To yearn for something is to live in hope that one day, someday, something will come to you. Someone will come to a realisation that you are all they ever needed. Something will finally happen to you, that you’ve been waiting for your whole life. Something will just fall into your lap with little to no prompting. Yearning therefore is inherently passive. And being passive is something that I am eliminating from my life.
Passively, of course. I have all these grand plans to finally make something of myself, to finally have this be the year of me. And yet it is now three weeks into the new year and I don’t really have a lot to show for it. Sure, I’ve been on summer holidays so it’s been a lot of friend catch ups, familial guilting and staying at home catching up on TV shows because I’ve spent too much money on friend catch ups and familial guilting. But I always feel that there’s something more. I could be more productive, more physically active as well as mentally and figuratively. I could make firm plans for the rest of my year and work out the procedure for enacting those plans. I could go through my house room by room and clear out anything I’ve getting rid of on ebay to make some money to put towards my grand plans.
But instead I yearn. I dream, I hope, I wonder, I lie, I wait. I make promises to myself and others that if I’m being honest we’ve all heard before. I talk a good game but when it comes down to it, it’s (so far) been all talk. Talking has always been my best part of any relationship. I know the right things to say, I know what he wants to hear, I know what kind of messages he will want to save for later and I know what will lead him down paths I want him to go. I’m all talk, and I’m good at it. He knows it though, they all do eventually. And then I’m back to the yearning and promises and pretty words that I know so well.
Yearning is passive. And yet I’m yearning to not be so. Passively trying to will myself into the motivation and determination that I know is there. That’s the funny thing. I’ve been told before that my confidence, my persistence and perseverance are some of my most admirable qualities. And yet they are qualities that lie dormant most of the time, emerging only when someone is telling me that I don’t have them, and even then they come out in spurts. They used to just be there. I used to just do things and make things happen for myself and for the people in my life. Actively seeking out the thrills and challenges and telling myself “what the hell, let’s barrel through” in the face of any and every obstacle. I love that part of me.
That part of me is still there though, coming out mostly to tell someone to fuck off and not tell me what I can’t do. But again, there’s the talk. A lot of big words and harsh truths without the action to back it up. Consistently. I have all the confidence in the world in what I say but sometimes it’s only a whisper in most of the things I do.
So instead I consistently yearn for that confidence and certainty to stay. All that talk has to lead somewhere, right? If I say it to myself often enough eventually (there’s that passivity again) it’ll come true.
They don’t call me Disney for nothing.