Many Have Lived (1939), Yves Tanguy
Dear Polly
I’m almost 30 and wow I am not feeling excited about the rest of my life. I know I don’t want children, I don’t desire a romantic relationship or partner and I’m not a particularly driven career-woman. Luckily I do have a stable job that is mainly remote which is rare these days. I have a nice place to live in an expensive East coast city and I feel no excitement or gratitude which makes me feel not right because I know many people would want this.
I spend most of my day reading the news at work between incoming requests that I take care of all on the computer. It feels empty. I’ve joined and left a few clubs. I’ve met a decent number of people who mostly didn’t stick around. I have this longing to belong because I’ve felt it so rarely in life. I wish for a direction to a place that I know I would belong.
While I’ve taken up yoga at the gym and am so grateful for it — really it is a small bright light — the gardening club, the little sports teams, the friendship apps, nothing else has gotten me where I’d hoped. Life still feels empty. I haven’t given up yet but man do I feel defeated pretty much most of the time. What do people like me try next? How do I find my place to belong and occasionally feel excited?
Signed,
Not Feeling Excited About Life
Dear NFEAL,
You’re very comfortable but you’re not being challenged enough. There’s no friction in your life. There are no awkward moments at the office to endure every morning. There are no confusingly intense friendships with roommates to navigate. Your life is smooth and simple and quiet and it’s making you depressed.
That feels absurd. You feel guilty. You feel ungrateful. You blame yourself for this terrible state you’re in. Don’t do that. Lots of people reading this understand completely. They also feel guilty and ungrateful and sad about the state of their lives at this moment. They are also confused about what they need to feel more excited and inspired and fully alive.
The key here is DESIRE. You can acknowledge that you have enough and you are enough and you can still make space for more passion and inspiration and connection in your life. Cultivating gratitude doesn’t mean snuffing out desire.
Real gratitude strengthens desire and passion.
You begin your letter by telling me what you don’t desire instead of telling me what you do desire. You say that you don’t want a romantic partner. You say that aren’t career-driven. You report that you work from home, presumably because you don’t want to deal with the hassles of an office job. You seem to live alone, possibly because you want to avoid the conflicts and inconveniences of roommates. You work on a computer all day and read the news online in between assignments, a daily routine that gives you the illusion of participation in real life without any of the chaos and joys and sensual experiences of moving through a real community inhabited by real people.
Your life is built on avoidance.
My guess is that you grew up in an environment that felt unpredictable and made you extremely anxious. As a result, the uncertainties and conflicts and challenges of life, the misunderstandings and bewilderment of relationships, the difficulties and disappointments of intimacy, all make you feel overwhelmed or even terrified.
You took control. You built a life that felt predictable and contained. But now it feels empty. You’re like an astronaut, venturing into outer space wearing a space suit and a glass screen over your face. You land on other planets but you don’t take off your space suit. Friendships don’t take root because there’s a glass shield in front of your eyes. No one can see you clearly. No one understands that underneath your suit, there is a passionate, sensitive, intense, vulnerable human with a huge heart who wants much more than she can stand.
It’s telling that the one thing you love is yoga. That’s the one place where you can get relaxed enough to surrender completely — in a room full of other people who are surrendering in sync. You crave surrender and real communion with others.
All of the things you don’t desire need to be reexamined. All of the safety and silence and smoothly functioning parts of your life need to reevaluated. I’m not suggesting that you desperately want a romantic partner or that you crave a hard-charging career. I’m suggesting that you don’t know what you truly want because you’ve built your entire life around avoiding DESIRE ITSELF.
It’s no coincidence that you used the words “I don’t desire” and not “I don’t want.” Your goal is to eliminate desire from your life. You grew up seeing desire as terrifying. You associate caring deeply with a total lack of control. Maybe you never had the experience of loving something or someone passionately without feeling like you were in extreme danger. Desire meant annihilation. Desire was your enemy.
I’m using dramatic words here that might feel stigmatizing to you, but trust me, I understand. It’s hard for people who don’t feel these battles under their skin to grasp how high the stakes are for those of us who try to construct a life that matches our notions of PEACE and SAFETY. So often, in our efforts to make life feel more calm and steady, we ignore our innate need for deep connection and big challenges worthy of our efforts. We are often very successful in our attempts to make life smoother and easier, but we fail to understand that the forces we fear the most are the ones that bring us to life and inspire us the most.
I think it’s very telling that your best moments of the day are spent stretching and then LYING DOWN ON THE FLOOR WITH YOUR EYES CLOSED while your yoga instructor reminds you of the radiant core of your body, which feels love for every living being. For the longest time, I had this fantasy that I could lie on a blanket in my yard with my closest friends and look up at the clouds with them and talk about our biggest dreams. The lying-down part was the MOST important part. The second most important part was not making small talk, not exchanging facts, but confessing our most imaginative and even delusional DESIRES to each other.
For years I’ve viewed the daily interactions and frictions and hassles of life as irritating obstacle courses that serve no purpose. All of that messiness just slows you down and prevents you from the good stuff, which is feeling calm and connected to the people you love the most.
But there’s a real cost to sweeping away all of those tiny conflicts and avoidable mistakes, missed connections and misunderstandings, awkward conversations and tentative clarifications. You need that stuff to remind you who you are and where you are. You understand yourself in relation to others. You distinguish your desires from a swirling storm of desires around you, and your passion grows from being in the midst of other forces and forms of passion — and yes, big egos and annoying personalities and difficult people.
Someone who says things like “I AM NOT AMBITIOUS” and “I DON’T CARE ABOUT STATUS” and “I DON’T WANT THAT MUCH” and “LOVE ISN’T MY THING” tends to be pointing a big red arrow at the things that they fear and envy and even care about the most.
Again, I’m not suggesting that you’re the exact opposite of who you think you are. I’m merely saying that you are determined to KNOW AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE about your truest desires at any cost — even at the cost of passion itself. Because passion, to you, isn’t just humiliating, it’s horrifying. You don’t want to be a PASSIONATE PERSON because people like that are scary and gross and out of control.
And yet, your moments of extreme peace and clarity come in the midst of SURRENDER. The surrender of yoga is inherently passionate. Allowing your body to take the lead is the definition of passion. Your favorite activity is all about desire, whether you know it or not.
You want to feel more.
It’s time to take off your space suit and feel the atmosphere of another planet, even when you’re afraid that you won’t be able to breathe there. It’s time to take some big risks and show your huge heart to other people in your life. It’s time to ask yourself what dream is big enough to feel worthy of your attention and focus.
These aren’t small things. I’m asking you to admit things that you’ve protected yourself from — to admit that you want much more than you can tolerate wanting. I’m asking you to look at what you distrust and dislike in others, what you fear and avoid the most, to see if there are threads of what you love hidden inside those things.
The stories that have protected you all your life are starting to choke the life out of you. It’s time to set them aside. But don’t start from a neurotic or fearful place where you try to think your way out of this puzzle. Instead, start from a state of surrender. Lie on the floor on your yoga mat and remind yourself, the way your yoga teacher does, that your body holds a higher wisdom that you need to listen to. Slow down your breathing and close your eyes and say to yourself,
You’re a survivor. Nothing you’ve built has been worthless. You needed safety and security to feel your way to this moment. You’ve set up a calm home and a steady routine that makes it possible for you to allow your desires and your passions to come alive again.
Your mind will say:
There is no desire or passion here.
Your body will say:
I feel nothing.
You are still protecting your heart and your body from the predatory world you fear. Don’t overthink it. Give your body love and acceptance. Proceed with your day. And when a desire comes up out of nowhere, write it down with a pen in a notebook. Record your desires, no matter how small they are. You probably already have three nice notebooks that you haven’t written a word in yet (or you scribbled a grocery list in the front of one and then considered it ruined). Make one of them your DESIRE NOTEBOOK.
If you don’t have a pen that you love, leave your apartment today and go to a stationery store. If you have to drive or take a train to the store, do that. Waste some time going to buy ONE nice pen to use with your desire notebook.
If anyone asks you what your notebook is, say “This is my DESIRE NOTEBOOK.” And then look them in the eyes and say nothing. Practice being illegible to others in real time without fear. Practice seeming strange without apology or explanation.
This is a way of standing up for your desires.
As your small desires accumulate in your notebook, you’re going to notice that you’re more irritated, more emotionally volatile, more anxious. Let yourself move through these states without judgment. This is passion returning to your body and your life.
Halfway through each work day, lie down on your yoga mat and repeat the exercise we did above. Say to yourself:
You’re a survivor. Everything you’ve built so far is worthy and beautiful. It’s a miracle to be here at all. What do you have to offer this world?
Your mind will say, I don’t know. Your body will say, I feel so grateful to be alive. Your body will say, I want to share this feeling somehow.
You’ll write some ideas down in your notebook. They’ll sound stupid to you the next day. They’ll sound scary and impossible. You’ll feel sad that you can never do the things you dream of.
And then you’ll question that new, defensive story, the way you’ve learned to question the stories you brought to me. You’ll learn to occupy a space of uncertainty and surrender the way you do in yoga. You’ll learn to associate calm surrender with desire and passion and excitement. You’ll learn to navigate the outside world without feeling besieged by fear and anxiety. You’ll learn to surrender to the world around you instead.
You’ll take off your space suit, and breathe deeply.
So much love is waiting for you on this wild and savage planet. So many impossible and brilliant hurdles are here for you to climb. There’s so much pain and so much joy ahead. Surrender to everything you don’t know yet. Surrender to what you never thought was possible for you. Surrender to how clueless you are, how small you are, on this crazy, colorful, harrowing new planet.
You will learn each morning that you’ve been dead wrong about everything, and you’ll continue to flounder and make mistakes and become confused and lose your way again and again. You will never find out all of the answers. You will never fix everything. Your life can never be perfect. Everything you’ve been waiting for is right here. Walk out to the sidewalk without knowing where you’re headed. Trust the wisdom inside your bones. Show your face to the world. This is where passion and desire and love come from. This is where your romantic, delicious life begins.
Polly
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That was an amazing response and just what I needed to read this morning. Dear LW, if you want a concrete action you can take while you are getting to know your desires, do something for something else, specifically bring a dog(s) into your life, not as a pet that will keep your world small, volunteer to walk dogs at the local shelter or raise puppy to become a service dog. These acts have meaning and that is important, because it forces you to work with all sorts of people towards a common goal (friction), but you have an animal in-between you as buffer and place to turn your attention to if it all gets to much.