By Alana Chernila

“How do you feel about singing?” This is where I begin when I’m with a client or a friend and the conversation turns to sex, then to the confession that they just don’t feel desire like they used to. Maybe their partner has more desire than they do. Or maybe it’s not about sex at all, but rather just a feeling of general numbness. Since I’ve begun working in the field of sex and intimacy, this has been the heart of so many of the conversations that come to me: I just want to WANT again. I’ve been there myself. And singing was my pathway in.

So often, especially in the case of people who slide into caregiving, it’s easy to let go of our own desires. There was a time that, if you told me I could have anything I wanted in the whole world, I would have paused, troubled by the blank slate in my mind. A clean house? Assurance that my kids would always be healthy? For someone to tell me what was for dinner? I was so endlessly useful, and I loved being that way. But that use—that necessity that I felt I had for everyone—replaced knowing what I truly wanted for myself.

For years, I had talked about joining a choir. I sang in college, not particularly well, but with a joy verging on ecstacy. I loved the harmonies of old church music, of Mozart, of Bach. Year after year, I talked about how I would sing again, and I even settled on the chorus I would join, someday. But every time auditions came around, I argued my way out of it. I was so busy. It was silly to commit to driving across the county on a weeknight, sometimes even in the winter! There were too many other things on my list, and singing had no right to push itself to the top. It would never make me money or take care of my family. It wouldn’t organize the house, and I couldn’t make an argument for it contributing to my physical, mental, or spiritual health. I wasn’t even a strong enough singer that I would necessarily improve the alto section. But still, I felt a seed of wanting, and pushed it away.

In 2021 when Berkshire Lyric advertised auditions, I finally showed up. And I’ve been there ever since, useless in the best way, working hard to read the music, joyfully contributing to a moment that could go on without me, but doesn’t have to. This, it seems, is what people seem to call a hobby. And this hobby, this moment that I commit to and take entirely for myself, has helped to bring desire alive for me again.

Why? Because in that front room of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Pittsfield, I’m not a wife or a mother or a worker. I’m just an alto wrestling with Brahms. I go there to be a beginner, to feel the accomplishment of a single measure that felt impossible weeks before. I go to experience the low satisfied hum of the group when we have it, when we all have it.

Of course, I know there is plenty of use to my presence at the chorus. I’ve made friends, connected with music, and drawn inspiration into other areas of my life. I believe in the need for music in our community and our world, and when we gather at Tanglewood in June to sing some great masterwork (this year it will be Haydn), I feel deep in my cells that we are providing a service. But it was the lack of use that led me to the chorus, and it’s that sense of curiosity—of play, of jumping into something I’m not necessarily good at and never will be and who cares—that’s shifted my relationship to want.

“A sense of curiosity shifted my relationship to want.”

So, how do we find our way back to our own desire? The model of “the emotional floor plan” comes from the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, but I first learned of it from the great sex educator and author Dr. Emily Nagoski. In her book “Come Together,” Dr. Nagoski offers the emotional floor plan as a tool to help us map the relationship between our own primary emotional states to understand where, for us, the erotic is most accessible. Some of these primary emotional states, like lust, play, and care, are more associated with pleasure. Others, like grief and fear, are less so.

When we create a visual of our own floor plans, we put these primary states into different “rooms.” The arrangement of the rooms, and the distance between them, is entirely unique to each person. I’ve found that the exercise of the visual floor plan can help give context, not just for the contexts that turn us on, but for the spaces that offer doorways for those turn-ons.

For example, I love to be useful and resourceful, and I’m proud of my competency in that area. But by creating my emotional floor plan, it became clear that the UTILITY room was really far away from the LUST room—so far away, in fact, that there are several gates, winding pathways, and hard-to-traverse staircases between them. So, what did I do? I looked for ways out of my utility room, trying to identify the spaces that took me closer to the lust room.

And when I found something that felt liberated from all that usefulness—an activity that didn’t make money, clean my house, provide care for my family, or even build up my physical or mental fitness—it changed my relationship to desire. It reminded me what it felt like to want something for no other reason than that it gave me pleasure. And that reminder, that practice, opened me up to the thought of what would turn me on—not just in sex, but in every facet of my day.

Dinner decisions started to come from the desires of my tastebuds. I found myself heading out for a walk not because I felt that I should, but because I could feel the need for the deliciousness of the air in my lungs, the long stretch of my legs. Just a little bit of wanting led to more wanting, and before I knew it, the numbness I thought was just part of adulthood had shifted.

For me it’s singing, but for you it might be horseback riding, or poetry, or embroidery. The beauty of a hobby is that there are usually very few barriers to entry. The very nature of it dictates that we don’t have to know anything to begin, or to accomplish some level of mastery. But I ask, with clients, with friends, with you, now: What is the thing for you that plants the seed of wanting? That doesn’t need you, but pulls you anyway? Where can you go to be useless in the most beautiful way? Go toward it.

Alana Chernila is a writer, coach, and communications specialist whose work spans food, relationships, and travel. She is the author of three cookbooks. As a relationship coach (alanaclaire.com), she helps individuals and couples reconnect with their desires and create deeper, more vibrant connections. She also serves as the marketing and communications director for Guido’s Fresh Marketplace.