a letter to longing
Dear Friend,
I somewhat envy that delicious, overwhelming, drowning, take-your-breath-away feeling of longing that currently swirls around the pit of your stomach.
I know what it is like to be overcome with it.
I know what it is like to look at someone right in front of you with longing for what you can’t have. I know what it is like to think of someone when you are home and all alone and long for them to be nowhere else but beside you. I know what it is like to long for a part of someone, a single trait, even when the rest doesn’t stir you at all. I know what it is like to long for what you imagine someone to be, even when they may never be that. I know what it is like to long for the imaginings of what you want, or even what you think you want.
Longing can be a wonderful feeling. And the part of me that envies you loves to drink in the exquisite taste of it and wants to tell you to eat it up as well, to chase after it, to answer its sirens call, and give it what it wants.
But there is another part of me that can’t help but also wonder, even when I sometimes sit alone with longing in my own belly, why it is a feeling that is tinted, even with the smallest smudge, with sadness?
I think that our deepest, most authentic, truest self knows that we are able to give to ourselves all the things which we chase for in others. And that self is sad to watch us keep running after it, running away from the source of it the whole time. I think that the truest self is sad because it knows, even when the rest of us doesn’t, that the things that we long for most are the things that we did not receive once and the tragedy of humans is that we have yet to figure out that we are the only ones capable of fixing the holes in the cup we spend our entires lives asking others to fill.
I think humans are so often sad because of all our longing. It’s endless and maddening. And though it feels good in the moment, even for a short time, I believe it is ultimately driving us all crazy, for it means that we spend so much of our time desiring things from others, rather than turning inward and asking what we can do to fill the need ourselves.
We long for people. It makes sense that we lust after people, that we love people, hate them, miss them. And longing feels like missing, except missing someone doesn’t have the same ache, the same hunger that longing does. And why is that?
There is a saying. People are more in love with the idea of love than the person they are with. And I think that’s where longing comes in. Ideas are powerful things. And they stay with us far longer than the chemical reactions other people give us. So do we long for the ideas of things because they stay and haunt us forevermore? Do we long for the ideas of things that we have never felt ourselves and are addicted to it because an idea just grows more and more powerful as it gathers more mythology and mystery as it sits within us?
I’ll let you decide what your own answer is. But my advice is to remember that even the harshest reality is always sweeter than the tastiest dream. The dream isn’t real, it isn’t tangible, and it won’t last, though it will last for an eternity in your mind if you let it, torturing you and whispering in your ear that you keep chasing after the fantasy. Do not let the fantasy, the mythology of what you long for, destroy your ability to be happy with what is real. And do not let the fantasy persuade you that you need to be saved by these people you long for. Because what is real and what is here now is you and your ability to give yourself everything you think you need from someone you’re chasing, lusting, longing after. Be overcome, instead, with the chase after the depth of your ability to love yourself.