I work in a restaurant.
A restaurant where alcohol may as well be the grease keeping the entire beastly machine from collapsing in on itself. By that I mean that it’s no surprise to be randomly handed beers, shots, extra drinks, or any other sort of brain-draining inebriator while on the job.
I came home pretty buzzed tonight.
I live with a few coworkers and no home was home to offer me another drink as I walked through the door so as to save me from actually thinking about if I even wanted it or not.
I walked into my empty room and felt a feeling.
A feeling of lack.
An awareness of a space in my chest that remained empty and unfilled.
There was no way I could just continue my night like this. How on Earth could I get through the night without having some kind of objective, substance, or person to guide me through it?
I stood there not wanting to feel the emptiness surrounding me but also knowing that that same solitude has the potential to be my most insightful mentor, were to let it do its thing.
I gave into my lesser instincts and walked to the store. There, I bought a small bottle of whiskey. I fully expected myself to open it as soon as I left the store and have a swig or two as I walked back home to my vacant space, but instead, once I bought the little bottle and walked through the doors, something strange happened. It’s a feeling I’ve felt before, but perhaps not in the same context. After I bought the bottle, I immediately stopped caring about it.
Before I had put myself through the rigorous hoop-jumping of trying to justify buying a bottle of Irish poison in the first place, I had been more or less hypnotized by the idea of needing something to satiate my psychological hunger pangs. How could I just sit there and distract myself with something else? What else was there to do? Something productive? Something interesting? Fun, even? No, this obviously called for some sort of branded elixir that would do all of the distracting for me, so questing for potions I went.
In the same way I’ve chased ideas, chased jobs, chased women, I was transfixed by the notion that once I had the thing my mind was set on, I could finally feel content with who I was, where I was, and what I was doing. And once I was presented with the grail I so desperately sought, the spell had been broken, and my chest was once again left with a void of relief where the weight of an idea had once resided.
I realized something in the moment I left the store with bottle in hand — I didn’t actually want the bottle. Or rather, I didn’t necessarily want what was inside of it to be inside of me. I didn’t actually want to be more drunk than I already was, what I really wanted was the comfort of knowing that the option was there.
Let me repeat that.
I never actually want the experience of what I seek, I only want it to be an option should I decide to change my mind.
The knowledge alone that I had it if I wanted it was already satisfying the hunger that I had just previously felt so strongly.
This isn’t about just alcohol either, but that’s the most salient example because most people can relate to the feeling of wanting a drink. But even those who aren’t prone to the intoxicating allure of dancing on the edge of addiction can understand what I mean.
The same goes for relationships.
I know I’ve had the exact same feeling when it comes to feeling entranced by a love interest. The infatuation we feel when first getting to know someone is palpable. We become obsessed with how much we think we love this person. We think it so strongly that we convince ourselves that we know we are in love. It isn’t just a flood of hormones making us feel this way, we say, as we start deciding on what color to paint the living room of the house we’re going to live in once we marry this magical person. No, this is the real deal.
Hey, for all I know, that’s exactly how it worked out with your now significant other, but that doesn’t mean that the majority of us out here aren’t romanticizing our way into unnecessary heartache. Because what so often happens once we actually get the person we think we want to actually want us back? Do the fireworks start exploding in a display easily seen from space? Or do you start to realize that it wasn’t actually them that you cared about, but instead the idea of them? Of course, I’m not saying this is always the case, but I’ve experienced it enough to know that if it’s happened to me it’s happened to you, or at least someone you know.
See, it’s not that I, or anyone else that’s gone through this in dating, was out to exploit anyone’s interest. But just like the whiskey I was so obsessed over acquiring, love can lead us to action in the very same way. It was never about the whiskey, just like it was never about the love, it was about knowing it was an option. It was about the feeling of comfort in the knowledge that that door was no longer locked but was now open to you should you choose to walk through it.
I have, regrettably, seen past partners like this. Once I knew that I had them, that they loved me, that I no longer had to vie for their affection or woo them into their own state of romantic enchantment… I lost interest. I was no longer on the path towards the treasure, and now that I held it in my hand I realized that it was never about the treasure in the first place, it was about my inability to articulate what I felt I was truly lacking. It was about “having acquired” their love, only to set it aside as just another option were I ever want to use them as some kind of affection dispenser. I treated winning them over like, well, something I won. Something I “achieved.” And now it was mine to use when and how I pleased in the same way I bought that bottle and just kept it in my room.
This may sound more like a commentary on my own past shortcomings as a romantic partner, and to an extent, sure, it kind of is, because boy was I self-centered back then. And obviously I never thought about any of this while it was going on, I only saw my actions clearly for what they were once I got a bit older and needed to trade in my rose-colored glasses for a fresh pair of Hindsights. Still, I only use my deluded past self as an example to showcase just how common and insidious these feelings can be. Replace love interest with “new car” or “latest gadget” or “job promotion” or anything outside of ourselves that we use as our justification to project our own sense of lacking. Any and all of the above can be prime examples of drivers of action that only serve to guide our behavior towards mere material acquisition, and rarely, if ever, provide us with inner expansion or understanding of what our souls are starving for.
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As humans, we feel good when we’re on the hunt. We feel a sense of purpose when we’re moving towards something. We even tout the maxim “it’s about the journey, not the destination.” Yet, even knowing that our perceived destination will not bestow upon us the enlightenment we seek, we all still act as if it will. We convince ourselves that once we have “it” that all of our turmoil will settle like a shaken snow globe into a solid ground layer upon which we can start to build our “real” life.
It’s in our DNA to constantly be on the look out for the next important thing. We used to have to hunt our food to survive, remember that? I doubt it, but I’m sure you’ve seen a history book that had a picture of a guy holding a spear once or twice. That used to be us in some far of desert of the past, and once we had successfully hunted, killed, and brought back food for our tribe, there was no time to sit around soaking in the feeling of being “successful.” No, we had to start once again thinking about our next meal, where it would come from, and how we would get it.
It’s natural that, thousands of years later, we still have the bug in our brain that tells us to move. To get out there and find something. To seek at all costs because remaining stationary means certain death. I don’t think this feeling is going away any time soon, but instead of fighting it off with the feeble instrument of clever monkey willpower, we can learn to balance our need to constant hunt with the feeling of simply having enough.
This primal precursor to getting off our ass and into the world is great for plenty of things. It helps us get our blood pumping, it gives us a reason to make something of ourselves, it helps us grow and evolve as individuals because with each new level of evolution, we settle into a new status quo and begin to feel that hunger for more once again. It’s this feeling that built civilization as we know it and it’s this feeling that will populate the cosmos if we ever get our collective heads out of our asses, out of the sand, out of media feeds, and into the plethora of perspective-expanding knowledge that sits at our modern fingertips.
It’s also this feeling that blinds us to what we truly want deep down. Beyond the constant hunting for sustenance or substance, material gain or a love-soaked brain, the need to be right or the acceptance of strangers, there’s still something behind it all that simply wants to feel okay. To feel safe, loved, and appreciated. The part of us that we’re scared to sit with for too long because our lack of these feelings becomes that much more noticeable once we stop moving.
You surround yourself with material possessions in an attempt to feel safe within the walls of your own achievements.
You continually seek to claim the affection of a parade of partners like a hopelessly romantic vampire feeding on the love of the innocent. Filling up on the acceptance of others because you never learned to generate an acceptance of yourself.
Or maybe you’re walking to the store to buy a bottle of whiskey that you’ve convinced yourself you need when all you really wanted was the comfort that the option provided.
The thing to take away from this is simply that you rarely ever want what you think you want.
In another life, when I was a street-creepin’ space-chaser, or “miserable heroin addict” if you want to be boring about it, I learned this lesson the hard way. I used to go through terrible withdrawals and my friends and I would debate for hours about whether or not we should, ya know, make the call. More often than not, we would. And the exact same thing happened then as happens now.
Once we had decided that we would venture into those vice-gripped streets, we would already start feeling better. The anticipation we felt during our journey was already altering the chemicals in our brains. So much so that by the time we got home with our prize and indulged ourselves in that stinky brown powder, it honestly left us disappointed. We felt regret, like we wasted our time and money, and within a few hours we felt exactly how we had before. That’s obviously an extreme example of all of this, as any sort of hard substance abuse is a hyper-exaggeration of the feeling of lack, but it still rings true.
When we can take a long moment to truly look inward and see what is actually driving us towards what we think we want, we start to surprise ourselves in ways we hadn’t expected. We start seeing that once you peel away the layers of immediate desire, or fantasy futures, or inflated love and praise, we simply want to be accepted for ourselves, with no strings attached.
Be conscious of yourself the next time you’re seeking something with such blind drive. Try to watch how you feel before and after you get the thing you want.
Ask yourself, do I feel better now?
Is the feeling still there? How long until it comes back? Why isn’t the feeling staying gone?
If you notice that once you finally have the thing you crave, you stop caring about it completely, you probably never wanted it in the first place. If that’s the case, ask yourself, what is the vacant space inside me that I thought this would fill? Where is it and want does it truly need?
Asking yourself these kinds of questions will lead you down some uncomfortable paths. But it’s only through that discomfort that you can find the real treasure you seek. It’s only by hacking away through the synaptic overgrowth sprouting out of the constant stimulation of modern society that we can find the spirit inside us that wants us to calm down, to relax, to enjoy ourselves and prosper within the confidence of our truest self.
This is where the real hunt begins, and this is where you’ll finally find what you’re truly starving for.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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