Desire

On how to lean into the longing

‘We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though it is often the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.’ Rebecca Solnit

Last night I gently closed my bedroom door, took my laptop and notebook from my desk and sat on my bed. In the hallway outside, and upstairs where you can see the sea, I could hear my daughters talking and playing, and the cat was not curled on the chair next to my window so she must have been outside looking for mice. It was dark, which is how I like it. In recent years I’ve been drawn to darkness because it takes the edge off the glaring exposure of this wild life. When the sky is inky black I can reinvent myself - I can be anyone.

I was sitting in the glow of my bedside lamp and the glare of my screen because I wanted to join

Anna Wharton

for her workshop about DESIRE. Not just that type of desire, although I’m kind of intrigued by that too, but the longing and yearning it is possible to feel in all areas of life, and could perhaps be described as plain old frustration. Is it possible to reframe that stifling emotion as desire?

Anna reminded me of Rebecca Solnit’s quote -

‘blue is the colour of solitude and desire’

- from ‘A Field Guide To Getting Lost’, and I couldn't stop thinking about the wide blue space between solitude and desire, the huge distance between wanting and getting. Is it possible, I wondered, to ever be fully sated? And is it about the journey or the arrival?

I’ve also been thinking a lot about impatience recently, and I wonder if I can reframe that as desire too. Maybe I can romanticise my whole existence and remove the mundane completely. Like desire, romance is a word that is usually conflated with a relationship with another person, but I mean it more in the sense that it suits my tendency to idealise life.

Anna told me she believes that life is a series of compromises, that you can fall foul when you try to have everything. Alongside my idealistic nature, I am a product of the 1990s, when girls were told they could have it all. We all know how that turned out - we definitely couldn't have it all, but we had to do it all, even if the effort might break us. I feel like the 1990s still chase me down, and the desire to have it all still looms large in my mind, perhaps it even informs the longing I frequently feel for something bigger and freer.

Alongside harbouring an intense and sometimes exhausting desire to create, I’ve been writing recently about the importance of being our own greatest love affair. In You Are The Prize I took readers through a photo journey of my own personal love affair, and of course it is a story without an end because we are always shifting and growing. If we are our own biggest love affair (and I believe we have to be because losing yourself entirely under someone else’s gaze can never be a good thing), I wonder what this tells us about desire. If you are single, what you do with the longing? As someone who feels frequently trapped, I want to know how to make the longing work for me so that it is not an endless sense of frustration, but something productive and enjoyable.

So last night I closed my laptop, and after tucking four daughters into their beds I reached for my copy of ‘A Field Guide To Getting Lost’, and as I read it I contemplated desire in all its forms: emotional, sexual, romantic, professional, personal. Later I turned out my bedside lamp with a head full of ideas and went to sleep dreaming of lighting a candle and pouring my own thoughts about desire onto a page in the morning.

Now here I am and I have been writing for over an hour. The sky has faded from Solnit blue to reality grey, and I am feeling longing in the biggest way. I am about to wake the children who cannot go to school, make porridge, call the GP, shop for food, teach maths, wash clothes, worry about money, dream about who knows what, and while I am doing all of this my body is full of a yearning I don’t know how to tame.

When your life requires you to give a lot of yourself to others, and when your own needs are met less often than they should be, the concept of desire takes on a new edge. Desire can often feel like desperation, and everyone knows desperation isn’t a good look. I’d rather call it hunger, I am hungry for everything. Or call it ambition, which has historically been a bit of a dirty word for women - too grabby, too bold. I’m reluctant to acknowledge that riding the longing might equate to mindfulness, a state I struggle to achieve. Far better to enjoy it as a bubbling energy, a sense of possibility, a cauldron of potential.

I’m not done with writing about desire, this is just an initial glance inside my mind as I begin to unravel the concept of longing. I suppose it’s an extension of the ‘claustrophobia in the middle of nowhere’ I wrote about in Twelve Moons, an attempt to understand how to reveal myself beyond the caring. Without desire there is no longing, and without longing I am not sure I would have achieved half of the things I have. Creativity stems from disconnect and discomfort, from curiosity, from a desire to make sense of the world. Perhaps that is the way to frame it, as a catalyst for creativity.

What are your thoughts on desire? What do you do with your longing?