But Wait, What Do We REALLY Want?

And what stands in our way of finding it . . . ?

After our recent discussions of desire and what we’d like our lives to look like in five years, I was struck by something Martha Beck said in podcast interviews I listened to this week. A few times she made an important distinction between wanting and yearning. I’d like to pick this apart, because I think it gets at what is really going on inside us when we feel restless, when we hear that (sometimes faint, sometimes loud) call for something different in our lives. (And thank you to subscriber Diana for reminding me of Martha Beck’s fabulous work!)

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What Do We Yearn For?

So Martha Beck says that she starts by asking people, “What do you want?” And people usually talk about things they would like to possess. Then she asks, “But what do you yearn for? What do you want when you wake up at 2 a.m. in the middle of the night?” That is a whole other thing.

Whereas our initial thoughts about what we want may bring up things like a new job, a new home, or a publishing contract, thinking about what we yearn for will lead us to deeper, universal human desires. Most often, she says, people yearn for peace, happiness, joy, belonging, and love.

When I set out on my journey, those were exactly the things I was looking for. I wanted them so badly my body hurt. She says, in fact, that we want in our heads, but we yearn in our bodies. I was yearning so much that I carried a kind of ache around inside me that could pull at my chest and hit me in my gut sometimes. Or it could bring tears to my eyes.

And I’m convinced those yearnings were at the heart of my autoimmune disorder and high stress levels. My body was telling me to dig deeper, to get to the root of what I really wanted in life. (I say “want,” but really I think these things we yearn for are basic human needs. And when we don’t get them, we feel like something important is missing from our lives.)

I had sought those things before, of course, but I had looked in the wrong places. My desire for love had led me down a path of conventional marriage and compromising my authentic self in order to hold it together at all costs. My yearning for belonging had led me to incessant (unpaid) labor and caring for others while submerging my own needs and desires. And happiness was a never-reachable ideal of thinness, sex appeal, and domestic perfection. (Yeah, I never got there.)

Starting over meant, more than anything, figuring out how to find those things for myself, rather than looking for them externally. It meant shedding everything in my life so that I could see what was going on deep inside me and listen to where my internal compass wanted me to go.

Some paths in the Pentlands, outside Edinburgh, Scotland.

This reminds me of a moment in a conversation I had this week with

Laura Hearn

. She is a brave woman remaking her life after a successful career as a BBC TV journalist and producer. (She asked me to talk to her for her podcast “Flip-It.” I’ll share the episode when it airs). She said that a lot of women she knows are struggling so much with the disconnect between the lives they are living and what they truly want in their hearts. Sadly, I think this is true of so many of us humans.

But Yearning Doesn’t Feel Great

Ignoring that voice inside us that is telling us we want something is a painful business. But then again, so is listening to that voice. Because a yearning is not easily satisfied.

Typically, when a nagging yearning comes up, we tend to push it away. We distract and numb ourselves with our screens, alcohol, shopping, spending time with friends—whatever takes it away or allows us to forget it for a little bit.

But does it ever go away? No. It’s still there, eating away at us, and we have to push it away even harder.

Tok-pa Turner talks in her magical book Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home about how we try “to curate reality so that it is only filled with pleasure and peace.” We react to our longings for something more, something deeper, by trying to fill our lives up with Instagram-worthy moments. But, she says, “longing asks us to make a mingling of laughter with grief, a combining of hurt and salve, a willingness to enter into our lostness so that we may be found.”

Isn’t that a beautiful cover? You can find the book here.

The most important part of my journey has been, without a doubt, an inward one. And I had to learn how to sit with the painful yearnings, how to accept their presence in my life and let them lead me into new experiences that have been far from 100% pleasurable. But I know they have been leading me in the right direction.

I remember hearing Brené Brown talk about how when we work so hard to keep out anything that doesn’t feel good, we end up flattening out our lives, accepting a vanilla version of existence because we can’t accept the darker moments. Thus, we rob ourselves of true joy. Because we can’t just have the ups in life; we have to have the downs, too. They come together—light doesn’t exist without dark; happiness doesn’t exist without sadness.

By this logic, then, if we yearn for joy, peace, etc., we also have to learn to live with their opposites.

Opening and Trusting the Universe

And this makes me think of my word of the year for 2023, the word I carried with me on my travels and returned to again and again—Open. I had to open myself to all kinds of things that we tend to shut ourselves off from. We close our doors, so to speak, on new friends, new relationships, learning new things, experiencing new things outside of our comfort zones. And why? Because of fear.

The #1 thing that will rob us of joy, happiness, love, peace—whatever we most yearn for—is FEAR.

Martha Beck also says that “Yearning + Trust = Happiness.” If we look into the future and trust that things will work out how they are meant to be (which doesn’t mean 100% wonderful, by the way), then yearning pulls us forward and we feel in balance. Fear holds us back, knocks us out of balance, she says.

This is so true! It’s when we don’t trust, when we are too afraid of what might happen, that yearning feels hopeless and painful.

Trust is not easy. Trusting that we will be better off in our future lives than we are now is a big ask. This is where bravery comes in, I think. We talk about bravery being the courage to act in spite of our fears. I also think bravery is another form of trust.

At a certain point in our conversation, Laura Hearn asked me rather suddenly, “Are you happier now?” I thought that was so interesting, because that is the real question we all ask ourselves—Will I be happier if I do this crazy thing my heart is telling me to do? Or will it be a disaster?

In my case, I believed I had to be happier because I was so supremely miserable. I guess you could say I trusted that something better must be out there for me, if I let my heart lead me.

That sounds pretty Hallmark, I know. But if you think about it, your “heart” is really just your body, because your body knows if what you are doing feels right or good or makes you happy, and it will tell you. And mine was yelling at me to make a change.

I was so sick with Meniere’s disease. And then I sat with my brother while he died. And I knew in my bones that if I didn’t save myself, I would get sicker and sicker. And really, if you are crying all the time and can’t control the anger inside you, that is your body talking to you as well.

Listen to your body. Listen to your heart. What is it you yearn for? And can you trust that it will lead you somewhere worth going?

Until next time,

Anne

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