on wanting things you can't explain.

i have desires i can't fully justify and i've made peace with that. i want things that don't make logical sense given everything else i say i value. i want quiet and i also want to be in the middle of things. i want deep connection and i also want long stretches of solitude.

i want a life that feels significant and i also want, more than almost anything, ordinary evenings that feel like enough.

i used to try to resolve these contradictions into a consistent narrative about who i was and what i wanted. it was exhausting and it never quite worked because humans are not consistent narratives. we are collections of wants that don't always agree with each other.

i think the most honest thing i can do is hold the contradictions without trying to flatten them. to want the quiet and the noise and to trust that figuring out how to have both is not confusion — it's just the particular complexity of being a full person.