'Even If I End Up in Shatters'

Can desire still somehow be good for you even when, on paper, it’s obviously bad?

Category is: Kim Petras Thought

Last month there was that thing on The Dirt, widely derided but which everyone secretly loved, about whether or not you would rather desire or be desired. The responses, many from well-known writers and journalists, were split about evenly, the same result my own Instagram poll arrived at. Yes, in a way it’s a dumb exercise, because the obvious correct answer is that they are best together as that rare, precious thing called mutual desire, and that either can be absolute torture without the other. As many of the respondents pointed out, it’s a maddening question because desiring someone you cannot have can literally make you go insane, while being the innocent object of someone else’s craziness can be weird, uncomfortable, even miserable.

But I liked the way that puzzling over the question tends to make you second-guess your own initial position. For me it came down to: if you must choose one or the other, and either is possibly an intense type of suffering, which way would you rather suffer? Like several of the respondents, I chose to desire, even though it is probably the more painful of the two, because it is the experience over which I am the author and therefore have narrative control, meaning I get to decide what it means to me. The person I love cannot stop me from loving them and deriving meaning from it even if they cut me out of their life. And also because the very fact that desiring is a more wretched type of suffering means that it is potentially more elevating, more transformative, than being the passive recipient of someone else’s desire.

Which is, I think, the question that puzzles, that the following essays address: is the craziness worth it? Can it add up to more than destruction? Can desire still somehow be good for you even when, on paper, it’s obviously bad?