a yearner's scrapbook

When I was 13 I wrote a list of all the qualities I wanted in my future partner. On my bucket list I wrote that I aim to

“marry a Protestant, hygienic, nonsmoking, healthy, celibate, sensitive, somewhat good-looking, nondrinking, physically capable, children-loving kind man who is taller than me even when I wear heels, with nice parents and good genes. And my parents have to like him. Preferably able to look after kids.”

“architect or kindergarten teacher”

One notable quality I didn’t get was “nondrinking,” but I was 13 and thought teetotaling and being straight edge was cool and that actually if you thought drinking was cool that made you LAME because…I guess D.A.R.E. worked on me. I also did a school project on the temperance movement and thought it was badass of Carrie Nation to take her hatchet and bust up saloons and get arrested. “Architect or kindergarten teacher” were aspirational jobs that suggested a precision and creativity oriented brain, or a nonthreatening and nurturing nature that still had an authoritative presence. And if we could meet all our goals on a single income, my husband could end up homeschooling our children and therefore I may have married a kindergarten teacher (with a history in software engineering and product management).

I like this list now, which means I liked something about myself at 13. In some fundamental way, I had my priorities straight. I also was kind of scared of getting into some kind of A Walk to Remember type of situation where the love of my life is terminally ill at a young age and assumed God might operate with a genie-like logic where I’d suffer for not accounting for all the loopholes.

I got everything I wanted, and I have her to thank for it.

Becoming a “normal distance” couple for the first time in nearly 6 years (to the day) and getting married took basically all our ingenuity and resources. I hope I never take it for granted. I had to endure quite painful amounts of yearning during this relationship, but when I look at the suffering I experienced before our relationship became romantic and how unloved and unlovable I felt, it was worth it.

The following is documentation of the yearning I experienced. Here is my proof that “before you came into my life I missed you so bad.”

A lot of it is kind of a bummer. But don’t worry, there is a happy ending.

A February 2019 email to myself. The cause of my anguish at the time? An ill-advised crush that thankfully didn’t work out. Common L.

“i feel so defeated and hopeless and exhausted by my own feelings

my own feelings which have nothing to do with the person i have a crush on, but have everything to do with what i’m attributing to a lack of willpower on my part and an inability to modulate my emotions the way i should be able to

i feel defective,

and i want to believe that i’m not and that there is the potential for me to grow…

i’m not incapable of being healthy. i pathologize my own feelings because i hate that i want things so badly. i feel like i’ve dug myself into this hole of performatively being an idiot when in actuality, like deep down, there is a person who is actually smart and maybe happy?

this is why i kept saying i dont have feelings/i dont want to have feelings/i wont have feelings

once i let them turn on, they just keep oozing inconveniently and all over the place. they just keep growing and i have no place to put them

when kosinski wrote “i’m sure there are aspects of my personality buried within me that will surface as soon as i know i am completely loved.”

Another email to myself from February 2019, written “to” the crush that became nothing, that knowing myself, I probably texted that person an abridged version of.

You have me yearning, which is an extremely unfair and unchill position to put me in

Not that i wasnt also yearning before

But yearning with also a small amount of raw material demonstrating potential

Real fuckin dangerous stuff

Every horrifying and monstrous feelings-inflected thought i’ve had, i’ve put aside and tried to remain calm and just write it down or do something else with it, telling myself that i can just tell him when i see him

And if i really want to, maybe MAYBE send him the sparknotes unintimidating version of it, since it gets long and unwieldy so easily that no one can ever tell what the important parts are in a long stream of consciousness block of text

I’m so mad, that my feelings act without my consent and that i have to send this over text because i feel like the biggest creep and it is supposedly deeply demeaning and you’re never supposed to provide evidence that anything matters or that you care about the fate of anything, especially when nothing has started yet

And i hate that i have to entrust you with this information, even though the way for me to “win” is to just not care that you know

But i’d been wanting to keep my cards closer to my chest and have a more protracted reveal of my total idiocy and creepiness and by the time all this informatiom is out there, there will have been enough context for my personality for these things to seem reasonable in their own silly and benign way.

I usually overexplain and overshare because i’m scared that if someone doesnt know all the information about me upfront because i’m scared that otherwise liking me cant be “genuine,” like otherwise i’ve tricked them into taking on more than they can handle and i rly do crave to be understood more than i crave being liked, and i really like being liked

But when i was speaking with you, i didnt feel the need to freak out. I withheld some information but it felt like my choice to delay telling you for the sake of a more satisfying reveal in the future. Like you have to keep unlocking levels of closeness to access that information. A person has to be both prepared for it and qualified to handle it. I think when i am in a room with you and talking to you, i can calm down and trust in a more organic process of letting something grow.

But when you’re not there i’m just left yearning, and in a lot of ways women are taught to fear their appetites and so there’s some hunger feelings food imagery going on in my head

When you’re not there, i’m left yearning and when yearning happens for too long without some access to more raw material, it turns into me waking up in the middle of the night (which i never do bc i almost always sleep through the night) and writing myself an email to be adapted into a text to be adapted into a voice memo that i may send to you begrudgingly and feeling a lot of shame

It’s so much easier to manage my feelings if you know how i feel, and if there’s a box of dumbass feelings in my head, it makes me feel better for you to know that the dumbass box exists. Even if i dont tell you what’s inside right away. But i feel like i’m not supposed to tell you that the box even exists, but i mean, there were far worse things i could do

I want you to eventually know what’s inside the dumbass box bc honestly i think it’s really funny. No one’s going to appreciate it the way you do. Or maybe i’m overextending my limited understanding of you with that statement

But i get embarrassed by all the wrong things. even though it can be seen as me putting my heart at risk

And it’s thinking and doing the stupid things that keep me from being terrified even though this is all so low stakes

But anyway i said a lot and that’s only a small fraction, but a lot of the other stuff can wait and i can feel comfortable about waiting for a more satisfying payoff to the information reveal. And i’m embarrassed, bur i can just chalk everything up to youthfup indiscretion and also i didnt do anything wrong

But I’m going to guess that you do have a real, abiding belief in love that you’re passionate about. And if you try to distance yourself from that belief, if you try to act like that’s not you, if you try to let go of your idealism and accept your fate as just another human who will be chopped up into various good and bad traits and reduced to the sum of your values as seen through the eyes of these cold emotional accountants, you will only become a kind of malfunctioning, jittery mess who finds herself saying she’s tough and doesn’t need a boyfriend but then begs for scraps of love everywhere she goes. You’ll be jittery not because you’re weak and needy and pathetic. You’ll be that way because you’re disavowing something that matters to you. Love matters to you.

We get obsessed when we try to convince ourselves not to care about something that we truly, deeply care about. The more you punish yourself for caring about love, the more of a wreck you’ll be. You’ll come across as desperate. You’ll come across as neurotic and needy. And I don’t think that a belief in love should be equated with desperation or neuroticism or neediness the way it so often is in our culture. That’s one of the most challenging aspects of being a woman who loves love and believes in it: People treat your deeply felt embrace of human connection as some kind of virulent infection that they might catch. That couldn’t be less true. Your belief in love is a reflection of something pure and strong and hopeful inside of you.- From Heather Havrilesky’s Dear Polly

yet another February 2019 email to myself

“i want to love someone and to be loved in return because i want to surrender

and i want to relax and i want to help someone and be helped”

God help me—help me—to stop loving her if she doesn’t love me any more.

I musn’t hang on because I have loved her more than anyone in my life. I still have that victory of feeling—of really loving for the first time—even though it has ended in defeat.

It is an honorable defeat. I risked everything—I gave all that I had—for the first time. If I was naïve enough to imagine that it must work between us, because of the immensity and certainty of my feeling, it was an honorable naïveté and nothing to be ashamed of. It will be a long labor of recovery. I must give up my love, I must give up my dream—without building up a wall again that prevented me from feeling fully until I met C.

[In the margin:] I don’ t want to learn anything from the failure of this love.

(What I could learn is to become cynical or guarded or even more afraid of loving than I was before.) I don’t want to learn anything. I don’t want to draw any conclusions. Let me go on being naked. Let it hurt. But let me survive

—Susan Sontag, from As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“There’s something pure and infinite in you, that wants to come out of you, and can come out of no other person on the planet. That’s what you’ve got to share, and that’s as real and important as the fact that you’re alive. We were able, at a really young age, to somehow protect each other so we could feel that. The world at large, careerism, money, magazines, your parents, the people at the rock club in your town, other kids, nothing is going to give you that message, necessarily. In fact, most things are going to lead you away from it, sadly, because humanity is really confused at the moment. But you wouldn’t exist if the universe didn’t need you. And any time I encounter something beautiful that came out of a human somewhere, that’s them, that’s their own soul. That’s just pure, whatever its physicality is, if the person can play piano, if they can’t play piano, if they’re tone deaf, whatever it is, if it’s pure, it hits you like a sledgehammer. It fills up your own soul, it makes you want to cry, it makes you glad you’re alive, it lets you come out of you. And that’s what we need: we desperately need you.”

— Julian Koster

THE operative fallacy here is that we believe that unconditional love means not seeing anything negative about someone, when it really means pretty much the opposite: loving someone despite their infuriating flaws and essential absurdity. “Do I want to be loved in spite of?” Donald Barthelme writes in his story “Rebecca” about a woman with green skin. “Do you? Does anyone? But aren’t we all, to some degree?”

We don’t give other people credit for the same interior complexity we take for granted in ourselves, the same capacity for holding contradictory feelings in balance, for complexly alloyed affections, for bottomless generosity of heart and petty, capricious malice. We can’t believe that anyone could be unkind to us and still be genuinely fond of us, although we do it all the time.

Years ago a friend of mine had a dream about a strange invention; a staircase you could descend deep underground, in which you heard recordings of all the things anyone had ever said about you, both good and bad. The catch was, you had to pass through all the worst things people had said before you could get to the highest compliments at the very bottom. There is no way I would ever make it more than two and a half steps down such a staircase, but I understand its terrible logic: if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known. - Tim Kreider, from The Rosetta Stone of meme yearning

“all i rly want is for someone to hold my hand and for me to be able to rest my shoulder upon someone as we listen to boygenius's "me and my dog" for the first time together and i exhale deeply at the I NEVER SAID I'LL BE ALRIGHT part” - email to myself in March 2019

“yo i just want to like...........feel loved and stuff

feel stillness, some frisson,” - another email to myself in March 2019

Email to myself from February 2019, during which I describe things I wish my future partner would think about me.

because there will be other nights when i am not lucid enough to see what is good in me and what good i might want another to see in me

-i love how hard you’re trying to be a good person and to be a positive force in other people’s lives...and you are and you are.

-i love how helpful you are and you’ve offered help when I didn’t realize i needed it and you’ve given me help when i’ve needed it.

you know when i’m hurting and when i’m happy and you know when i’m lying and in need

-i understand how circumstances have sometimes made it difficult for you to cope and that you end up making poor decisions because of it

and i see how everything in you that is not joyful or life-giving or “helpful” is so intrinsically linked to everything about you that is good as well

-i love how loved i feel when i am in your presence and that you see my faults but also the good in me when i can’t see it myself

-i love how funny you are and how we are always laughing together

-you are so smart and insightful and make connections i never would have thought of. your brain is so powerful and i love hearing the things that go on in it

we’re different kinds of smart but the same kind of stupid

-i love most of the links and jokes and memes you send me. it makes me feel cared for.

you are radiant and sparkly and so much fun

One evening in November, after I had returned from my field trip to the Tibetan Buddhist Monastery, DH asked if I wanted to get dinner at a Korean taco place neither of us had ever been to. We each paid for ourselves and found a table. As we talked, I thought it was weird that he were looking at me as though he had a crush on me. He wasn’t really about that. In his desire to be my friend, and through his understanding of my inherent suspicion of men, he had laid some groundwork suggesting that he was not attracted to me and we would not make for a good couple. He assumed this would be the best way to prove the purity of his intentions. That was fine, especially because I was always hung up on someone else at the time, I wasn’t interested in him romantically, and I liked being his friend.

But he had told me months earlier that I wasn’t his type. So it was a little confusing when he seemed to gaze into my eyes under the fluorescent taco shop lighting. I didn’t think much of it. It was just a glitch. It’s not like he had a girlfriend to direct that kind of energy towards. I was a female-shaped target of whatever excess affection couldn’t be sublimated.

After we ate, he drove me home and walked me to my shared apartment. I let him inside so we could chat some more. In what felt like the middle of our conversation, he said “we should go out.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said. “You don’t even like me.”

“I like you.”

“No you don’t.”

I had assumed this was some kind of sad sack last ditch effort to curb his loneliness and to give me a solution to the fact that college was ending and I never even got a computer scientist to carry my books across the quad. I figured he just wanted to throw me a bone because I was so undateable. He was just trying to be nice, in a way that felt kind of condescending. And I wanted to stop him from making a decision or starting an experiment that he’d regret.

He actually did like me, completely without my consent, by the way! In retrospect, he was probably even in love with me, or very close to it.

My husband, the aforementioned DH, suggested that I once suffered from a “mental disorder” called “I’m-unloveable-itis.” I’m inclined to agree.

It took several essays’ worth of conversations and texts and prodding about “what do you like about me” to kind of believe the idea that he liked me. It took a concerted effort on his end to convince me that he didn’t think I was an uggo. It also took me about 3 weeks to figure out that I liked him back. Once I felt safe in that, I basically decided I was going to love him. It wasn’t very hard at all. There was no stopping this.

I could believe that he really loved me because he knew me. I felt safe knowing that he made an “informed decision.”

One of the perks of getting into a romantic relationship with an existing friend is that they basically have the answer key to how you want to be loved.

In their own ways, Tim Keller and Taylor Swift both suggest that we “ruin the friendship.” Tim Keller posited that while straight and single men and women can definitely be platonic friends, trouble emerges specifically when you are “best friends” and are each other’s #1s. More often than not, one of you is in love, even if neither of you are aware of it. This is a situation that will inevitably end in heartbreak (if love is not reciprocated) or marriage. You may think you are safe in a platonic “we’re just friends” state, but the deeper you invest in someone, the richer the conditions become for falling in love. And if one of you doesn’t feel the same way, that’s going to actually end the friendship, whereas succumbing to the natural affinity and compatibility might actually lead you to an even stronger friendship, supported by romance.

For the record, I hate yearning. I don’t romanticize the suffering of yearning. I spent 2 years yearning for love, got it, and then spent 6 years yearning for a shared life. I wouldn’t call yearning a “waste of time” and I would hate to make anyone feel ashamed of their yearning. It hurts enough to not get what you want, and it hurts to try to stop wanting it, too.

Yearning has consequences, and it changed parts of me for the worse. Prolonged yearning exacerbated my control issues and it contributed to my unhealthy relationship with the need to be “agentic.”

Nobody loves the externalizer

·

October 9, 2025

You can read more about why the "internal locus of control" is overrated here, and how this obsession with "agency" can hurt the internalizing personality type.

The thing that I wanted most in life was out of reach for a long time, for the majority of my adult life.

I still haven’t “forgiven” myself for taking so long to have solved my problem and end my yearning. When I saw others in my peer group solve the same long-distance problem I had, it seemed they got out of it by being high achievers. She gets into a top tier MBA program. Simultaneously, he gets a job in the same area that is equal or greater in perceived prestige or pay or seniority compared to his last job. Basically, it looked like they both upgraded their lives as they continued their life together in a new location. They were desired by schools and employers that allowed them the optionality of living near their loved one. So like the striver I am, my conclusion was that the only way I could solve my problem was to “be better,” to have a better resume, to be a better candidate in the labor market. And if I were to compare myself to my peers, I failed. I took 6 years to solve what might have taken them 9 months.

If what I wanted was just to be near my partner, one of us could have quit our jobs and moved in together, sacrificing both financial stability and alienating our families, who all regard cohabitation before marriage as haram. Or we could have eloped so as to avoid “premarital cohabitation,” but that would be getting married for financial convenience and to close a loophole. We wanted to have a wedding that honored us and involved our friends and families. What I wanted was for us to both have jobs that were worth our time and compensated us fairly AND to live in a part of the country where we could enjoy the community and culture AND do this in a “proper” way so as not to make our relationship illegitimate in the eyes of our families. So marriage and moving was the way we achieved it. We worked to make ourselves valuable and trusted in the workforce, with both of us keeping our jobs and DH being allowed to work remotely. He took a leap of faith in getting engaged. We planned a wedding in over a year, and it was only 6 months before we got married that we could even conceive of cobbling together a life for ourselves.

So we’re married, and it’s truly a dream come true. But I also spent those years lashing myself for my “failure,” and I want to recover from the welts. Yearning taught me that I would never find rest or relief. In the back of my mind, there was always a serious problem that I was failing to address. How could I even claim that I was “working hard” to solve this when I wasn’t left an empty husk at the end of each day, if I wasn’t devoting at least 2 hours a day to applying to jobs that would leave me in a better position to be with my partner?

I’m scared to say that this was just a hard problem for us to fix because there is a lot I could have done better. I feel like I’m not entitled to say that I even did anything right. I don’t really know where the criticism comes from, but it’s an instinct I’ve only started to fight off in the past 7 years. I don’t want to be ashamed anymore. What if I really did try my best and my situation was harder than other people’s? What if I really did conduct myself in the 99th percentile of “best conduct given the circumstances” and I faced something objectively challenging, that even greater minds would have equal trouble solving? There is something highly arrogant about this too, that my standards are so high.

the logic out of negative self talk

·

September 15, 2024

Negative self talk is bad for us because it reinforces one’s negative opinions about the self. The repetition cements it into your mind, making it harder to break over time. Of course, you think that’s what you deserve.

To pity myself is how I begin to heal. I want to try to acknowledge the idea that I have “come so far” and “did a good job” and “did the best I could under the circumstances.” It’s quite hard, given the way the Jane-GPT been programmed and trained. Maybe the rest will be resolved by rewarding myself and enjoying the life I can finally share with my husband.

Maybe. Sometimes it depends on whether they’re able to actually accept the love they have been longing for. Other times, it depends on their making strategic and lucky decisions to make their lives better able to accommodate love, like becoming valuable at the workplace over the past 5 years and convincing them to let you work remotely from a state with weird laws so you can live where your wife is. Yearners can become winners when they chase after what they want.

I’m not so optimistic about the “I don’t chase; I attract” crowd. Imagine telling your partner that.

To me, that’s saying “I actually only chose you out of a list of people who were already interested in me because I’m too scared of rejection to chase what I actually want so you’re good enough, I guess.”

And people who “love the chase” are even more screwed. They’re straight up saying, “I never want to be known or loved. The moment someone shows me love, I lose interest.”

Regardless of who initiates the relationship, this all only works out if you choose each other and chase each other constantly, meeting them where they’re at. “I don’t chase; I attract” is a protectionist attitude that is antithetical to finding fulfillment. It works if you’re—let’s say—a senior employee who is well-connected in the industry and never applies to a job because they are always head-hunted. Not so much for love.

So a yearner has some advantage here. They know what it’s like to be a “man with a heart that offends with its lonely and greedy demands.” And they will love you “more than the world can contain in its lonely and ramshackle head.” They are an endless pit of want, and they know that only the most delicious, scrumptious morsels will satisfy them. Sure, yearners can settle, but they remain hungry and itchy when they do. The difference here is “I don’t chase; I attract” always means settling. To not chase is to not want. To not chase is not experience desire.

There is a degree to which you must become the fool. You gotta lace up each other’s clown shoes and promise that you will not squirt the flower on the lapel at each other, that you’d never dare do such a thing.

You need guts to be in love and look ridiculous, but you’ll find that it’s almost instructional. Being the first one is hard, but you’re establishing that it is safe to be this ridiculous. When they join you, you transform from a lone nut into a lover. In becoming a unit, you become living proof that the mortifying ordeal of being known is well worth the rewards of being loved, that with the right person, it’s not so mortifying at all. It’s actually the greatest relief one could find.

Moving in with my husband has finally liberated me from yearning. I am a big believer in the idea that commitment is freedom. Commitment provided me with the baseline of safety that allows me to pursue everything I want and become the person I want to be. By having unconditional love and support, I’m already so much closer to getting there than if I were completely on my own.

Romantic love is not the only place you get “commitment.” CS Lewis basically says lovers never get anything done because they’re too busy looking into each other’s eyes. It is committed friends who show each other great tenderness, who walk side by side into the same horizon, who support you and relieve your burdens. And you do the same because you know how hard it is, walking parallel on the same path. You care about the same truth and you’re interested in creating the same kind of world. So after getting married, I’m excited to continue this project of living, with a renewed sense of purpose and knowledge that I’m not alone.

“The mention of college gave a new direction to Gilbert’s thoughts, and they talked for a time of their plans and wishes . . . gravely, earnestly, hopefully, as youth loves to talk, while the future is yet an untrodden path full of wonderful possibilities.

Gilbert had finally made up his mind that he was going to be a doctor.

‘It’s a splendid profession,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘A fellow has to fight something all through life . . . didn’t somebody once define man as a fighting animal? . . . and I want to fight disease and pain and ignorance . . . which are all members one of another. I want to do my share of honest, real work in the world, Anne . . . add a little to the sum of human knowledge that all the good men have been accumulating since it began. The folks who lived before me have done so much for me that I want to show my gratitude by doing something for the folks who will live after me. It seems to me that is the only way a fellow can get square with his obligations to the race.’

‘I’d like to add some beauty to life,’ said Anne dreamily. ‘I don’t exactly want to make people know more . . . though I know that is the noblest ambition . . . but I’d love to make them have a pleasanter time because of me . . . to have some little joy or happy thought that would never have existed if I hadn’t been born.’

‘I think you’re fulfilling that ambition every day,’ said Gilbert admiringly.” - from Anne of the Island by LM Montgomery