There’s a certain weight to the life you’ve built. A weight that sits just behind your ribcage, familiar and steady, like the hum of a machine left running for too long. It’s not unbearable—no, you’ve carried far heavier. It’s just enough to keep you from asking too many questions.
This is the architecture of your life: brick by careful brick, each laid with precision, practicality, and a quiet resignation. Every "I can't" the mortar. Every "I shouldn’t" the scaffolding. Every desire buried beneath the foundation, tucked neatly away where it can’t disrupt the load-bearing walls.
We’re told these walls are good. Necessary. Noble, even. That they protect us from the chaos of wanting too much. So we call them things like "responsibility," "stability," and "success." We admire their symmetry and pat ourselves on the back for following the blueprint so perfectly.
And it worked, didn’t it? Look at what you’ve built. The promotions, the accolades, the polished floors that shine underfoot. A solid life. A respectable one. But tell me—does it breathe?
Because somewhere under these walls, there’s a part of you that still knows what it feels like to yearn. To ache. To long for something untamed and unruly, something that can’t be measured or managed. A part that remembers what it’s like to feel the pull of your own desire—before you learned to file it away as a distraction, a weakness, a liability.
You gave it up so easily, didn’t you? Or maybe not easily at all. But you gave it up all the same. The late nights spent painting just because you wanted to see the colors bleed together. The song you wrote that no one else ever heard. The ideas you dreamed of but didn’t chase, because it felt safer to want quietly than to risk failure.
Desire became a problem to solve. A calculation to balance against the weight of expectations. And so you made the "right" choices. You took the job, said yes when you meant no, stayed silent when you wanted to roar. You built the life you were told you should want.
But tell me—when was the last time you held something in your hands, or let it hold you, without trying to fix it, improve it, or make it mean more than it was? When was the last time you trusted yourself enough to let go of the checklist, the plan, the approval of others?
When was the last time you didn’t second-guess what your body, your heart, your gut was telling you?
Maybe it’s been so long you’ve forgotten how to even recognize the shape of your own longing. Maybe you’ve convinced yourself that it’s better this way, that desire is dangerous, that the walls are safer.
But are they? Or are they just quieter?
Julius Caesar trusted his walls, too. He believed in the systems he built, the structures that held his world together. He trusted them right up until the moment they crumbled around him, sharp edges and betrayal cutting him down. His downfall wasn’t his ambition—it was his faith in a system that couldn’t hold the weight of his desire.
And what about your walls? What are they keeping out? What are they keeping in?
Every "I can’t," every "I shouldn’t," every excuse you make for why you can’t have more, be more, feel more—they’re not wisdom. They’re not protection. They’re just bricks.
So here you are, sitting in the house you’ve built, sipping your wine, staring into the fire. And somewhere in the flicker of the flames, you see it—the faintest shadow of what could have been. Or maybe what could still be.
The question isn’t whether you’ll tear the walls down. Not yet. The question is whether you’ll let yourself even imagine what it might feel like if you did.
If you followed your desire. If you let the "I can’t" and the "I shouldn’t" fall away. If you let yourself want—truly, recklessly, unapologetically want.
Would the walls hold? Or would they burn?
Perhaps the answer isn’t a sledgehammer but a chisel. A slow, deliberate excavation of the parts of you buried beneath the mortar. Start small. Pick up the thing you set aside—the guitar, the journal, the brush, the whisper you didn’t dare let out loud. Let your hands remember what it feels like to create, not because you have to, but because you want to.
Because desire is an invitation that you need to be vulnerable enough to accept.
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