I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to have a “burning desire.” According to Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich), a burning desire is necessary in order to achieve any sort of success.

Good to know… but how do you cultivate a “burning desire” inside of yourself?

Sophie Germain (1776-1831) had a burning desire. “She embraced her work [in mathematics] with a fervor and stubbornness that bordered on obsession. More than once her worried parents caught her studying by candlelight, and they pleaded with her to stop her nocturnal routine and get adequate rest… through stubborn will and creativity, she excelled in a time and place that suppressed the higher education of women.”

Actor Eleonora Duse (1858-1924) had a burning desire. She challenged the style of acting popular in her time, and changed the way that actors after her approached character. “If some mysterious strength appeared (unsaid) from the depths of me, it was not, then a projection of art, but, something far stronger: passion for life. It was life that I sought and that I wanted; life, it illuminated me and slipped from my hands every evening. Every evening, when I thought to grasp something of the secret of life, of the reason of our life, this at least; then art took possession of it (with me as medium) and stole the answer from me – and I remained, afterwards as if emerging from a hallucination, exhausted and alone, and with an irrepressible strength that the next day made me resume my war, and my defeat — !”

Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962 ) had a burning desire. “I was full of a strange feeling, as if I were two people. One of them was Norma Jeane from the orphanage, who belonged to nobody. The other was someone whose name I didn’t know, but I knew where she belonged. She belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole world.”

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) had a burning desire. “I want to force myself again and again to leave the warmth and security of static situations and move into the world of growth and suffering where the real books are people’s minds and souls. I am blessed with great desires – to give of love and time, and find that people respond to this. It is often tempting to hide from the blood and guts of life in a neat special subject on paper where one can become an unchallenged expert, but I, like Yeats, would rather say: ‘It was my glory that I had such a friend’ when I finally leave the world.'”

Lena Dunham (1986 – present) – writer, director and lead actor in the hit HBO series Girls – has a burning desire. “There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman. As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren’t needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter. That personal writing by women is no more than an exercise in vanity and that we should appreciate this new world for women, sit down, and shut up.” – Not That Kind of Girl, Lena Dunham

Do you develop a ‘burning desire’ in response to resistance?

I’m looking at women because I am a woman. I can relate to their stories. I’ve experienced a lot of resistance in my life. Sometimes my fear feels so intense that all I want to do is curl up into a ball and disappear into the roar of everyday life. It would be so easy to get swallowed whole. I’m small; polite. ‘I’m sorry that I don’t make a more sufficient meal,’ I’d say to the 9-5 job that easily succeeds in fitting my physical body into their mould… but I know that my mind would not follow. My body would be vacant. How peaceful that would be.

I often observe my own personal tendency to be shy and frustratingly quiet. It’s only frustrating because I desire to be heard. It would be so much easier to let go of the frustration and disappear.

But I can’t.

“Herman Hesse called suicide a state of mind – and there a great people, nominally alive, who have committed a suicide much worse than physical death. They have vacated life.” – Jeannette Winterson

I love my life too much to vacate it and give up on my dreams.

What does it mean to have a burning desire? I thought that as I wrote I might start to understand the answer to this question. I still don’t. But I have discovered some clues.

Phrases repeated by the women mentioned above:

• A desire to be heard.
• A desire to challenge the way they’ve been brought up to be – the way it would be so much easier to be.
• A desire to belong to the world.
• A desire to understand something bigger.
• A desire to be creative.
• A desire to live fully.
• A desire to be themselves by embracing all that they are: their passion, confusion, fear, courage, and (of course) their burning desire to create.

Is a ‘burning desire’ something that all of us are born with?

What then allows the flame to go out? How do we rebuild after being extinguished?  How do we protect ourselves against arrogant and unfeeling gusts of wind? It takes time to get started. How do we grow something that could be blown out so easily?

“Just like Pinocchio, there’s a Jiminy Cricket on your shoulder too, giving the very best advice. It is you, your authentic self, the one you were in first grade, before you learned to massage your personality into a form that would suit others. Sometimes it’s hard to hear its message because all the external voices are so loud, so shrill, so adamant. Voices that loud are always meant to bully.

Do not be bullied.

Acts of bravery don’t always take place in battlefields. They can take place in your heart, when you have the courage to honor your character, your intellect, your inclinations, and, yes, your soul by listening to its clean, clear voice of direction instead of following the muddied messages of a timid world.”

– Anna Quindlen

Courage? Is courage is the answer? Courage to embrace your passion with abandon – shutting out the quiet voices that gently encourage you to maybe “try something more realistic.” Courage to feel. Courage to live. Courage to be present amidst the discomfort and resistance that dares to feed the burning desire that bubbles underneath your belly button waiting for that moment when you say fuck it, I WILL NOT BE SUPPRESSED! I WILL SUCCEED! I WILL BE ME!!

Is that burning desire?

I can feel it bubbling… but I’m still afraid to scream.

References:

• Profiles in Mathematics: Sophie Germain by Stephen Ornes
• Eleonora Duse: A Biography by Helen Sheehy
• Marilyn The Passion and the Paradox by Lois W. Banner
• Letters Home by Sylvia Plath
• Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham
• Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal by Jeannette Winterson