Recently, my friend Erika called my cell phone. I will never understand why people insist upon calling my cell phone. It’s such an aggressive action to take: calling someone. Each time my phone rings, I have a heart attack like my pocket’s on fire and a tiny siren is going off.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to address texting. Texting = Better Than Calling. Unless.

Unless you are one of those people who doles out texts like IOUs. Unless you believe that whenever you feel like it, you can just poke at me, ping me, jump into my day like Hiiiiii and feel so entitled to a response that the next time I see you, you will arrange your face in an injured manner and say quietly, “Hey. You doing okay? I just never heard back…” At this moment, I have 183 unread texts. Texts are not the boss of me, and neither is anybody who texts me. I have decided, once and for all, that just because someone texts me does not obligate me to respond. If I believed differently, I’d walk around all day feeling anxious and indebted, responding instead of creating. Now that we’ve established why I have no friends, let’s return to Erika.

Erika and I went to college together. She was a born artist, but studied business because her mother was a corporate executive and wanted Erika to become one, too. Erika resented every minute she spent in those business classes. It’s nearly impossible to blaze one’s own path while following in someone else’s footsteps.

Erika returned to our dorm each day and recovered from her business boredom by painting. She graduated with a business degree, then fell in love with a fantastic guy and worked in a corporate office to put him through medical school. Next, the babies came, and she quit her job to stay home and care for them. All the while, she heard a voice nagging her to start painting again. One day, she told me she planned to honor that longing—to honor herself—by enrolling in art school. I heard fizz and fire in her voice for the first time in a decade.

So I answered the phone in celebration of Erika’s commitment and I said, “Hey! How is school going?”

She was quiet for a moment and then said, “Oh that. That was silly. Brett is so busy, and the kids need me. Art school just seemed so selfish after a while.”

Why do women find it honorable to dismiss ourselves?

Why do we decide that denying our longing is the responsible thing to do?

Why do we believe that what will thrill and fulfill us will hurt our people?

Why do we mistrust ourselves so completely?

Here’s why: Because our culture was built upon and benefits from the control of women. The way power justifies controlling a group is by conditioning the masses to believe that the group cannot be trusted. So the campaign to convince us to mistrust women begins early and comes from everywhere.

When we are little girls, our families, teachers, and peers insist that our loud voices, bold opinions, and strong feelings are “too much” and unladylike, so we learn to not trust our personalities.

Childhood stories promise us that girls who dare to leave the path or explore get attacked by big bad wolves and pricked by deadly spindles, so we learn to not trust our curiosity.

The beauty industry convinces us that our thighs, frizz, skin, fingernails, lips, eyelashes, leg hair, and wrinkles are repulsive and must be covered and manipulated, so we learn to not trust the bodies we live in.

Diet culture promises us that controlling our appetite is the key to our worthiness, so we learn to not trust our own hunger.

Politicians insist that our judgment about our bodies and futures cannot be trusted, so our own reproductive systems must be controlled by lawmakers we don’t know in places we’ve never been.

The legal system proves to us again and again that even our own memories and experiences will not be trusted. If twenty women come forward and say, “He did it,” and he says, “No, I didn’t,” they will believe him while discounting and maligning us every damn time.

And religion, sweet Jesus. The lesson of Adam and Eve—the first formative story I was told about God and a woman—was this: When a woman wants more, she defies God, betrays her partner, curses her family, and destroys the world.

We weren’t born distrusting and fearing ourselves. That was part of our taming. We were taught to believe that who we are in our natural state is bad and dangerous. They convinced us to be afraid of ourselves. So we do not honor our own bodies, curiosity, hunger, judgment, experience, or ambition. Instead, we lock away our true selves. Women who are best at this disappearing act earn the highest praise: She is so selfless.

Can you imagine? The epitome of womanhood is to lose one’s self completely.

That is the end goal of every patriarchal culture. Because a very effective way to control women is to convince women to control themselves.

I tried to control myself for so long.

I spent thirty years covering and injecting my face with potions and poison trying to fix my skin. Then I quit. And my skin was good.

For twenty years, I was attached to a hair dryer and straightener trying to tame my curls. Then I quit. And my hair was good.

I binged and purged and dieted for decades trying to control my body. When I quit, my body became what it was always meant to become. And it was good, too.

I numbed myself with food and booze trying to control my anger. When I quit, I learned that my anger never meant that there was something wrong with me. It meant that there was something wrong. Out there. Something I might have the power to change. I stopped being a quiet peacekeeper and started being a loud peacemaker. My anger was good.

I had been deceived. The only thing that was ever wrong with me was my belief that there was something wrong with me. I quit spending my life trying to control myself and began to trust myself. We only control what we don’t trust. We can either control our selves or love our selves, but we can’t do both. Love is the opposite of control. Love demands trust.

I love myself now. Self-love means that I have a relationship with myself built on trust and loyalty. I trust myself to have my own back, so my allegiance is to the voice within. I’ll abandon everyone else’s expectations of me before I’ll abandon myself. I’ll disappoint everyone else before I’ll disappoint myself. I’ll forsake all others before I’ll forsake myself. Me and myself: We are till death do us part.

What the world needs is more women who have quit fearing themselves and started trusting themselves.

What the world needs is masses of women who are entirely out of control.

I wrote to my community recently: Do with your Self whatever it is you want to do. You can trust your Self. Someone responded,

Isn’t it irresponsible to suggest that we should do whatever we want to do? Most nights, by the time I get home I want to drink an entire bottle of Malibu. Pretty sure I shouldn’t trust all of my desires.

I have a friend who has struggled mightily with money for decades. She recently told me that she was this close to renting an expensive beach house even though she was deep in debt. She knew from her roots that she couldn’t trust this desire of hers, but she wanted this vacation for her family so badly that she was prepared to allow her desire to override her Knowing.

When I asked why she was so desperate for this house, she looked down at her hands and said, “I see all the pictures on social media of families at the shore. They’re relaxing together. They’re off their damn phones and just being together. My family is so disconnected right now. The kids are growing so fast. Tom and I never really talk anymore. I feel like we’re losing each other. I want to slow down. I want to talk to my kids and husband more. I want to know what’s going on in their lives. I want to have fun together again.”

Instead of renting the beach house, my friend bought a two-dollar basket and placed it on a table in her foyer. She asked her husband and teenagers to leave their phones in the basket for an hour each weeknight. Her family began preparing, eating, and cleaning up after dinner together. There was a lot of grumbling about this new system at first, but then came the laughter, talking, and connection she’d yearned for. Her basket turned out to be a two-dollar beach house.

So, that woman’s nightly desire for a bottle of Malibu? That was just a surface desire. I know this because her Knowing didn’t trust it. A surface desire is one that conflicts with our Knowing. We must ask of our surface desires: What is the desire beneath this desire? Is it rest? Is it peace?

Our deep desires are wise, true, beautiful, and things we can grant ourselves without abandoning our Knowing. Following our deep desire always returns us to integrity. If your desire feels wrong to you: Go deeper. You can trust yourself. You just have to get low enough.

I have spent the last decade of my life listening to women talk about what they most desire. This is what women tell me they want:

I want a minute to take a deep breath.

I want rest, peace, passion.

I want good food and true, wild, intimate sex.

I want relationships with no lies.

I want to be comfortable in my own skin.

I want to be seen, to be loved.

I want joy and safety for my children and for everyone else’s children.

I want justice for all.

I want help, community, and connection.

I want to be forgiven, and I want to finally forgive.

I want enough money and power to stop feeling afraid.

I want to find my purpose down here and live it out fully.

I want to look at the news and see less pain, more love.

I want to look at the people in my life and really see them and love them.

I want to look in the mirror and really see myself and love myself.

I want to feel alive.

The blueprints of heaven are etched in the deep desires of women. What women want is good. What women want is beautiful. And what women want is dangerous, but not to women. Not to the common good. What women want is a threat to the injustice of the status quo. If we unlocked and unleashed ourselves:

If women trusted and claimed their desires, the world as we know it would crumble. Perhaps that is precisely what needs to happen so we can rebuild truer, more beautiful lives, relationships, families, and nations in their place.

Maybe Eve was never meant to be our warning. Maybe she was meant to be our model.

Own your wanting.

Eat the apple.

Let it burn.