I'm so over yearning

On a slow and rainy Saturday afternoon, I nuzzled into a lover’s neck. “You’re so sappy,” they teased, my fingers trailing down their cheek. “I’m a loverboy,” I smiled, “I won’t deny who I am.”

Consistently, at times regrettably, yes, I am a lover of the sap. Call me a “my heart is so full” kinda bish, a proudly self-described corny shawty. Give me an open car window and a city view to gaze dreamily into. Give me a 384th rewatch of Pride and Prejudice (which version? kiera knightly babes, duh). I fear I am that friend that pulls up to the dinner party with a stack of We’re Not Really Strangers cards, hungrier for a deep, earnest convo than the prepared spread. I will in fact, take any opportunity to add a lil romance to my day. And lemme tell you, cringe? Babyyy, she hates to see me coming.

And yet, I’m so over yearning.

Culturally, we’re in the yearn of the yearn. I look around and see so many of us attempting to seek out what aliveness looked like before everything could be optimized, recorded, ranked, screenshot, monetized, posted, and watched. We’re more connected than ever, yet loneliness has become so dire it’s a public health crisis. All these advancements made to collapse distance, while making closeness feel ever more elusive. I was struck by Tyler the Creator, who after dropping his last album DON’T TAP THE GLASS, shared, “I asked some friends why they don’t dance in public and some said because of the fear of being filmed. I thought damn, a natural form of expression and a certain connection they have with music is now a ghost.” Ghost is accurate. Shit is haunting, living in a time where we’re so terrified of becoming mocked content, we contain our joy lest it be surveilled in its cringey, vulnerable trueness.

So we go looking for forms that return us to a slower, softer age. We watch Bridgeton in the millions, enraptured by times before situationships when just getting a glimpse of ankle had one crashing out across the Ton. We buy old camcorders, iPhone 4s, and nintendo ds’s to take pics because the grain feels more honest than the hyperrealness of an iphone lens. We want birdwatching and phoneless dance parties and letters that take weeks to arrive over instant emails in our inbox. Earnestness is everywhere, and the trend points to a longing for feelings that the past has come to symbolize: connection, sweetness, a more easeful, true life. Too elusive in this age fraught with disinformation, AI slop, and irony, we yearn for the gentler timelines modern life makes increasingly difficult to access.

A strange thing for me about having a bit of an audience online was that it made my loneliness feel even more…humiliating. I felt so visible to thousands of people, and still didn’t have anyone to invite to a movie on a Friday night. The shape of my life didn’t match the shape of my longing, and it curdled into a shame so looming, it kept me from hosting the types of gatherings that lit my desire awake.

Fear level one: If I hosted an event, I was scared nobody would come. Deeper fear level: if nobody came, something terrible about me would be exposed. People would see the gap between the life I seemed to have and the life I was living. They would find out that I knew fewer people than they thought, that the person writing about tenderness and friendship and gathering was struggling, badly, with loneliness. Hosting a public event ballooned in my mind into a public referendum on my lovability. If nobody came, what would that confirm? “That something is wrong with you,” my shame noted solemnly.

I remember watching my partner throw house parties and the bruises around my lonely would flare. Their apartment would flood with loved ones, people spilling over the couches with hands relaxed softly on shoulders, the backyard fireworking with cackles, my god, there would be too many speakers because so many saw the partiful psa that one was needed. I’d sip my ghia and feel the ache rock my heart. Their life had people in a way mine didn’t. It wasn’t jealousy, but a tenderness, sigh, a yearning. I could feel how badly I wanted that kind of community, and how far away from it I felt.

Years ago, I told one of my best friends Van about an idea I had for Bad Ball Club. A silly sports club for Black and brown queer and trans people who wanted to play badly, reclaim recess, touch grass, and pick up unserious kickball or soccer without the pressure to be impressive. I’m a sporty babe, and I grew up playing soccer. Never the official high school team, but the rec league where the vibe wasn’t as serious. As an adult, I missed the smell of a dewy grass field on a Saturday morning, of running around in the sun with friends, and I wanted it back. I could see the gathering so clearly. A park and missed goals and cheering anyway. Juice boxes and orange slices afterwards. Grown people remembering that play can be accessed at any age. So I got a designer. Got the logo. Looked up the NYC Parks and Recreation rules for reserving a field.

And then I didn’t do it.

I told myself nobody would come. That I didn’t know enough people. When Van asked about it over the years, I’d offer a new blockade: “I don’t have the right permit, I’m traveling this month, I’m just…really busy right now.” All covers for the heavier fear that it would be humiliating to invite people to a park, and not have enough show up to play. So the idea stayed where so many of my desires do: in the drafts, in the daydreams, vivid, beloved, untouched. I kept longing for the full life while feeling too sad and lonely to build any of the doors into it.

This is where yearning worries me: when it makes us feel close to what we want while untouched by the risk of actually stretching towards it. The yearning that remains in the liminal, a call unheeded, a desire lost to impossibility.

According to Cambridge Dictionary, yearning is: “a strong feeling of wishing for something, especially something that you cannot have.” There’s a reason we’ve got hundreds of poems, books and songs over centuries about unrequited love. The unattainable is culturally tangled with a forlorn, seductive romance. Oh to be kept from that which we desire most! But what if what we have dubbed impossible is actually asking for a messy, awkward, first attempt at reach?

Here lies the power to the yearning. It opens us to our desires, and our desire is a direction. Desire says, “Oh, this matters. Here is a path to its possibility. Follow me.” Yearning is a compass, pointing us towards what which expands our hearts. So we’re called to pick it up and walk on, however uncertain, to explore the map.

I recently posted an instagram story poll asking what people were yearning for. Four answers were available: a person, a place, a feeling, a version of self. A version of self won out by far, and in this I saw a shared connection. So many of us are yearning for a different way of being. A self with more ease. A self with people to invite over. A self with a slower timeline. A self living in a liberated world. So what do we do with this yearning?

Maybe, we begin by listening to it without making it an unreachable altar or an impossibility. Maybe we let it sit beside us. Breath. Place your hand somewhere on your body that could give to ease. Ask your yearning: What do you want to show me? What feeling have I been outsourcing to fantasy that I might be able to practice, however wonkily, in the life I already have? Can we show up for our desire by affirming its dignity? By saying, yes, you are here, I hear you, and yes, I will love you so damn much, you will walk outside my heart into being.

I cannot time machine back to my childhood soccer field. We cannot return to the age before phone screens lit up concerns, before Hinge and IG reels and read receipts and knowing wtf an algorithm is. But we can access the feeling. The desire for friendship, romance, community - it can come alive. We can start a club before knowing who’s gonna come. We can make parties where phones disappear for a while. We can be bad at the game before we play it. We can send our crush a text. We can go to the event alone. We can let the first attempt be a small, stumbling, courageous one.

A few weeks ago, I hosted the first Bad Ball Club kickball game. The yearning had to leave my body. It had to become a date on the calendar, a flyer posted up, a notes app list of rules to the game I’d anxiously googled the morning of cause I hadn’t played in years, a group of qtbipoc people pulling up with water bottles and a little nervousness in their pockets. The yearning had to become real, in all its imperfections. I had embraced that if nobody showed, at least I’d tried. If one person came, that’s all that’s needed for a good conversation and kicking a ball back and forth. About 20 people showed, most solo. We ran around and laughed and barely followed the rules. There were team names and bubble guns. I exchanged numbers with a few people, friend dates now planned. The realness, with all its weather, gave me more than the yearning ever could.

So, if I keep it real…I’m not totally done yearning. What can I say? I’m a lover boy, through and through. But these days I want my yearning to take me somewhere. Into the park. Into rooms I don’t know anybody in but might learn to love. Into the awkward beginning. Into the life that is ready for me, all open orchard, all brave chorus, arms wide and loving and all I got you, I got you, I got you.

A question I’m leaving myself with, and leaving it with you too:

What has your yearning been telling you?
What would it look like to build one small door for it to walk into the sun?

with many young leaves 🌿
Annika

If this essay stirred something in you, School of Softness is the place where I’m planting portals into the lives we keep imagining: creative practice, play, friendship, gathering, and softer ways of being together. The Summer Fieldguide workshop is dropping there soon!

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