Over the last couple of days, I was in the company of self-identified yearners. There’s something liberating about giving this delicious torment a name, a state of being.
“We are yearners,” I said, looking at my friend’s Spotify wrapped where the data didn’t lie: Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers topped his listening history. I echoed the phrase to my friend, when she told me that she was mad at herself for “being this way.” It was also my shrug-shoulders-what-can-I-say response, when another friend yelled at me for choosing to suffer. It’s stupid, it doesn’t make sense, and it’s absolutely against my self-interest, but being a yearner, I suspect, might be hardwired into my DNA.
To a degree, it’s quite enjoyable to lean into sentimentality about some [thing, place, one] that you find yourself swimming in it. You once had a connection that made you feel like you finally belonged - and for a time, existing didn’t feel so lonely. But you also probably didn’t realize it then, because you didn’t expect your world to keel so much once it disappeared. Remembering it is as close as you’ll ever get to it. And so yearning is as addictive as sour candy.
I get the flak on yearning, and on us self-indulgent yearners. It is annoying to see your friend, who is brilliant, beautiful, and kind, keep pining after a guy who really said “no thanks,” instead of evolving into bad bitch 2.0. But let me defend yearners for a bit. The Australian rock artist Nick Cave called yearning the “universal human condition” on an episode of the On Being podcast. When I asked my dad why he only listens to Korean ballads about heartbreak even though he’s never experienced a breakup, he said, “Koreans are a sad people.” Nick Cave, my dad, and I - who couldn’t be more different from one other - all agree on one thing: yearning is beautiful and essential. At its best, it unleashes creativity, builds your instinct on what’s important to you, and motivates you to try a little harder to treasure what you have. Even if it doesn’t do any of these things, it at least reminds you (with severely rose-colored glasses) of a time when you were happy.
I’m turning 28 soon. I know myself well enough by now to know that yearning is my default state. At the same time, I feel, more than ever, an urgency to grow into who I’m supposed to be. I don’t want to stunt my own growth with a type of yearning that thinks of me and that some [one, place, thing] I miss as static entities, frozen in time. As I keep up my ✨masochistic✨ tendencies, I want to think about:
what it is that I miss so much about that some [one, place, thing];
how I and my life have changed since then, both because of losing that some [one, place, thing] and everything else that has happened — and if I am fundamentally different, whether remembering fondly might not be more appropriate than yearning now;
whether I’m balancing out the yearning with the hope that I will be able to feel that sense of belonging again, because I will;
The last panel of the Lorimer subway stop mosaic said it best: we will keep finding things to yearn for.
Omg this is my local stop and I pass this mural every day 🥹 it always resonates so much