Making Friends With Yearning

How is your relationship with yearning? We don’t often think about being in relationship with specific feelings or sensations, but I’d challenge you to ask yourself this question. Yearning for me lives in my chest cavity, a sensation of spaciousness that looks forward towards something new, something I may not be able to visualize yet. Yearning often cohabitates in my body with other sensations–shame, envy, frustration. My relationship with yearning has long been one of judgement and fear. If I’m yearning, I must have done something wrong because I do not have what I’m seeking.

In recent years, I’ve been trying to heal that relationship. Yearning is an extremely powerful sensation, one with a lot of energy and depth. That kind of feeling can lead you forward in life like a strong current if you’ll allow it to. However, when we feel that sensation of yearning and build narratives of lack and unworthiness, we judge it as something negative. Would you allow someone you don’t trust or respect to lead you forward?

Why is yearning so fraught for so many people? We clearly have a culture that values having, consuming, owning. Yearning lives in a space of wanting more, which we have framed–at least in American culture–as meaning you currently exist in a space of lack. Not having something you want? Bad. Shameful. Uncool. If you’re yearning, are you keeping up with the Joneses? The Spaldings? The McDougals? If you yearn, what ways can you blame yourself for not having?

There’s also a hierarchy of value where we place feelings pretty low on the totem pole. Logic, planning, and playing it safe are all highly prized. It speaks to treating life like a business, hedging your bets and only going for what is reasonable and practical. When a feeling is big or loud or deep, like desire can be, we don’t trust it. People who are emotional are judged as crazy or reckless. Our big emotions are something we should run from. They might interrupt the big plan. They might make us feel out of control.

There’s the biggest rub, huh? Control. Humanity likes to pretend that we’re in control, simply because we can bully our way into getting what we want. We can watch, historically and in real time, the ways that control is an illusion however. Children do not grow up to be what their parents had hoped. The weather can ruin your plans even with an umbrella or a heavy coat in your back seat. Your favorite mug can crack in the dishwasher. Did your blue jeans really get dry during it’s time in the dryer? In small and big ways, every day we watch things that are out of our control make themselves known and complicate our lives. 

Emotions function much the same way for most people. We don’t make space to sit with them, to get to know them, to ask ourselves how we can adapt and grow alongside them. We only think, “Oh no, this emotion is uncomfortable. How can I squash it? How can I run from it?” And when we realize we can’t do those things, the next question becomes, “How can I hide it?” Yearning feels uncomfortable. For a very long time, I thought I shouldn’t become well acquainted with it because of this discomfort, because of how often it could lead to disappointment.

Yearning has, even in moments of disappointment, led me to where I am today. I wanted to go to grad school and didn’t get a scholarship that allowed me to do so. Instead, I moved to New York, discovered drag, and crafted a whole career for myself that lasted almost a decade. I wanted to be married, and now I’m divorced and single but I’m also so much fuller for the experience and I’ve clarified a lot of what I want in a partner that I did not know when I was married. I wanted to feel free, and I thought that looked like a lot of things but I never realized it would look like becoming a woman, yet here I am. Yearning has led me to this very moment where I’m sitting in a friend’s beautiful home, surrounded by lovely dogs, writing a blog post and feeling quite content.

Every disappointment, every pang of not getting the thing I yearned for, aligned me with a future that was something I couldn’t imagine. Each time I have followed yearning, I have had to learn to adjust and evolve to accommodate the desires and frustrations I met. Every moment of stagnation and loss led forward to moments of growth and fullness. Yearning brought me here, and here I am content. Not having all that I desire means that I also have room to continue to strive and seek and learn and listen. Today, I am not ashamed of my yearning. Today I am grateful for it. Thank you, big, loud, scary emotion. You’ve done so well for me.