Desire, Interrupted
How being a good girl taught me to perform desire.
I was inspired to write this after listening to an episode of Back from the Borderline by Mollie Adler1. One sentence -I don’t even remember it perfectly-cracked something open in me. It’s strange how some words can pierce through years of assumptions, years of performing a self you didn’t understand how performative it was. We live inside our blind spots as if they were truth. But that moment made me stop everything. It made me see myself with a clarity I had somehow avoided for decades.
I had several “ah-ha” moments listening to the podcast. One of them was when she described what desire feels like when you’ve been groomed to be a “good girl.” There was this one sentence and bang. I paused and thought: oh shit! This is it! I know now!
And tears immediately came to my eyes.
I did not know.
I did not have desire.
No desire?
Until then I thought I did, but they were never mine. What made me feel alive was being desirable to others. I felt empty if I was not. I felt blessed and happy and fulfilled if seen. Somehow, that was enough. I never thought this through, but in fact, I did not have any desire of my own. I was not a subject; I was an object, shaped by the desire of others. This realization is really hard to swallow.
Desire: what an extraordinary word. It was as if I was relearn it. I used to understand it but… it was not mine. Desire belonged to others: to my Mum. To Men. To Myth. To Books.
When I first encountered the book Femmes désirantes, Femmes désirées (Women Desired, Women Desiring) by Danielle Flamenbaum2, the title felt like a safe harbor. I did not really understand it, but it gave me cover: if I am not desiring, at least I can be desired. But I had it all wrong. Desire, was something I provoked, never something I owned. I performed it like a language I did not speak - mimicking sounds and gestures without knowing what they meant.
When you are taught to be a good girl, your hunger is trained out of you. You learn to smile instead. You learn to wait to be chosen. And when that happens, you make mistakes. Oh, so many mistakes. I remember sleeping with a man I found ugly — and, in hindsight, also disgusting. He had nothing I could have wanted — nothing — but he wanted me, and somehow that was enough. Just because he desired me, I felt flattered. I thought I wanted him too. Bullshit. To be able to go through it, I had to disconnect from myself, almost float above my body, watching as someone else moved and responded in my place. I remember making love to him and hating myself. I was bored. I was laughing inside myself, removed from everything that made me me.
And in that sense, I also did a lot of other dangerous things, simply because I was asked to. In the heat of it, you think you want these things. You don’t. The autopilot is on, and I am not me. I am the good girl. La poupée qui dit oui.3
You learn to mistake being wanted for wanting. Being chosen starts to feel like proof that you exist.
And the thing is, you never wake up until much later. Until you listen to a podcast. Long, long after. I had so much to sort out in my life… so this came late. (Better late than never, you will say …) You wake up and realize: you have built a whole self around being the echo of someone else’s longing. It’s a hollow architecture made of mirrors. Every reflection tells you what you should be, how you should move, what you should wear, what you should never admit to wanting. Desire becomes dangerous because it threatens to make you real.
Another book that stayed with me in the last couple of months is Ovidie’s La Chair est triste, hélas (Julliard, 2024). It tells the intimate story of a woman who decides to step away from any sexual relationships. Each line carries the weight of long-held anger, tracing the repetition of erotic scripts and the fatigue of the roles women are taught to perform: keeping themselves polished, pleasing, available, always on display. In this refusal, she grants herself the right to distance herself from imposed sexuality, reclaiming agency over her body and her desire.
Now I understand why I was afraid of desire. Desire demands presence. It asks you to take up space. It asks you to know your body, your voice, your pulse. It asks you to want without apology. But when I try, I still feel the tremor. The old scripts return: the fear of being too much, too loud, too visible. The confusion between pleasure and permission.
Sometimes I think of all the women I know who were taught to fold their desires like napkins; neat, silent, hidden. And I wonder what would happen if we unfolded them together. If we stopped being desirable and started being desiring. If we stopped asking to be seen and started seeing ourselves. If we allowed wanting to be sacred again. If we understood that needing is not a weakness but a pulse. How can I stop being ashamed? How can I stop thinking of others? How can I become more selfish - or better said, simply alive?
I realize now that this fear, this restraint, this careful folding of desire is not just an individual issue. It is inherited. The invisible legacy of strong women forbids themselves from asking for help; it forbids them from needing. Maybe I am wrong to connect desire and need, but the two feel entwined: what if desire is simply need with a pulse? In some lineages, being strong is not a choice; it is the only option for survival. Strength is passed down in silence, never recognized for what it is: a family duty. Humiliated, abandoned, silenced… those who came before stood firm to protect their children. They learned not to need, not to ask for anything. Showing weakness seemed to endanger themselves and the systems they obeyed. Asking for help became an unconscious betrayal. In this transmission, need becomes guilt. Rest? Guilty. Saying I’m not well? Unthinkable. And the body ends up carrying what words dare not say. Being strong becomes an identity but also a cage: always available, always efficient, never in need.
The strong woman is exhausted.
She is not valued and this is just normal. This is not resilience. It is an inherited over-adaptation. Strong women deserve to be lightened. It’s time to bring nuance back to this strength. It’s not by carrying everything that we honour our lineage, but by showing that need can become permission and by freeing ourselves for it too.
What would it mean to take my desire back, piece by piece, breath by breath? What would it feel to practice letting it move through me, not as a performance, not as a reflection, not as an obligation, but as a pulse that belongs only to me? To allow myself to want without apology, to need without guilt, to rest without shame. I am just beginning to learn that desire is not dangerous; it is alive, it is tender, it is my own. It is the flame I have always carried, waiting for permission to burn fully. And now, finally, I can give it permission.
Maybe this is all desire ever needed, for me to stop disappearing.
Writing this text helped me understand something I had avoided to face my whole life. If it resonates with you, I feel less alone. These conversations matter - more than we admit.
“La poupée qui dit oui” — literally “the doll who says yes” — is a French cultural reference for a woman who has been trained to be endlessly agreeable. She is expected to smile, acquiesce, and comply; her identity is defined by her availability. It captures the eerie feeling of performing consent rather than inhabiting it.
your text sounds like an echo of emotion and I know it goes for many of us. Thank you for the courage to share ❤️
Thank you so much for your medicine words, my dear. I needed this one.