All the Lonely, Secretly Enormous Ways I Feel Desire

With the amount of spiritual experiences I’ve had in my late-night trips from Dasmariñas City to Kalaw Ave., Starliner buses should pretty much double as churches now. Mitski caught me off-guard the first time I listened to Be the Cowboy in a cushioned window seat, whispering, “I’ve been big and small and big and small and big and small again and still nobody wants me.” I first listened to Shellfish by Ourselves the Elves standing on the bus aisle, my legs aching from having no seat, exhausted and desperate to go home. Young girlhood is essentially just a seemingly perpetual series of questions left unanswered and feelings left unlabelled and unspoken about, and on more than one occasion I have been gifted some semblance of affirmation from shuffle play, from Discover Weekly. I’m getting sick of pretending and acting casually / Why do you make it seem like you don’t want to be with me?—somehow it feels good to know that I’m not alone in feeling very, very alone. 

A lot of second-guessing went into this piece: it felt like something I’ve written about so many times before, and I’m merely just rehashing myself now, but also something I can’t even begin to talk about extensively and openly. Female desire is suppressed and for that I am angry, but thankful for all the women who has taught me to be; but I am also lonely and I don’t know how to be. At first I didn’t want to write this essay because I didn’t want to admit—to myself, let alone the internet—that I don’t know how to love in a way that’s not violent, that’s not asking for too much. But then the universe seemed to be writing it for me, and what used to be sporadic moments of clarity limited to bus trips became everyday occurrences until I finally gave in and decided to write about it. It can be annoying, receiving all these signs about something you don’t want to believe, but alas, what am I but a firm believer in signs from the universe and a tiny speck in its infinite vastness?

Let me paint you a picture: drunk me is making out with someone I barely talk to. (I know my unbounded honesty is going to bite me in the ass one day, but what am I if not stupidly brave?) It is with the wrong boy (also very much drunk) at the worst place (by the door of the men’s restroom at a party, with people going in and out passing by us—I mean, there’s just too much romance in the whole thing). I’m sober enough to realize the whole thing wouldn’t happen in any other circumstance (had I been any soberer it wouldn’t have happened at all), but I have enough alcohol in my system to just let it happen that night. I regret it after—it was the wrong boy and it wasn’t me to make out with just anyone at a party, but when I see him again, we do it again, then I see him again and we do it again. I go home and brush my teeth for ten minutes (a part of the story a lot of my friends found extremely amusing). I spend the rest of the early morning just regretting: not because I didn’t want it, but because it’s the wrong boy, it’s not me, etc. etc., but also because I basically confirmed something about me I was so terrified would be true. Richard Siken, in War of the Foxes, wrote, “Something's not right about what I'm doing but I'm still doing it—living in the worst parts, ruining myself. My inner life is a sheet of black glass. If I fell through the floor I would keep falling. The enormity of my desire disgusts me.” 

(For the record, the boy did reach out to me after and apologized for what happened, in case I regretted it. I did, but it wasn’t really his fault. I told him he didn’t even need to apologize. For a second I even wanted to do it with him sober, with the party over and all the lights back on. I didn’t tell him that last part though.)

***

I’m such an un-casual person it makes me laugh every time I remember how un-casual I am. Co-Star, which provides hyper-personalized horoscopes, loves reminding me of this: I saw one of their instagram posts saying Tauruses lack a sense of moderation and I hated it so much that I downloaded their app immediately. The next morning, it told me, “Practice recognizing when your emotions exceed their cause. Infatuation is fun when it’s light—until it moves into an obsession. Desire will eat you alive if you let it.” Later that day, I was reading Melissa Broder’s So Sad Today, and in one of the essays, she wrote, “It’s sad to disengage. It’s not poetic or musical. It’s not what art tells me is valuable (at least the art I like). I want love at first sight to be real. But I fall in love at first sight every day.” 

***

The first verses of Boyish by Japanese Breakfast goes, Your boyish reassurance is not reassuring / and I need it / And all of my devotion turns violent. Desire can make me self-destructive, in that I’ll take whatever you can give. They continue: If you go to her / don’t expect to come home to me, except yes you can. All this confrontation / this suffering / What do you want from me? / If you don’t like how I look then leave, except please don’t. 

In his love letter to Fanny Brawne, John Keats wrote, “I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion—I have shudder’d at it—I shudder no more. I could be martyr’d for my religion—love is my religion—I could die for that—I could die for you,” and also, “My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you.”

Did I learn to love this way because I crave it that much or because I crave the completion it provides? Maybe it isn’t my desire that’s all-consuming but my insecurity. Broder again: 

“What I have sought in love is a reprieve from the itch of consciousness—to transcend myself and my human imperfections—but this has yet to happen. What has happened, instead, is a lifetime of fictional love stories; fiction, in that I have perceived every new experience through the veil of my own insecurities.”

And Broder, yet again, this time in her novel The Pisces: “Was it ever real? The way we felt about another person? Or was it always a projection of something we needed or wanted regardless of them?”

Maybe this is why my desire never feels romantic, erotic, or something to swoon over (as compared to, say, male desire), but it always feels so desperate: I need it, because it is so much more than desire. It is always melancholic and isolating. To desire means you don’t have something, hence the want; it implies a lack. But female desire is not punctuated by this notion of, oh, I don’t have it so I’ll go get it then, but of, oh, I don’t have it and that’s unfortunate. The context is always that of helplessness. My desire is weighty and a burden to carry. My desire is a catastrophic hit; out of my hands, and I am its hapless victim. 

And yet it is my burden to carry. Desire frustrates me, makes me selfish. I don’t know what female desire looks like so I find it so hard to define and navigate; I keep confusing it for something else entirely—selfishness, mostly. Maybe I’m frustrated because I am asking for too much, or I am pouring too much too quickly. It’s hard not to feel like all this exasperation is synonymous with being pathetic; my loneliness never not feels like begging. My anger at the scarcity sounds bratty and, well, selfish. Maybe I am too much of a bad thing. Maybe my desire makes me a bad person.

Broder, again (she nails this feeling so, so well), writes in So Sad Today:

“I repeatedly dreamt that my family was burning in our home and it was up to me to save them; from a poetic standpoint, fire depicts passion, sexuality, and a destruction that leads to renewal. I was coming into my sexual feelings, and perhaps I felt that my desires would destroy my family.”

Broder’s and my experiences are not unique. We cannot ignore the role of history and culture in this: for centuries women have been scrubbed clean of agency, and with it, desire. Womanhood, in its historical subservience, has become docile to the point of blankness; docile to the point that when we show any sign of interiority, it always feels booming, too much. Women talk too much. Women are too emotional. In my navigating of how I feel desire it is inevitable to see myself as one of those ‘crazy girls’: needy, clingy, feely, teary, all the things men don’t want, i.e. characteristics that demand something from them (maybe your girlfriend is needy because you’re barely there for her, dude); i.e. things that are human (oh, I’m sorry my physical body has feelings and tears attached; why don’t you go date Alicia Vikander’s robot character in Ex Machina). Maybe I was never too much; I was just never allowed to feel even a margin of it in the first place that even the littlest amount feels pompous. 

***

My desire, and hence heartbreak, can be many things. Broder, yet again: “It’s probably never really about the person you think you’re obsessed with. It’s about old pain.” And again: “My longing is not for him but for the stars. No, my longing is for him. Why is my version of him not real?”

My desire can be many things, is what my reflexive response is every time said desire is suppressed. I’d say that it’s enormous because guised in it is also my insecurity, my emptiness, my insatiableness. But maybe my desire really is just, in itself, larger than life. Maybe I simply want you as you are, in this magnitude. Maybe this binds me to endless disappointment—Broder, again: “I do not trust the universe to provide enough of anything to fill my apparently bottomless hunger.” Maybe I’ll learn to be okay with that; it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved, etc. etc. 

While conceptualizing this essay and seeing all its bits wherever I looked (the song lyrics, the book quotes), I saw pain everywhere. But the universe wanted to share one last message, in the form of my Co-Star update today: “You don’t have to respond to trouble with self-pity. You can use it, but you can also let it go.” In the face of suppression I will keep at it, desiring in the only way I know how: bigger than me, non-blasé; and hopefully now desiring in a way I only recently learned: unashamed, openly, visibly.