Th(e) normity of desire

Lately, I've been thinking about how often people talk about time as if it's something we're constantly failing to keep up with

We're always "running out of time." Too old to start. Too young to know. Too late to change. Too early to settle down. It feels as though every stage of life comes with an invisible deadline that no one agreed to.

One of the words I hear the most now is peak.

People talk about peaking in high school, in college, in your twenties, in your career. Before that, they called them your "golden years." As if somewhere in your life there exists a single stretch of time where you are at your most beautiful, your happiest, your most interesting and everything after that is simply decline.

I can't help but wonder what that belief does to us.

How can you enjoy today if you're already asking yourself whether these are the years you'll miss someday? How can you appreciate your youth if you're spending it terrified of losing it?

It almost feels like we experience life twice. Once while we're living it, and once while we're grieving it before it's even gone.

I wish I could say I don't think this way.

I wish I could tell you that I wake up every morning grateful for the present, unconcerned with aging or wasted time. But I don't. I'm constantly calculating. I wonder if I've done enough for my age. I compare my timeline to people who seem impossibly ahead of me. I convince myself that every year carries more weight than the last, that every decision determines whether I'm moving toward the life I want or away from it.

Sometimes it feels like I'm not living my life at all, like a constant perfomance.

And maybe that's because our lives have become timelines. Every milestone has an expected age attached to it. Graduate by this year. Find love before that one. Build a career before thirty. Stay young for as long as possible. We don't just experience time anymore; we measure ourselves against it.

The strange thing is that time itself has never judged us.

A tree isn't embarrassed for blooming later than the one beside it. Seasons don't rush because another season seems more desirable.

Only humans seem convinced that our worth can be measured by a clock.

Maybe that's because time is the one thing we can never negotiate with. We can't earn more of it, save it for later, or ask it to slow down. And that lack of control terrifies us. So instead, we obsess over productivity, milestones, and "making the most" of every moment, hoping that if we organize our lives well enough, time will somehow become less frightening.

Ironically, I think that's exactly how we lose it.

Not because we waste it, but because we're so busy worrying about whether we're wasting it that we forget to experience it while it's still ours.

I don't have a solution to that fear. I still feel it almost every day. I still wonder if I'm behind, if I've missed opportunities, if the best years of my life are slipping away before I've even realized they've begun.

But maybe the cruelest thing we can do is spend our entire youth mourning the day it will end.

Imagine reaching eighty only to realize you spent eighteen worrying about turning twenty, twenty worrying about thirty, thirty worrying about forty, and so on, until your whole life became a countdown instead of an experience.

Perhaps life isn't a mountain we're supposed to climb before inevitably descending. Maybe it's just a landscape that keeps changing, and every time we insist that one season is worth more than another, we overlook the beauty of the one we're standing in.

I hope one day I stop treating time like an opponent.

I have always been interested in the moment desire stops being innocent.

Not because desire is ever truly innocent, but because there are versions of it that pretend to be. The kind that hides inside everyday gestures. A glance held too long. A sentence that could have been shorter but wasn’t. The quiet awareness of someone’s presence becoming slightly more important than it should be.

And then, sometimes, without warning, something shifts. Desire stops being a background noise and becomes a structure. Something that organizes attention, behavior, imagination. Something that starts to bend reality around it. What fascinates me is not desire itself, but its distortion. The way it becomes something else entirely when it is repeated, imagined, or denied for too long.

In Secretary (2002), desire is not presented as romance in the traditional sense. It is mechanical at first, almost absurd in how formal it is. Rules. Correction. Discipline. A structure that looks like control but slowly reveals itself as something more complicated: a choreography of power and surrender that neither character fully understands, yet both seem to recognize instinctively. What begins as discomfort becomes language. What begins as punishment becomes meaning. And somewhere inside that transformation, desire stops being about attraction and becomes about structure itself.

Crash (1996) takes a different path, but arrives at a similar place. Bodies colliding not only physically, but symbolically. Desire emerging from violence, proximity, trauma, and recognition. Not love, not tenderness, but the unsettling realization that the self is not sealed. That identity leaks. That even the most socially unacceptable forms of attraction are still rooted in something deeply human: the need to feel real through another body. In that world, desire is not clean. It is contaminated by history, by fear, by power, by accident.

But fiction is only a mirror for something much older.

The Greeks understood this long before psychology tried to name it. Eros was never simply love, it was disruption. A force that arrives from outside the self and reorganizes it without permission. In myth, it does not ask. It interrupts. It wounds. It redirects entire lives with the simplicity of a glance or a curse disguised as beauty.

Even philosophy struggles to contain it. Plato tried to elevate desire into something intellectual, something that moves from the body toward the ideal. But even in that ascent, there is a recognition that desire begins in lack. That it is born from absence rather than fulfillment. And anything born from absence is already unstable.

Modern interpretations often try to sanitize desire. To separate it from violence, from obsession, from discomfort. But in everyday life, desire rarely behaves. It appears in the wrong contexts. It attaches itself to the wrong objects. It persists even when it is inconvenient, even when it is unwanted, even when it contradicts the self-image we try to maintain.

That is what makes it perverse. Not in a moral sense, but in a structural one. Desire does not respect coherence. It does not care about who we think we are. It emerges in fragments: a voice that interrupts thought, a gesture that feels too charged to be “nothing,” a moment that becomes disproportionate in memory compared to how small it was in reality. And then there is the most unsettling part: the way desire survives interpretation. The more we try to explain it, the more it mutates. It resists language by adapting to it.

Freud called it repetition. Lacan turned it into structure. But neither fully resolves its strangeness. Because desire is not only psychological, it is experiential. It is what happens when attention becomes attachment without permission.

What we call “normal life” is built on suppressing this instability. On organizing desire into acceptable forms: romance, ambition, aesthetics, consumption. We are allowed to want, but only in ways that can be justified afterward. Anything that escapes justification is labeled excessive, irrational, perverse. But the perversion was never the exception. It is the underlying condition.

It appears in the smallest things: the way a routine becomes comforting only after it has been repeated too many times; the way familiarity turns into attachment without announcement; the way certain people become emotionally oversized in our minds without doing anything to deserve it. Desire is not clean intention. It is accumulation. It is distortion over time. It is meaning produced by repetition until it no longer resembles its origin.

And maybe that is what makes it dangerous. Not because it is forbidden. But because it is ordinary.

This is the part we resist the most: the realization that desire is not something we choose but something that chooses its form through us. It does not arrive asking to be understood. It arrives already transformed, already distorted by context, memory, and absence. We spend so much time trying to purify it. Through morality, through language, through self-awareness, we forget it was never pure to begin with. 

The real perversion is not what we desire, but the belief that desire should be clean.That it should make sense. That it should behave. Because desire, in its most honest form, does none of these things. It interrupts, it lingers, it misplaces itself. It attaches significance where there was none and refuses to disappear even when meaning is removed. And long after we believe we have moved on, it remains.

I have always imagined heaven differently than most people. Not as a place above the clouds, not as a reward waiting somewhere beyond death, but as a state of mind that occasionally appears without warning.

It happens during strange moments. Moments when I stop fighting myself. When I stop measuring my worth against everything I lack, everything I have failed to become, and everything I wish were different. For a brief instant, the constant pressure disappears. The need to prove something, to achieve something, to justify my existence. It all falls silent. And in that silence, the world changes.

Nothing around me is actually different. My problems remain exactly where they were. The future is still uncertain. The things I fear have not vanished. Yet somehow, everything feels lighter. A tree outside my window looks beautiful. A familiar song sounds almost sacred. Even ordinary moments begin to feel as though they were given to me rather than owed to me. I think that is the closest thing to heaven I have ever experienced.

Not happiness. Happiness feels too temporary, too dependent on circumstances. What I mean is something quieter. A sense of peace that comes from no longer resisting reality. A moment when I stop demanding that life become something else before I allow myself to appreciate it.

Most of the time, I live inside a constant negotiation with existence. I tell myself that I will finally feel at peace once I achieve a certain goal, become a certain person, or reach a certain version of my future. I postpone contentment as though it is a destination rather than a way of seeing. But every time I arrive somewhere new, the horizon moves. The person I hoped to become is replaced by another person I should become next. The pursuit never ends.

Yet there are rare moments when I forget to chase. Moments when I simply exist. And during those moments, I begin to understand something that is difficult to put into words. The world has not changed. I have. Perhaps suffering is not only created by pain itself, but by our endless resistance to it. By our insistence that life should be different than it is. We spend so much time trying to escape discomfort that we never notice the beauty that exists alongside it.

When I allow myself compassion, when I stop treating my own mind like an enemy, I feel protected in a way that has nothing to do with safety. The things that hurt me still exist, but they lose some of their power. They no longer define the entire landscape of my life. And then the feeling fades. It always fades.

I sometimes think that self-hatred is misunderstood. People often treat it as evidence that something is wrong with a person, as if it is simply the result of insecurity or low self-esteem. But I wonder if part of it comes from something much more inevitable.

Human beings were never meant to know themselves this intimately.

I know every embarrassing thing I have ever done. Every lie, every contradiction, every selfish thought, every insecurity. I carry around an archive of myself that nobody else has access to. Other people only see fragments of who I am, carefully filtered through conversations, expressions, and moments. I see everything. The polished version and the unfinished one. The person I want to be and the person I actually am.

Maybe that is why it is easier to love other people than it is to love ourselves. We are allowed distance from them. We can admire them without being forced to witness every flaw, every repetitive habit, every moment of weakness. But there is no distance between me and myself. I am forced into constant proximity.

Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to meet myself as a stranger. Would I like the person I met? Would I find them interesting? Would I find them exhausting? The truth is that I have no idea. The version of me that exists in my own head is so crowded with memories, expectations, and disappointments that I can no longer see it clearly.

What if the problem isn't that we fail to love ourselves? What if the problem is that we know ourselves too well?

The human mind is relentless. It revisits old mistakes, invents future disasters, and analyzes conversations that ended years ago. It turns ordinary moments into evidence. One awkward interaction becomes proof that you are unlikeable. One failure becomes proof that you are incapable. We become both the prosecutor and the defendant in a trial that never reaches a verdict.

And yet, despite all of this, we are expected to feel completely at peace with ourselves. We are told that confidence should come naturally once we become the right person. But every time I change, every time I improve, the finish line seems to move. The version of myself that once felt unattainable eventually becomes ordinary, and a new ideal appears in the distance.

Maybe that is because self-acceptance was never supposed to come from perfection.

Or maybe true self-acceptance does not exist at all.

Maybe being human means living with a permanent tension between who you are and who you wish you could be. Maybe everyone is carrying around a quiet dissatisfaction that they rarely admit out loud. Not because they are broken, but because consciousness itself creates distance between us and contentment.

The strange thing is that even when I understand this, it does not make it easier. I still grow tired of my own thoughts. I still wish I could step outside of myself for a day, just to experience silence. To exist without constantly being observed by my own mind.

There are nights when I lie awake in my room and feel as though the entire world exists somewhere far beyond my reach. I stare at the ceiling, at the shadows on my walls, at the small details I have memorized over the years, and I wonder if everyone else feels this way too. This strange mixture of loneliness, curiosity, and hope. Sometimes it feels impossible to believe that life is only what we see in front of us every day. School, routines, conversations, expectations. It all feels too small to explain the enormity of being alive.

I have always been someone who searches for meaning in everything. In music, in the sky at night, in the way certain memories stay with me long after they should have faded. There are moments that seem insignificant to everyone else but feel monumental to me: hearing a song at exactly the right time, watching sunlight move across my bedroom floor, or having a conversation that changes the way I think for days afterward. Those moments make me feel connected to something larger than myself, even if I cannot explain what that “something” is.

I used to believe that growing older would make life easier to understand. I thought adulthood came with certainty, with answers, with some kind of clarity about who you are supposed to become. Instead, the older I get, the more I realize how little anyone truly knows. People walk through life carrying invisible fears and questions, trying desperately to appear certain while silently searching for reassurance themselves. In a strange way, realizing this has made me feel less alone.

Sometimes I think that is why people cling so desperately to religion, love, ambition, or even other people. They need something to convince themselves that all of this means more than it probably does. And maybe they are right to. Because without something to hold onto, life can start to feel unbearably hollow. Days pass so quickly that they almost blur together, and before you realize it, entire parts of your life exist only as distant memories that no longer feel real. There is a kind of beauty in not fully understanding the world. I think that uncertainty is what pushes people to create art, fall in love, believe in something greater, or simply keep going even during difficult times.

I do not know what I believe in. I wish I did. I wish I could say that I am certain there is something greater waiting beyond all of this, something that makes suffering and loneliness meaningful. But most of the time, I cannot convince myself of that. Most of the time, I just feel aware of how temporary everything is. Relationships end, people change, memories fade, and even the moments that once felt life-changing eventually lose their intensity. I know there is something deeply human about wanting to understand our existence.

Maybe that is the hardest part of growing up. Realizing that nothing stays untouched forever. Not people, not feelings, not even the version of yourself you thought would always exist. There are still moments when I look at the sky or listen to a song and feel something close to wonder, but even then, there is always a quiet emptiness underneath it. Like no matter how beautiful something is, it will eventually disappear, and there is nothing you can do to stop it.

There is a feeling not many get to experiment. That longing euphoria that follows you, a great feeling of ecstasy that floods your veins like blood and fills your thirst like water. I do not mean a normal type of euphoria. That is easy to get. A pill, a party, a night out. No, I do not mean that. I mean the natural kind of euphoria. A sensation that fills your lungs and doesn’t let you breathe. Or maybe it does. Maybe it’s all you can breathe. A familiar face that comes with you. A memory. Like dead leaves dragged by the wind against the pavement, always returning to your feet no matter how far you walk. A trail of sadness that leaves you after the euphoric moments fade away. And all you can think about is your past. Listening to the strings buzz, the metal vibrating underneath your fingers. The sound of a voice, a song you can’t forget. A face you crave to remember. It follows you. And you think to yourself, Why? Why can’t I forget? Why can’t I remember?

The trees had begun to empty weeks ago, although no one seemed to notice when it first started. Leaves gathered at the edges of the sidewalks in damp orange piles, sticking to shoes, to tires, to the soles of people too distracted to look down. The air smelled of rain and smoke and something rotting quietly beneath the cold. Somehow, it all reminded me of you.

Not in the obvious ways. Not in their eyes or voice or the shape of their hands. It was smaller than that. The sound of wind pushing through dead branches. The hum of streetlights turning on too early in the evening. Every piece of it came back to me, only to leave again, emptying my mind like it didn’t matter. And maybe that was the cruelest part of it all. Not losing someone entirely, but losing them in pieces. Remembering them only through sensations your body refused to let go of.

The feeling stayed under your skin like the lingering warmth of a fading fire, painful only once you realized it was dying. There were moments when the memory stopped feeling painful and became something dangerously beautiful again. Like standing in the middle of the cold and suddenly feeling warm. Like hearing the first notes of a song you thought you had forgotten. It rushed through me so quickly I almost mistook it for reality. It was never loud, not really. Not like I remember it now when I try to hold onto it. It was quieter. Almost stupid in its simplicity. It did not arrive all at once. It leaked into everything. A shift in the way things existed. The way sound felt closer than it should have. The way silence didn’t feel like absence, just another kind of presence. And then it would disappear and leave no clear point where it had ended. No line. No moment. Just the sudden realization that it wasn’t there anymore. And everything after that felt slightly wrong in a way I couldn’t explain properly. Not broken. Just misaligned. Like the world had adjusted itself back into place, and I hadn’t followed. A state that had no language outside of itself. But why? Why did my body morph into a mind of its own whenever a glimpse of them arrived? It seemed like i was the only one noticing their absence. Could it be that I was the only one trapped in that memory?

Maybe that was the problem with euphoria. It never really leaves. It only buries itself somewhere beneath your ribs, waiting for something small enough to awaken it again. And your mind eats your memories alive while waiting for its return, a return so strange that only one could hope to live once in their lifetime. A sound. A season. A certain kind of light filtering through dying trees. It rushes through your body so violently it almost feels unbearable, filling every empty space inside you until there is no room left for thought, for memory, for grief. Only feeling. Pure and blinding and warm and comfortable. And then it fades so quietly you almost do not notice it leaving. One second it exists within you, warm and unbearable and alive, and the next it is already dissolving.