I was looking for a reference in my notebooks, and then just browsing. A note from 12/28/1995 seems worth quoting today:
“For all of us, it is the public expression of desire that is embattled, any deviation from what we are supposed to want and be, who we are supposed to behave.” Dorothy Allison, “Skin: Talking About Sex, Class And Literature”
It is not what we want, it is the act of wanting that is both a political and a personally threatening act. Even to want anything as simple as a flower, a sunset, a cookie, is to bring forth the hidden “I”. “I want.” I am I, I have an identity rather than just a function.
Wanting is the ultimate subversive act to those who depend on and make use, or misuse, of the functions we carry out– wife, mother, secretary, woman to leer at, etc. We may not even know to what functional role someone has assigned us, until we express a want not consonant with that role in that person’s presence. SRChalup, Cat Leaping Notebook
Relentless Inquiry 
But Buddha says that it is the ego that is the source of all desire and from desire comes suffering. So desire is a form of suffering to the Buddhist mind. It is only through the elimination of the self that one can truly be happy.
In order to eliminate the self, one must know the self. The student tells the master, “I have renounced the self” and the master hits the student with a stick. The angry student advances on the master, who says, “Who is angry?”