What do you want?

Please note that containers are sold empty.  Honey is shown for illustrative purposes only.

 This one's about you, friend, not me.

What do you want?  Why don't you already know this, why don't you have an answer at hand?  Why, as you think harder about it, does the answer seem to recede into the distance?  And what's with this sense that you used to know but can't quite remember what that earlier answer was?  Lots of reasons, lots of really good reasons.

You've been taught not to want the things you do want.  I do this all the time to my kids.  What does Felix want?  More syrup on his pancakes, more soy sauce on his rice, more honey on everything.  No, Felix, you've had enough syrup...more soy sauce will ruin your rice...we are out of honey, again.  What does Gideon want?  To stay up all night, "reading," to climb out the window that leads to the apple tree, or, formerly, possibly still, to drink out of the toilet.  No, Gideon, no, no, no.  And it doesn't end there:  we are constantly telling one another not to be greedy, not to strive too obviously, not to leave the dirty dishes sit, not to have an affair.  If we exclude the leaden question of What-do-you-want-for-dinner-tonight you will find that, as an adult, you are rarely asked what it is you want, and almost never asked what you really want.

Things get taken away from you--a favorite restaurant closes, a friend dies, lovers leave you, families get broken, Utz discontinues their Mesquite BBQ Kettle Cooked potato chips, why why why why why?--and you confuse the desire to fill that hole with the want that creates something new.  Yes, you want those things back, it's a true want, but it's a useless, irrelevant want, and it drowns the weak signal of the want-for-that-which-you've-never-had.

You aren't in touch with your emotions and finding what you want depends on being able to feel it.  You will never answer this question by analysis, it isn't a puzzle to be solved.  Wants are discoveries, not inventions, but your education and your work have done almost nothing to teach you how to find things, only how to make them.  The making is what gets you the things you want, but we're not there yet.  Feeling comes first, and at your age feeling is uncomfortable at best, and if you're like me it actually hurts.

Last, there's just no space in life for questions like this.  It's open-ended, doesn't offer quick wins, and any answer you do find is probably going to cause an awful lot of trouble.  Searching necessitates sitting still, which you don't do.  Searching is helped by having conversations with people of a sort you don't normally have.  You might have to start keeping a diary or seeing a shrink, you might have to travel or take a long, long drive.  Who has time?  Who has capacity?  And who even wants to admit they don't have what they want, much less that they don't even know what that thing is?

When you really look at it, it's just a terrible question to have to ask yourself, a terrible question to have to share with others, and it's just a terrible pity that you must.  But you must, so get to it and stick to it, and good luck to you.  You can do it, you can find an answer, or a part of one.  And once you do know what you want perhaps we can blog some more together about how to go about asking for it.