We’ve created a bizarre creature who consumes incessantly, yet desires nothing.
We don’t yearn, anymore.
We have access to everything, yet our longing has vanished. The more we acquire, the less we adore. Not just materially, but within ourselves: We’ve learned to minimize our wants, to want less, to somehow believe that in caring less, we will gain more. We acquire, adapt, discard, repeat.
The result is a very morbid overwhelm. It creates a veiled persona, an identity without any intensity. Our ego is gluttonous yet our identity is starved. How perverse, how strange, to yearn for nothing but the idea of more.
Yearning isn’t simply wanting something. It’s allowing desire to change who we are.
The poverty of having it all reduces us to homogeny: We cut away the strange tastes, obsessive interests, dramatic desires, inconvenient ambitions. We slice ourselves into bite-size pieces and wonder why our appetite rages on.
I know how terrifying it can be to stand in front of the world and declare your love for something, the idea that this precious notion, person, ideation, creation could be mocked or ridiculed, stripped, robbed, beaten or stolen away. I know firsthand the tax that yearning demands, how it eats into my veins like the little mice who feast on my wool sweaters. I am here to tell you that life without yearning is not a life worth living. You must find something to make you awed, consumed, miserable, at the very least.
The painter yearns for the perfect pigment, the writer for the perfect word. I have no intention of softening my edges and telling you how easily this comes to me, it would be a lie to myself and of my work, and would mitigate all circumstances that make writing the powerful exorcism it is. Because without yearning, we are reduced. We’re a shell of the person we were supposed to be, a slave to our lost potential.
You can protect yourself by never caring deeply, or you can accept that the possibility of loss is the price of having something precious.
How radically terrifying, the sheer possibility of what you could become!
What you could be, who you could be! Become a zealot, obsessive, willing to allow the fervor to twinkle in your eyes. Coax to life the passion that demands your attention, the one that make you feel ridiculous, and alive.
Don’t be tempted by the ease of minimalism, by the looser threads of fate. There is nothing to be gained through minimal anything, least of all minimizing yourself.
Humiliate yourself, and start again.
Become hideous, and try again.
Lose yourself, and begin again.
The glory of yearning lies in its power to change us; to let us lose who we were so that we might become something greater. Surrender. Let it undo you. Let it transform you. What you become, that is your prestige.
With great personal aesthetic,
Alexandra Diana, The A List
