I used to think I wanted the thing. The money, the person, the answer waiting on the other side of some door I hadn’t opened yet. I’d get close to it, almost touch it, and feel that hum in my chest that I called desire.

Then sometimes I’d get it. And the hum would stop. Not satisfaction. Just silence, where the music had been.

It took me a long time to understand the hum was never about the thing. The hum was the reaching. The thing was just somewhere to point it.

You can spend a whole life this way, mistaking the engine for the destination. Climbing because climbing feels like being alive, then standing on the summit confused about why you came.

The strange part is that noticing this doesn’t kill the wanting. It just lets you hold it without being held by it. You can want something and know you want the wanting, and somehow both can be true, and somehow the thing itself becomes possible to actually have.