate, because the answer to that question informs how we prioritize or respond to our desires, and how we narrate and regulate ourselves in courting them. When I was trying for a baby, I did eventually figure out that I wasn’t so much desperate for a baby as uncomfortable with the waiting, but even that answer was incomplete. After a couple years passed and I watched a friend go through the process, I realized that anxiety during the two-week wait wasn’t a matter of finding one’s zen, but a rational response to an unusual and high-stakes process. The more effective response, then, might be radical acceptance and dispelling of shame around feeling “crazy.” That is, not to sidestep the trapdoor through self-discipline and claim victory over it, but to allow oneself to fall gracefully through it.

So maybe the trapdoor isn’t always the wrong door; it merely transforms, in the light of our awareness, from a trap into an escape. I wouldn’t want to live in a world completely devoid of escape routes, or opportunities to lose your head for the wrong person or do something fun for the wrong reasons. How dull. In contrast, to misread our trapdoors as front doors is to let ourselves be guided by our shadow selves. To live our lives in a state of perpetual running away rather than running toward, jumping from one cosmically unsatisfying desire to the next.

In Sherry Ning’s beloved essay, “You’re overspending because you lack values,” she posits that developing stronger values, in the context of shopping, can prevent us from caving to trapdoor desires (although she doesn’t use that term, as I just made it up). “Stronger values make you spend more mindfully because they shift the axis of desire,” she writes. “When you know what you worship—what you actually stand for and who you want to become—everything gets tested against that vision.” Here she refers to values as a filter or a sieve, but in applying this idea outward, to other venues of desire, I think values function more so like a light. Here’s what’s actually going on, they might tell us, so tread carefully.

Treading carefully could mean behaving differently, or it could mean responding differently to our own behavior. Often I find that my bluntest self-analysis in moments of trapdoor vertigo—that I’m shallow, desperate, impatient, pathetic—fails to appreciate who I actually am and what I value. Only later can I see that I was falling for another kind of trap, whereby I might behave “better” through the discipline of my character. The simplicity of the punitive solution holds appeals. But when I afford myself more time to reflect, I usually find that my values would have served as a better guide than discipline; not to choose or behave perfectly but to operate in awareness and with compassion.

Desire might be one of the most heavily explored philosophical fixations: Buddhism’s “attachment,” the Freudian unconscious, Lacan’s “desire as lack,” the internet’s obsession with dopamine. There seem to be infinite ways to think about it, which is mildly unnerving when you consider how often we allow it to serve as a compass. But forever approaching it with skepticism feels risky in a different way, like throttling some vibrant aspect of our humanity. I don’t really want to live without desire (another desire), I’d just like to fall knowingly.

You can find last week’s 15 things here, including a book I absolutely fell in love with and can’t stop thinking about.
The rec of the week was best book/film adaptations (great recs!).
Last Wednesday’s Dear Babies was about love and mental illness—thank you so much for your insights.

Hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley