“Keep your hopes low and you won’t be disappointed.”
“Expect disappointment and you won’t be disappointed.”
“I don’t want to get my hopes up, what if it doesn’t happen?”
I’ve heard these things a lot in my life. This adamant refusal to allow ourselves to hope. To want. To desire. There’s this very common idea that if you allow yourself to want something too much it will only lead to intense heartbreak if you don’t get it. It’s better to be lukewarm about it. It’s better to want it just enough to push yourself, but little enough that if it doesn’t come you won’t feel bad about it. You saw this coming. Our desires have become possible heartbreaks rather than glimmering possibilities. How did we turn something so beautifully human into a detriment to ourselves? Why don’t we want to want? Why are we scared or, even, ashamed to want?
Wanting is so beautiful. It’s a feeling beyond ourselves. It’s a feeling beyond choice. You, most often, don’t choose what you want. It comes to you. You just know. It’s so uncontrollable in some cases that sometimes you don’t even fully KNOW what you want.
Wanting has fueled our history. The desire to discover, the desire to create solutions, the desire to be heard. We make our progress through the pursuance of something more.
Wanting has been with us since birth. It’s grown with us and transformed. It’s branched out to parts of ourselves we never knew would appear.
We spend our whole lives wanting, but the moment we realize this, we try to stop it before it gets too big. We have to stop before we get ahead of ourselves. There is always some part of us that needs to hold on to ‘reality’.
I want you to know, it’s okay to want.
I know it can be scary. It can feel pointless and heartbreak can be inevitable, but you have to know you can’t force yourself to not want anymore. There’s always some part of you that will be waiting, giddy at the thought that what you’ve been waiting for is coming. Why try and force that part of yourself to stop glowing? Why ask it to shrink into itself? Knowing the heartbreak you could face in the future, why not live in the giddy excitement of hope? Know that wanting, hoping, wishing, desiring, all of the above are not naive or perpetually fruitless. They’re an ever present part of you. The beauty of humanity, the driving force behind our major discoveries and our everyday movements.
You will be disappointed at times. You will want things that you cannot or will not have. Or even, your want will work out, but not last forever. This doesn’t make your wanting mean nothing. You felt it, you learned from what it led you to. Not everything we want manifests its benefits and lessons in what we thought it would. We can’t be afraid of what we learn from getting our hopes up and watching them fall down.
So want, hope, WISH
Want deeply and feverishly. Want until your heart beats out of your chest and rings and your ears.
Have that stupid unrequited crush.
Hope with all your heart for that internship, for that job, for that promotion.
Wish for that opportunity that could change your life as hard as you can.
It’s what I plan to do.
“But what if you don’t get it?” Some will say, “What if you get your hopes up for nothing? What if you get hurt?”
Then I’ll get hurt!
I’ll get hurt! At least if I get hurt, I’ll know for a while I was hopeful. I wanted something. I was happy to want. I was joyful in my hope and my crazy, constructed fantasies. I’ll always have that nonetheless.
I hope that for you all too. That even if you get hurt, you never forget the giddy, unrelenting, heart beating, foot tapping, thoughts-racing, skin-tingling, reality shattering cacophony that wanting can sometimes be.
I leave you with the words of Emily Dickinson, who said all of this before I even got a chance to, and in fewer words too.
Hope is the thing with feathers (254)
Emily Dickinson – 1830-1886
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.