The first word I chose to focus on in 2025 is deeper, and boy, did I get walloped with it weeks into the new year. It felt like unshed tears, a tightness in my throat, a pressure in my chest, and a tingling in my nose. Going deeper seemed to mean allowing my feelings their full range, and at the beginning this looked like grief and sadness.
As time went on, I thought of this process as The Long Yearn. I felt stirred up, hyper-aware of people, things, and experiences that I had yearned for since childhood and early adulthood. I missed my Granny, who died in 2008, with a keen sense of loss. I longed for the career I wanted to have in the film industry. I felt the absence of my own mother and siblings, who are alive but emotionally distant from me.
This process felt like sandpaper on raw skin. I felt up close in my own life and feelings, while also standing apart from me to notice what I missed and what was lost or too far away to grasp. The overall experience was one of grief—I saw myself standing on the edge of what I longed for but couldn’t reach.
More than once in the last six weeks I’ve wished I’d chosen another word besides deeper. When I picked it, I was thinking of it as an intellectual exercise. But our human emotions don’t function like that. What I was initially looking for was a way to deepen my work. To stay away from the surface when I wrote, to stop playing it safe and dive below into the churning mess below day-to-day life.
What I didn’t realise was what that process would cost me. It’s hard down in the depths of our being and our consciousness. That’s where the old stuff from our childhood is buried. That’s where the pain and the loss and the longing and the trapped love with no one to give it to lives. And it’s not intellectual. It’s the subconscious, which means our soul needs to feel it.
The Long Yearn is how I’m describing this murky expanse that I cannot reach with my mind. This is a feeling place. It’s dark, like the sky at midnight, with a bit of hazy purple around the edges. It’s a graveyard for lost hopes and dreams. It’s where the relationships that ended are stored. And all of these areas are swamped with pain.
I’m learning how to feel it and not crumble. I know it’s leading me somewhere. Taking me by the hand and tugging on my spirit. The Long Yearn is unveiling me to myself. I feel so consciously aware of my inner landscape when I’m in this longing space, but it requires tenacity to stay here and not to run to the safer confines of my logical mind.
If we want depth, we have to go to the depths. We have to face up to what we may never achieve, and the people who might not want to love us, and the fears we’ve tried to pretend we don’t have. It’s all here, part of this yearning expansive space inside of us, but we need courage to sit with it. I can see my failings in here. And I can also see my strengths and abilities, clearer than usual.
I’m trying not to rush this. I wanted to go deeper, and now I know how hard it is to do so. But I believe this work will bear fruit. I know that I will make it through this and get to the other side. I know this because I’ve done it before, many times over. There’s no way to get to deeper without swimming through this murky place. Most of the true things in life we can’t think our way into. The way to travel there is to feel, and to feel it all.
