It’s deep and seemingly insatiable in the way it always returns. One could call it pain but its feeling is not so palpable. In my teens it was known to me as an ache. In some ways this name was suitable. Not all days are as bad as others. During the former, it’s bearable, but the latter days grow with such intensity that it feels it may last forever. But it was the incessant nag of it that kept me in the solitude of my mind enough to come to understand it.
When it comes to difficulties of the mind, I’ve learned that knowing their intricacies is usually the only route to their resolve. This perpetual ache I had within me felt like a hollow just behind the skin of my chest. In contradiction, it felt like it filled me with a dark mist that only helped bring awareness to the space it took. I was internally drowning and externally standing motionless with an emotionless face.
Coming to know this feeling deeply, as well as granting myself the denial of the belief that I was experiencing something unique—since it’s quite ludicrous and honestly arrogant to think I am alone in this feeling, or any feeling at that—has rid me of it almost completely.
The feelings of anguish is only made larger in thinking one is alone in it. But considering all of us on Earth, and experiences plenty worse than my own, I relinquished the thought that even though this sensation is intensely shadowed and seemingly detrimental, it’s also impossible that I’ve made it up on my own. And with that realization, there was a part of this ache that dwindled. The part that feasted on what I perceived as something that made me unique, different, textured, tortured even.
Maybe it’s the magic of the late 20’s that helped me step outside of my own “tortured” mind and soul. Maybe it was my third watch of Girls and witnessing each characters’ self obsession and the demise it brought to them.
So in viewing this ache not from a solely personal perspective, and instead a communal experience-of-humanity one, I couldn’t call it ache anymore. No, it was a craving. And how on-the-nose is it that the craving was one to be held. Oh how surprising that the self-indulgent teen-turned-20-something didn’t realize all she needed was a hug. Don’t worry, with my relatively fresh and fully formed pre-frontal cortex, the irony is not lost on me.
So the craving to be held seemed more manageable. At least I knew the feeling by its actual name. But the feeling sustained in me nonetheless. It took a few more years getting to know her before she let me go at last.
Countless hugs, hand holding, a few kisses, and many verbal affirmations (that I’m still so grateful for) did not satiate this feeling. What did came on quite suddenly, though I’m sure after more reflection in the coming years it will reveal itself not to be sudden at all.
In this sudden* moment, a realization came to me during meditation (ahh yes, one of many beautiful habits I picked up over time while trying to understand the pangs of young adulthood). But the realization was quite simple, but profound in its affect. All this time I was seeking to satiate my craving to be held with an external value. Another person, an act, something tactile and other.
But as I lay in savasana, in a quiet neighborhood in Northern India, I felt every particle of my body. Its energy relenting to the Earth but its physical form remaining intact. I am held already. To exist in the physical is to be held. Then, existence itself felt like a hug.
I return to this each time that dull craving creeps in. Sure, a hug from a loved one is always welcome, but the hug I need is just waiting for me to become aware of it. For each moment my body is hugging me by holding me together.
xo,
A. Song