I've been saying some version of it for two or three years now. I was saying it, again, to a friend on a call earlier this summer, half joking but not really: I want to not want things.

At the time I meant it in the bluntest, most literal way possible. Scrolling through people's new kitchens, work promotions, Pilates routines or expensive holidays when feeling like an accidental adult (honestly, who greenlit this?!) was doing a serious number on me, like everyone was somehow mastering life whilst I was still looking for the basic instructions.

I didn't just want to not want the things, I also wanted to stop being the kind of person who could be wound up so easily by other people's wants. By then I was happily calling myself a retired businesswoman. Thoroughly anti-consumerist. Still deep in the fog of burnout from running a company. Done, done, done with social media and with wanting things in general. Enough had been had, you see. And it wasn't just the stuff, it was the constant sense of emergency around it too. Optimise your morning, your nervous system, your diet, your desk setup, your relationship with your inner child, etc. There was always something to improve or to work on, and I was drained from treating myself like a work in (never-ending, might I add) progress.

But eh, it's September now, and for me September has always felt more rightful as a new year than January could ever wish to be. And this September, surprisingly and not surprisingly, the drive is back. I want to build something again. I miss being a founder, even the parts of it that nearly wrecked me. I want to create and share and put my name on things in public again. Which is awkward, frankly, after spending so long declaring I was finished with the whole thing. Although I get it now, my burnout was so intense, it felt like the universe was shouting a loud cosmic "NO" at me: "Wrong path, girl. You've been too greedy. Now move over and scale these ambitions all the way down, please."

But today, when I look back at the last five or six years, I see less failure and more... curriculum?

There's a story about Ram Dass asking his spiritual guide, Emmanuel, why he still felt so far from where he thought he should be. Emmanuel's answer, more or less, was: "You're already in school, life is the curriculum, so why don't you just take it?"

So I've stopped fighting the pace of my own unfolding (or rather I'm trying), which is different from understanding it, and might honestly be more useful. When you stop fighting the pace, you also stop needing every desire to pay off immediately. Who even knows what's coming? The point isn't to "arrive" quickly and land perfectly, but to witness who you're becoming along the way.

When I think about wanting now, I always end up at my fashion blog back in 2013. Back then there were no links. I mean that literally: nobody was tagging brands or dropping affiliate codes. I was just a crazy-looking girl in something wacky, mixing prints because I liked how chaos looks, bringing whichever Freddie of the day I felt like being. My wardrobe was a costume lair, and every morning I'd ask, who am I today, and then dress her.

That was my first language of wanting, playful, expansive, experimental. My hair was another; as a Black woman, changing my hair has always been this magic wand of reinvention. I could be a different Freddie just by switching a wig or a weave. My want back then was about unapologetic self-expression: I want to see the whole breadth of what I can be.

But as social media evolved, wanting stopped being personal and turned into a performance we were all doing to each other at the same time about the same things, a race to the well-lived, well-optimised and instagrammable life if you will. Then we moved past the fun of clothes and self-expression straight into career plans, into bodies, into holidays, into sleep and morning routines and, God help us all, our own healing.

We have become so optimised that even our breakthroughs look the same. The captions blur: "five ways to regulate your nervous system," "three things you're doing wrong with your boundaries," "how to become your highest self." Hello?? Our desires have their own templates now! We're rewarded by these apps for telling each other what to want, how to want, and even what it should look like when we say we're "over wanting."

Cutting out the noise for so long felt so good, and I'm grateful for the sabbatical from wanting I gave myself. It made way for my intuition to get loud again. It taught me to take comfort in nature. A wildflower doesn't need fertiliser to grow through a pavement crack. It just grows, whether anyone's watching or not and regardless of anything trying to stop it. The sun rises every single morning, and has done so since the beginning of time. The seasons turn, four of them, same as always. Nature has always kept the same MO. It is absolutely not rushing to catch up with us, or our impatience and expectations.

Maybe that's the whole lesson. A wildflower doesn't scroll through feeds of other wildflowers to decide how much it should bloom this year. And so I wanted that, a total disinterest in what everyone else was broadcasting, living like a wildflower, fully unoptimised. Rekindling with "being" before layering it up with "wanting," something like that.

And once that settled, the wanting came back slowly, like a drip of energy returning. An urge to create something, to share again, to build something that has my fingerprints all over it. To play with clothes again, to experiment with my hair, to be seen on purpose. It's a different kind of wanting, though. It doesn't feel like chasing trends or validation. The test now is simple: would I still want this if no one ever saw it? If it never turned into something I'd be admired for?

My style these days is closer to those early blogging years, secondhand and charity-shop treasures, Vinted finds and stuff I've had for years. The fun is the hunt, the discovery, the ability to explore. I'm the only pilot now, the only bridge between the Freddies I've been and the Freddies I'll become; there's no other map. Algorithms, podcasts or Substack think pieces can nudge, inspire, or even confuse, but they cannot do the becoming for me.

When I zoom out, the absurdity of ever feeling "behind" is almost funny. My last proper job as an employee was eleven years ago. I remember the HR guy, almost smug, telling me I was too opinionated and therefore not a match, and me, devastated, telling him that my life was now over. I hadn't started a single one of the things I'd go on to build. From where I was standing that day, everyone else's life looked finished and mine looked ruined. Except it was just the prologue.

I'm thirty-nine now, with potentially decades ahead of me if I'm lucky. It would be absurd, and I mean truly absurd, to call the story finished from the vantage point of any given chapter. Kierkegaard said life can only be understood backwards but has to be lived forwards. Lately I think about that mostly when someone asks me for a five-year plan and I have to resist the urge to laugh.

So when I say "I want to not want things" now, I no longer mean "I want out." I don't want to move to a cabin in the woods and never see an ad again. I don't even want to delete Instagram anymore. I like beauty. I like style. I like watching other people's expressions of these things. I like building things and watching them land in other people's lives. I actually like wanting, and where it takes me.

What I want is to stop wanting what was never mine to begin with, so I can fully want what is, in my own time.

Maybe that's the only real question any of us can ask when a new desire appears: who taught me to want this? The algorithm? My fears? My impatience? The answer won't always be straightforward, and it doesn't have to be. But the asking is how we find our way back to ourselves.

I still want quite a lot, as it turns out. I just want to be the one doing the wanting.