on longing

it's a little being with infinite arms

The other day, I was supposed to be writing but instead I was scrolling through farm listings in Portugal, chest tight with the familiar ache: what if my truest life is somewhere else?

I've lived with this insatiable longing for the better part of my thirty-three years. When I was little, I learned to call it drive. "She's very driven," people would say. So driven I sprinted through life checking off boxes—until I ran empty and had to stop.

Now I know that drive is just longing in disguise. And I’ve longed for it all—every version of success, every body except my own, all kinds of cities and places. I wanted to make it big and be somebody, I wanted to become nobody. I wanted to be by myself and find someone else. I wanted to travel, dwell, settle. It’s never long until a new flavor of longing comes along.

Since I’ve gotten most things I strived for, I also know that’s not the antidote. After a brief blink of satisfaction, the part that longs always returns. It’s like a little being with infinite arms—when one gets a hold of something, another one sprouts.

It leaves me alone when I am in nature, connected to loved ones, engaged in my work, or immersed in stories. Those are the moments when I can feel every ray of sun on my skin and I can look at flowers for hours and make time stop and feel irrevocably at home in the moment.

But then there are those empty moments of boredom when it always sneaks back in. I have your best interest at heart, it tells me, trust me, this is your path. But how can I trust when it never lasts? I’ve courted and ghosted a million dreams, but this little being? It never leaves.

It makes me reach for the glowing pacifier in my pocket. My thumbs fly over the flat surface as the hours pour away. I peer into a million lives, none of which are mine, hypnotized by how everybody else is spending their days. The endless possibilities stream past in currents too fast to ever enter. Everybody has already built their boat while I’m still watching from the shore, searching.

How do I know which longings to trust? Not all of them are created equal. There are two types: the ones that come from deeper truth, and the ones that distract from it.

The deeper longings are never sudden or transient. They might come and go, but they always return. Some never leave. There aren’t many of them. They also don’t tug and nag at me, give me this! give me that! it’s now or never! They are subtle and patient.

They push me into the world rather than pull me out of it. They nudge me to simplify, slow down, stop hiding, and mother one day. There is no urgency, only knowing. Knowing that there is a life I fully belong to, a life that will find me in time. I just have to get light on my feet and let the winds carry me in the right direction once I stop gripping to all these distractions.

I’ve put the pacifier away. I left the city of longings, the city of angels, where everybody arrives with the grandest of dreams. A city that flaunts wealth like nowhere else, with seventeen year old boys driving Ferraris, ring lights in every window and the hunger for more silently carved into every other door.

Now, I am in the mountains, in the middle of nowhere, and I am not sure the current of longing has made its way here. There are fresh streams everywhere, but nobody seems to be in a rush to get anywhere, people are quietly building their lives. There are fewer screens and simpler dreams. It is silent. So silent I am beginning to hear myself again. Maybe there are still places that can teach me how to be.

If I could speak the language of the longing, here’s what I would tell it. I know what you are looking for. You just want to belong. I’d pull it into a hug, let all its arms wrap around me, all infinitely many of them, and whisper: You once were one with everything, every big and little living, breathing thing. The world was yours until you began to believe that parts of you were no longer free to simply be.

Then I’d squeeze it closer and invite it into my heart—making a home for it, right there—all one again, at last.

“I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.” — Emily Dickinson

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