WEEK 40 - Wanting
You’ve mastered the art of showing up for everyone else. The harder question is whether you’ll let anyone show up for you.
By Jennifer Dirksen · Sheer Photography, Youngstown OH · Est. read time: 6 min
I’m guessing, you are very good at giving!
You show up. You remember things. You check in when someone’s going through something hard. You take care of the details, manage the emotions in the room, make sure everyone has what they need before you look around to see what you might need.
You’re the person people call. You’re the one who holds it together. You’re reliable and warm and present in a way that people lean on without always realizing they’re doing it.
And when someone tries to do any of that for you?
You deflect. You minimize. You say you’re fine. You redirect the attention. You make a joke. You thank them and immediately turn it back around because sitting in the receiving end of someone’s care feels somehow more uncomfortable than giving it endlessly ever has.
Sound familiar?
Why giving is easier.
Giving feels like control. When you’re the one offering, you set the terms. You decide what’s needed, you provide it, you’re in charge of the exchange. Nobody sees anything you don’t choose to show. Nobody gets close enough to notice what’s actually going on with you.
Receiving requires something different entirely. It requires you to be seen. To admit, even briefly, that you have needs. To let someone else decide what you might want and trust that they got it right. To sit still in someone’s attention without deflecting it away.
For women who have spent years being the capable one, the strong one, the one who handles things, that kind of stillness can feel almost unbearable.
Because underneath the deflection is a belief that’s been running so long it feels like a fact: that your value is in what you provide. That being needed is what makes you worthy of being here. That wanting something for yourself (attention, pleasure, care, desire) is somehow taking more than your share.
The woman who can’t receive has decided, somewhere along the way, that she doesn’t deserve to be given to. She’s been proving she doesn’t need anything ever since.
What you’re actually blocking.
When you deflect attention, you’re not just being humble. You’re refusing connection.
When you minimize your needs, you’re not just being low-maintenance. You’re disappearing.
When you redirect every act of care back toward someone else, you’re not just being generous. You’re making yourself impossible to actually reach.
And the cost of that is intimacy. The experience of being known by someone who looked at you directly and saw something real.
You can’t be truly seen if you won’t hold still long enough to be looked at.
What it looks like when a woman learns to receive.
I watch this happen in my studio.
A woman who gives everything to everyone. Who shows up for every person in her life without question. Who cannot, when asked what she wants from her session, answer the question without immediately adding a caveat — I don’t want to be too much, I’m easy, whatever you think is best.
And I ask her: what do YOU want? Not what’s reasonable. Not what’s practical. What do you actually want?
And she has to sit with that. Sometimes for a minute. Sometimes longer. Because nobody asks her that very often. And she hasn’t asked herself.
What happens over the next few hours (when she practices receiving my attention, my direction, my genuine care about getting her something that is specifically, entirely hers) is one of the most transformative things I get to witness.
She gets uncomfortable. And then she gets present. And then something opens up.
Not because I did anything extraordinary. Because she let herself be given to. Maybe for the first time in a very long time.
Wanting is not the same as being selfish.
Here is the thing about desire, about wanting, about letting yourself receive:
It does not take from anyone else. Your wanting doesn’t deplete anyone around you. Your pleasure is not at anyone’s expense. Letting someone show up for you doesn’t mean you’re failing at being the strong one.
It means you’re human. It means you trust. It means you’re willing to be known instead of just needed.
The women who have the most to give (the most genuine, sustainable, real presence to offer the people around them) are not the ones who have emptied themselves out. They’re the ones who know how to fill back up. Who let themselves be seen. Who receive as well as they give.
That’s not selfishness. That’s wholeness.
A boudoir session is an act of receiving.
Three hours where someone is entirely focused on you. On what you want, what you need, how to make you feel exactly like yourself at your most alive.
No caregiving required. No managing the room. No making sure everyone else is comfortable before you check in with yourself.
Just you, being given to, fully, for a few hours.
For a lot of women, it’s the first time in years that’s happened. And it changes something. Not just in the photos… in them. Because they practiced receiving. They held still and let themselves be seen. And they found out that being given to doesn’t make them less. It makes them more.
You’re really good at giving.
It’s time to find out what happens when you let yourself receive. 🖤
The investment is smaller than another year of waiting.
→ If You’re Done Waiting fill out the form below!