On Longing

Sketch 2, Wassily Kandinsky

In July, while walking with my dogs, I was blessed with a beautiful vision of the space I want to create here in Indiana. I saw cabins where body workers in residence could stay and be available to other guests at the retreat. I saw an educational space that could be used by local residents and visiting artists and activists. I saw much more.

While I believe the vision was a gift from my spirit guides and ancestors, it was spurred on by talks with Abby, a local artist and organizer with whom I’ve been in the very beginning stages of planning. (More about this to come).

But my first instinct wasn’t to reach out to Abby; it was to reach out to the person I’d broken up with in June. In a voice memo, I told him I’d had a vision of the space I wanted to create, and I really wanted him to be there, to be a part of what I was building.

My voice broke with grief and longing.

He didn’t respond.

***

August marked a year back in the Bloomington area — a place I’d returned to in order to serve the queer community. And, within the span of a year, so many seeds I’d planted had already started to bloom. I was (and am) the cohost of a monthly queer hangout that regularly connected over 40 residents. I’d joined the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and spent the summer attending rural pride events, blessing queer kids and adults with glitter and encouragement.

I was living a life I’d manifested for myself.

Throughout the summer, in conversations with my spirit guides and ancestors, I thanked them for the visions they offered me. (I’d had two, both rich with details and possibilities.) I expressed gratitude for the presence of people like Abby in my life, as well as the opportunities I’d had to serve the community.

I also vocalized my frustration. Why was I expected to give and give and give without the presence of someone who helped refill me?

My spirit guides and ancestors didn’t respond, either.

At least not right away.

***

My difficulty finding and maintaining romantic love is core to my internalized shame. It’s the part of my life in which I feel inferior to others, where I’m always “too much and not enough.” It’s the place of the heaviest, most consistent grief and the hottest flame of desire.

It’s also where I have the most potential to heal.

What do you long for? In What It Takes to Heal, psychologist and activist Prentis Hemphill poses this question and positions longing as a North Star on the healing journey. “We tend to long for what our bodies need in order to heal and feel whole,” they explain.

We tend to long for what our bodies need in order to heal and feel whole.

Prentis Hemphill

By investigating what we long for, we start the process of dispelling any shame around it, because shame tends to shrink when exposed to direct inquiry.

Investigating our longing also helps us better imagine a future we want for ourselves and strategize what we need to get there.

The concept of longing as a healing agent comes as a relief to me.

It’s not that I didn’t already believe in the healing powers of longing or desire prior to What it Takes to Heal. As a queer person, of course, I know how powerful embracing one’s desires can be. But after years of singleness and unsuccessful attempts at relationships, it’s hard for me not to see my continued longing for love as a problem.

Common advice I get from friends when I bring up any discomfort with being single is to “focus on myself,” which is another way of encouraging me to deny my desires until such a time as they can be met.

And, to be fair, the self-work I’ve done over the decades has paid off. I’m now quite comfortable being alone with my thoughts and frequently prefer solitude over the company of others. I’ve taken great strides to be the most authentic version of myself and am proud of the queer witch-in-the-woods drag nun that I’ve become.

Even more complicated, for years, I’ve explored alternative forms of dating and making romantic and erotic connections. I now have several people in my life who love and care for me, relationships that are difficult to put a traditional label on. But none of them are my person or my home base.

Sometimes it’s confounding to me that I can be actively loved and desired, can embrace and accept this love and be grateful for it, and yet still long for a more satisfying or stable love and question whether I’m worthy of it.

I’ve found that loving myself and even being loved by others has not diminished the longing to have a consistent companion who sees me as their home and vice versa.

In other words, nothing I’ve done has healed the wound, fully banished the shame, or sated the longing.

Still, I don’t think the advice of “focus on yourself” or “embrace your singleness” is the way forward.

Sure, there are times when actively searching for love is not helpful. Sometimes being on dating sites is like trying to play tennis after a shoulder injury. But at other times, continuing to actively search for love is how I fight back against the story I’ve told myself that I’m not worthy of finding it.

With wounds around relationships in particular, there’s this idea that we need to be completely healed to be ready for a healthy relationship, which just isn’t true. For one thing, none of us are ever completely healed. It’s always a process. And while we can’t be in charge of healing someone else, we can be a part of their journey.

Healing should never happen in a vacuum.

***

There’s a difference between “want” and “longing,” according to Hemphill. “Want attaches itself to objects we think might make us happy,” they write. “It fills in gaps we think we have. But longing is something else. It comes from deep inside and is not easily satisfied with things.”

What do you long for? When their therapist asked Hemphill this question, at first they offered up easy answers, like being better at their job or being a better listener. These were Hemphill’s wants; things they might pursue, believing it would make them happier or more confident in themselves.

Their therapist kept pushing and Hemphill finally they got to this: “‘I want to know how to love,’ I said. ‘I want to be able to give love, show the love I feel, and I want to let it in when someone says they love me back.’”

These responses were Hemphill’s soul-deep desires. Their North Star.

I tried the exercise out for myself, searching my heart until I could find the root of my longing. I wrote in my journal:

I long for consistent care, including attention, support, willingness to offer me energy and time. I long for touch, to be claimed and wanted. I long to feel, in my most intimate self, that I am worthy of all of this.

None of this was new to me, but it felt good to write it down and claim it anyway.

I also know this: the goal of my North Star isn’t to find a specific person. No one person will ever magically make me believe I’m worthy — not if I don’t already believe it for myself. Rather, I see the purpose of my North Star to keep me on the path of claiming my worth.

***

My other vision for the space I want to create came while gardening on my property. I saw an outdoor sauna and hot tub. And I imagined a community garden, one that could nourish guests’ bodies and their spirits. More specifically, I understood this space could be used by spiritual leaders, depleted from their work, who could come to replenish their minds, bodies, and souls.

When I talked to a friend about this vision, they gently pointed out to me that I wanted to create it because I needed it for myself, as well.

What if our longing isn’t a problem to be solved? What if it’s a part of the solution?

In Open to Desire, Buddhist psychologist Mark Epstein challenges the common Buddhist belief that desire is the root of all suffering or dukkha. “The actual word that the Buddha used to describe the cause of dukkha was not desire, it was tanha, which means ‘thirst,’ or ‘craving,’” he explains. “[Tanha] connotes what we might also call clinging: the attempt to hold on to an ungraspable experience, not the desire for happiness or completion.”

The difference between desire and cravings feels very similar to how Hemphill separates wants from longings. In both cases, when we cling to specific objects—people, jobs, roles, etc—as the exclusive way to reach satisfaction, we prolong our suffering.

Epstein asks us to reconsider desire as the cause of suffering and to see it instead as “a valuable and precious resource, an emotion that, if harnessed correctly, can awaken and liberate the mind.”

Epstein encourages the reader “to relate to [desire] differently” by learning “how to use desire instead of being used by it.” By doing so, Epstein claims that desire becomes the “foundation for all spiritual pursuits.”

One of the ways I’ve learned to relate to my desire for love differently is to use it to cultivate compassion for others who are lonely, as well. In this way, my own longing becomes a tool through which I connect to and comfort others.

It becomes a part of the solution.

Another way we can relate to desire differently is by embracing its unresolvable nature. The lack of satisfaction can be a gift in and of itself.

“The infinite can be known through an acceptance of, and opening to, the unending quality of yearning,” Epstein writes.

I think he means that our longing, in whatever form it takes, can be a way to tap into source, to the raw energy of the universe. The universe is never satisfied. The cycles of life never stop. The hungers and drives that rule Mother Earth remain constant and moves life forward.

The infinite can be known through an acceptance of, and opening to, the unending quality of yearning.

Mark Epstein

Maybe if I had a main squeeze, and a hot tub of my own, and other ways to consistently fill my own cup, I wouldn’t feel such a drive to create a space to help others rest and rejuvenate, as well. And maybe I’m okay with staying a little depleted at times and a little lonely to help others be less so.

***

So what is the goal if not to satisfy our longing? How, then, do we heal? It depends on what we mean by heal.

In the book, Hemphill offers us a beautiful definition of healing that I find helpful. “Healing,” they write, “is the process, often lifelong, of restoring and reawakening the capacities for safety, belonging, and dignity on the other side of trauma.”

I think we all know the process is lifelong—that’s why we’ve collectively started calling it a healing journey. But it’s still so easy to judge ourselves and others for not being healed enough to our liking.

In part, this process is lifelong because in this capitalistic, white supremacist, patriarchal, trauma-filled society, we continue to receive injurious messages and new traumas. “It’s hard to heal when you’re still being hurt,” Hemphill writes.

Healing is the process, often lifelong, of restoring and reawakening the capacities for safety, belonging, and dignity on the other side of trauma.

Prentis Hemphill

Hemphill’s definition also offers us ideas for our own North Star: to desire to be safe, to belong, and to have complete dignity in our selfhood.

It’s not that we are ever fully safe. It’s not that our communities, families or other relationships don’t ever fail us and force us to look elsewhere for that sense of belonging. And it’s not that our full value as individuals is always recognized by ourselves or others.

But we intuitively know that these are ideals we should keep working toward.

***

In publishing this piece, I publicly claim my desire for love, as well as my shameful fear that I’m not worthy of it. This is a fear I’ve struggled with my entire life and will likely continue to struggle with regardless of my relationship status.

I share it so that others can recognize they’re not alone in their fears. I share it because authenticity is a core value of mine and an act of self-love.

How can I explain that in my heart I both know I’m worthy of love and am afraid I’m not? This is the process of restoring a capacity for dignity that Hemphill writes about. My capacity isn’t empty. It’s just not full either.

I don’t write any of this to glorify suffering or trauma. Instead, I want to celebrate the act of claiming our longing.

It’s the individual and communal act of pursuing that which brings us safety, belonging, and dignity that is holy.

This process starts by claiming what we want and giving ourselves grace that we’re not—and perhaps will never be—fully healed.

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