Want is a terrible thing.

I wasn't much of a Barbie girl...my poor mother laments this

“[S]he believed that the Buddhists were right – that if you want, you will suffer; if you love, you will grieve.”

-Anne Lamott, Crooked Little Heart

Last week, in between watching the Olympics, reading Jane Austen, and hangin' with the dogs, I thought about some stuff. I generally try not to think too much, since I'm neurotic and thinking too much all the time anyway, but sometimes it's necessary to sit in silence and work to untangle some things in your brain. I probably have done a lot of thinking this summer, since I had no time to think the previous year. Perhaps the thoughts just backed up in my brain, and had to be processed one by one, like items on a conveyer belt coming out my ears.

When I was a kid, I didn't want things. I just didn't. I learned at an early age that wanting was futile, that it only brought pain, and that it was just easier to avoid it entirely. But when things started to happen that were outside of my control - I fell in love, and didn't know what to do about it - I was faced with the question, "How does a person want and not want, love and avoid, all at the same time?" After all those years of not-wanting, the feeling of want became unbearable, so uncomfortable, and I got stuck between the two, not being able to choose either one.

So I've decided to want things, and unfortunately (oh boy), wanting means suffering. Wanting inevitably means not having, not getting. And at some point, I might get the things that I want, the big things, or maybe I'll get different things, things that are better for me than the things I want (thank you, Mick Jagger). But I'm tired of believing that I don't deserve the things that other people have, that for whatever reason I deserve less because I am less.

Oh geez, sometimes I sound like a makeup commercial.