On misplaced longing

The one where I do my damndest to not abandon myself

❤️‍🩹Next Sober From Bullshit Recovery Club is Monday, July 19 (next Monday!). Register here.

🔥July writing workshop is happening SOON. Join me on July 25th, from 12pm - 2pm PST. This month’s theme is “HEAT.” Register here.

Questions? Just ask. I’m here and I’d love to hear from you.

---

Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash

I love San Francisco except for in mid-July when the fog is a thick murk and the space heater is grinding along under my desk while just twelve miles away in Oakland people are walking around with bare shoulders and bare thighs and over here it doesn’t matter if it’s 10am or 4pm, you look out the window and it’s all the same time. Climate is in chaos and everything to the north, east and south is melting but San Francisco is a stubborn bitch who somehow gets away with staving off summer until September and it doesn’t matter that this is my nineteenth summer, it doesn’t matter that this happens every year, all that matters is that this is the time of year I am loneliest and least comfortable in my skin and the monotony of gray has me pulling my nonexistent hair out of my head and basically I have to sit on my hands to keep from overstuffing my mouth or texting people I really don’t want to or scrolling myself into oblivion any other number of behaviors that whistle to me out of the gloom.

This breathless, and—OK, borderline whiny—lead-in might be my very-Dani way of conveying that the fog for real gets me in my head. Mix in a recent break-up and my Enneagram four-ness and you have what I’ll call a recipe.

Tater, however, is into it.

Inside this swirl of annoyingly familiar angst is the part of me who bears witness. This is the part of me who does her best to create something palatable from the ingredients she’s working with. This is the part of me I’ve only in the past few years reentered into relationship with. It is the part of me I hear when I close my eyes and breathe; the part of me that makes choices that delay instant gratification in service of the long view (the part of me that can even fathom that there *is* a longview); the part of me I do my best to honor in those moments when, if left to my more base devices, might have me degrade myself in some way.

Admittedly, the fog is the perfect backdrop to bear witness to one’s longing, to sit with the confusion that comes when the object of said longing is misplaced.

Sunday, 5:56pm (me): “I am feeling a bit crazy. Lizard brain is so intense and I am obsessively thinking about texting X.”

5:59pm(F): “Don’t do it!! Even if you got the response you wanted (which 🤔) you’re back in the cycle. I know how much it hurts. It’s awful!”

6:00pm (F): “Ride the craving!!”

I don’t know why I started to abandon myself. I don’t know why I learned to want things that caused me harm. I don’t know why, even now that I know better and am no longer (quite) at lizard brain’s mercy, I still seek these things. I can speculate. I can trace some fault lines back to their epicenters. But mostly, I don’t actually care. I want to be done. I want to let the past rest.

It’s hard when all the old sirens call from the fog.

This is what the weekend looked like (in no particular order):

1. I spent $83 on plants and finally repotted all the root bound family members I’ve been needing to tend to for a while.

2. I had friends over on Saturday and Sunday.

3. I forced myself to go to the gym.

4. I countered my brain’s unfriendly thoughts with other peoples’ by running podcasts constantly.

5. I reached out to my friends instead of him.

6. I made plans for a weekend away with girlfriends.

7. I scrolled Instagram so much that I got to the end of the feed multiple times.

8. I ate butter on crackers for dinner

9. I ate frozen Greek yogurt with baclava crumbles for another dinner.

10. I felt my insides burning; I sat and squirmed. I let the burning have it’s way with me.

This is how I stayed. This is the transformation I seek. It’s not pretty, not at all. It’s terrible and dumb and exhausting. It’s messy and disappointing. It’s skin-too-tight. It’s hot rage one moment, ugly crying the next. It’s nonlinear and confusing and it’s the opposite of palatable.

But I want my transformation to be sexy, dammit! I want a glamorous story of overcoming obstacles and I want a sense of having arrived somewhere where I am finally the type of put-together woman who knows how to manage her life (do you hear that sound? It’s the aforementioned “bearing witness” part of me, laughing her ass off).

This is magical thinking.

This is me admitting that my misplaced longing to be palatable to others made me unpalatable to myself.

Sometimes in my work with people, they push back on using distraction as a way to cope. They worry that it’s a “bandaid.” They too want their transformation to be neat. They want to believe that by saying they will meditate instead of drink when they feel a craving that their words will make it so. Sometimes, they do. But most of the time what is needed is to do whatever it takes to sit and burn. Even if that means engaging in behavior that is less than ideal. Let’s work on one thing at a time, I offer. Can we acknowledge how much less harm we are causing, I remind them (I remind myself).

Less harm, less harm. Slowly, over time, we cause less harm. We begin to arrive, not at any place, but at a sense of enough-ness. If it’s true that we are enough, than there’s no need to abandon anything, nor to seek solace in anything that is not right here.

This is the transformation we seek.

*

I want you to know that there’s so much more to this story. I still get knocked down. I just don’t stay down as long. I am no longer walking around the world, scratching away at the wound of lack. My edges have returned. It’s messy as hell, but I know who I am.

What is it that I genuinely long for? I wonder. If my longing was misplaced, then what do I actually seek?

I shuffle this inquiry along with long walks, hot showers. Circles paced in my living room. What I see (what I’m seeing) is that there is so much on the other side of longing. If I can stay and see it through, there is a soft place to land. There is belonging and connection, those things I have desired since the beginning of time, that thrum and pulse in my DNA, that call me forward, nosing my way through the fog.

I practice belonging, I find a home in friendship. I practice connection, I am here on the page with you, more myself than anywhere else. I orient myself toward a partnership in which my longing is received as it is intended: as a blessing. I give life to those things that keep me here, that expand my sense of self, that place me in relationship with gravity, two feet planted in the fecund dark.

Slowly, patiently, over time (as long as it takes) and alongside all of you, my people, I am longing for all that would long for me back.

---

SELF MADE is a newsletter for 🌺late bloomers🌺 with a focus on recovery, creativity and community. It's written by me, Dani, a writer, coach, and recovery advocate in San Francisco, CA. 

SELF MADE is reader-funded. The small percentage of readers who pay make the entire publication possible. 

You can also support me for free by pressing the little heart button on these posts, sharing this newsletter with others and letting me know how this newsletter helps you. Thank you.