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The Quiet Radicalism of Asking for What You Want
As a woman, I mean.
I feel like I spent the first half — or more — of my life cycling between a) imagining my loved ones could read my mind and know what I wanted; b) feeling hurt and disappointed because they had failed to read my mind and weren’t giving me what I wanted; and — sometimes — c) making a huge and daring effort to murmur vague, indirect hints about what I wanted.
In bed, at work, with friends — it was just so damn hard for me to express what I wanted, never mind what I needed. Not that that stopped me from wanting or needing things. Yet I somehow, very early on, got the message that it was not okay to ask.
As you can imagine, this didn’t work out so well for me. And honestly, not for anyone else either. It’s one thing to negotiate and compromise when different agendas are in conflict; it’s quite another when one person’s desires never even get expressed. I’m quite sure that all those friends and lovers and husbands and bosses had no idea that I was silently nursing my wounded dismay about so many unfulfilled wants.
How would they have known? I could barely breathe a word about it.
I haven’t read Amanda Palmer’s book The Art of Asking, but I did watch her TED talk a while back, and yes, I am talking about much the same thing here as…
