82. You've Forgotten What You Want: The Patriarchal Path (and the Way Back)

I'm recording this one from a sweltering hotel room in New York City, and I can't stop thinking about a 26-year-old named Karen I ate dumplings with last night — because Karen is standing at the front door of a path most of us walked all the way to the end. I call it The Patriarchal Path: the list you were handed so early you thought it was your own idea. The education, the career, the partnership, the kids, the house — and happiness waiting at the end like a prize at the bottom of the cereal box. We didn't fail that path, love. We crushed it. And then we arrived, boxes checked, whispering the question every woman thinks she's the only one asking: is this it?

What you'll hear:

🔥 The Patriarchal Path, named — and why the most accomplished women are the ones standing at the end of it asking "is this it?"

🔥 The data that will make you feel less crazy: the documented paradox of declining female happiness, and why women our age carry the highest depression rate in the country — the problem is the path, not you

🔥 Why the guilt of wanting arrives faster than the want itself — and whose job that guilt is doing

🔥 All Fours, Dying for Sex, and what it means that every story our culture can't stop consuming is about a woman needing an escape hatch before she's allowed to want

🔥 The turn: stop asking WHAT you want (that's the advanced class) — and the story of the day I climbed a tree at forty-two and found my life's work up there

The framework: This episode lives in The Unbinding — unbinding from the path that never had your wanting on the list.

🌿 The Desire Ritual: if this episode is stirring something, I built a self-paced mini-experience for exactly this — a ritual for you and your wanting getting reacquainted, inside our community, on your own time. It might be the most important thing you give yourself this year.

With love to Vella BioScience and founder Carolyn Wheeler — doing incredible work in women's sexual wellness (and Carolyn, that podcast invitation is real).

One more thing: subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and share this with 5 women in your life. Those three things tell the platforms to put this in front of more women — and the more women who hear this, the better the world gets for all of us. I will die on that hill.