Desire, I wanna turn into you
— Caroline Polachek
Buddhism says that we should not be motivated by craving or desire. Rather, we should act mindfully. We should avoid delusions around control, fame, and material possessions. We should avoid consuming substances and toxins such as alcohol, drugs, gossip, as well as certain websites, books, sense impressions, and food. The tangible immediacies of Buddhism are often conceived in terms of abstinence. No meat. No sex. No alcohol. No desire.
Much of my life has been shaped by desire. I’ve called it hunger, I’ve called it burning. There were periods where my entire life felt like a febrile fire pulsing with force towards my goals and desires. I could feel the burning heat in my body, which manifested as restlessness and hyper-action. A good bit of this was the anxiety that seized my life then, but I also recall vibrations of surprising warmth and fullness, and a manic sense that everything was possible for me. I was ambitious with a vengeance.
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Another form of desire intimate to me is limerence, which has been far more damaging to endure. Limerence, as defined by The Attachment Project, is
the experience of having an uncontrollable desire for someone – an obsession that consumes the limerent person’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviours.1
I experienced limerence from childhood up till 2020. I had moved through numerous limerent objects (LO) over the years, but each LO sank me into the same sort of helpless infatuation.
Every waking hour (from the moment I woke) was filled with thoughts of them. I always wanted to be near them. I longed for some sign (any sign) that they liked me. When I was around them, I was hyper-aware of their every action and speech, observing them with the restraint and eagerness of a pervert2. The obsession possessed me. My life (which I hated) was given up in service of desperate romantic idealism.
The spell was binding, absolute, and thorough. Further fed on media representations of romantic love, I assumed that the extreme emotions indicated the extent of my love for the person. Even as I became aware that something was wrong, I couldn’t extricate myself. True love, as I conceived of it, demanded that I be more true, more devoted, more perfect in my love for the other person. I suffered, I thought, because my love was too large, too absolute, too thorough in its devotion.
I fell into cycle after cycle of limerence. Most times, I chose to pine in silence. Once or twice, trying regain control over myself, I cut my LO off. In one my final cycles of limerence, I acted on my feelings and made a grievous mistake which deeply hurt someone I loved.
I had already been terrified of myself and my monstrous feelings. Over time, this anxiety only grew. I resented what I can now name as my primal need for love.
I don’t carry these vibrations anymore. They’ve been transmuted through a long, meandering process of healing—giving way to softer confidence and serenity. The guilt I bore has also tapered out into acceptance and compassion for who I was then, and how I was doing my best to survive myself. I did harm, which I owned up to. I was in a state of emotional emergency, which, with some distance, I’ve come to recognise and hold with love.
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By all accounts, desire has been a mixed bag. Desire was the steely hunger, summoned by rage and sadness, to live a life of my own making. Desire prompted me to dream with greater strategy, scheming, and playful confidence about other possible worlds. It has also possessed me, removing me from my life. It has possessed me, driving me towards my greatest aspirations. It has possessed me, making me feel certain about what I wanted and giving me confidence that I had control over my future.
I don’t think I could have reached this point in my spiritual, interpersonal, and creative life without these effervescent ambitions. For someone with an afflicted, ruined self-esteem, the hyperbolic sense of possibility was an equalizer. The fire that burned me has fed me well. Yet I can’t deny how misplaced, ravenous desire has vandalized and held me hostage in so many moments of my life.
Am I giving desire too much power? Let me take a step back, and tell you a different story.
There is a book I am captivated by. It’s called The Courage To Be Disliked3. In it, authors Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga make a case for the principles of Adlerian psychology through a conversation between a philosopher and a troubled young man. I’ll admit that the dialogue, modelled after a Socratic seminar, can sound rather clunky and mouthpiece-y at parts. But the ideas presented are ones I continue to turn over in my mind.
One key proposal the book makes is that human psychology is governed not by etiology, but teleology.
Etiology, as the book describes it, belongs to the Freudian school of psychology, where our present is determined by past events. For example, we may have experienced trauma, which shapes the ways we behave today. In the past is the cause, and in our present are its effects.
Conversely, the central logic of teleology might be stated as:
In each moment, we choose our behaviours, dispositions, and lifestyles because they fulfil a need or desire we have.
This applies even to debilitating anxieties, harmful habits, or supposedly fixed aspects of our personalities that we dislike. This extends also to behaviours and triggers that we may attribute to trauma. According to Adlerian psychology, these seemingly detrimental aspects of our lives in fact serve certain emotional or psychological purposes, which is why we choose to engage in them. Following this logic, the philosopher says, trauma does not exist.
Against the flabbergasted responses of the young man, the philosopher presses on. He argues that we are not trapped by these behaviours, but rather choose to be trapped by them. We could choose to live differently right now. However, we invent these cages to insulate ourselves against possibilities that scare us, such as being rejected, disliked or judged by others, or accepting that we could be happy.
The Adlerian philosopher’s argument that trauma does not exist is a bold, probably divisive claim to make in this age, where Internet culture has made us increasingly trauma-aware and even trauma-informed in our approaches to one another. I will attempt a re-definition of the term, rather than a complete dismissal.
If we follow the logic set out by the philosopher, trauma is not a matter of cause and effect, so much as a method of making meaning which creates behavioural patterns that best serve our goals of self-protection against things we fear, i.e. things that feel dangerous. Trauma responses take information from a traumatic event and turn them into persistent beliefs and corresponding behaviours that serve to protect us from any possibility of experiencing such an event again. In doing so, these beliefs and behaviours reinforce what has been learned from the event. They ensure that the logic or messages communicated by the event live on and do not leave us.
For example, a person might be a recluse. One might attribute it to a traumatic experience they’ve had, where they were laughed at publicly for a mistake they made. You could say that this created feelings of inferiority and social anxiety. They suffer from social anxiety, which makes it hard for them to go outside.
Adlerian psychology, as the book argues it, might posit instead that the person chooses to be a recluse. They make use of (or indeed, create) social anxiety in order to achieve their goal of not going outside. To attempt to go outside would be to risk the possibility of being laughed at, or disliked. This is something the person does not have the courage to face. Thus, they choose the lifestyle of social anxiety in order to protect themselves. Social anxiety is beneficial to them in this way.
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I’m not sure I fully agree with Adlerian psychology as set out in The Courage To Be Disliked, but I find its insistence on individual agency compelling.
It reminds me of a quote I came across recently4:
The problem with addiction is not that it’s harmful, it’s that it’s helpful.
We make “bad” decisions because they benefit us, at least in the short term. In particular, they help us escape parts of our lives that terrify us, or parts of ourselves that we reject. They are accomplices of fear.
Rather than being at the mercy of desire, perhaps I’ve used desire, even in its most destructive forms, to escape my life. I used desire to create such an obsession so I could access the emotional extremes I was addicted to. In the pits of my depression and anxiety, those extremes made me feel alive. Because I felt something, my life meant something. Because the emotion was extreme, my life was extraordinary—whether in its tragedy, or in its destiny.
Saving myself would mean that I wasn’t special, I wasn’t chosen. It would mean accepting, at least in part, that I was ordinary—I wasn’t going to wake up and discover I was a princess, or a wizard, or a prodigy. I didn’t want to face that. Instead, I used desire for my emotional, psychological goals of staying a victim and amplifying the tragedies of my life. I used it to hold on to my ideals about who I was and how my life was meant to unfold.5
So I bet on being special. I waited for my uniqueness to be crowned upon me, not made through my own efforts to live my life. I waited in that pit, refusing the possibility of saving myself. I wanted to be saved. I deserved to be saved by someone else. Rather than being at the mercy of desire, I made it something I could be at the mercy of.
Desire perishes/ because it tries to be love.
— Jack Gilbert
Just as our seemingly “bad” decisions create certain benefits for us, our seemingly ‘good” decisions can ultimately reinforce our deepest fears. While desire drove me to live a life of my own making, desire also made me believe that life must be made. Or rather: by following desire toward my greatest aspirations, I reinforced the idea that being as I was wasn’t enough, and that I had to strive in order to create a life worth living. I had no courage to believe otherwise, because to do so would undermine the self-worth I had constructed upon external achievements.
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I’ve only been able to touch on the early premises of the book, which unfold further into a practical philosophy for life. The philosopher goes on to offer even more captivating ideas, such as the separation of tasks. I’d recommend reading it in full to find your own footing with it.
For me, what I ultimately gather from the book is this:
While we are not at fault for what happened to us, we are responsible for what we do next—and in fact, we are very much capable of shaping our lives. We participate in the reinforcement of traumatic events as reality when we give in to fear, and allow our responses to continue to reproduce their logics and beliefs. We participate in the dissipation of our trauma when we take a leap of courage, and attempt to disprove its fearful logic. We weaken the force of the traumatic event. We strengthen our ability to observe reality as it actually is. We build up our courage to be ourselves.
I like this proposal, even as I continue to sit uneasily with the idea that trauma does not exist. If nothing else, it is an incredibly use-ful proposal. It gives me full permission and encouragement to choose my life. It alerts me to my most pervasive and tender fears, which require skillful compassion to embrace.
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In the meantime, the obsessive impulses of my limerent years have largely faded. Limerence has given way to what I consider its more “normal neurotic”6 form: anxious attachment, which I’ve also worked on healing these last years. I feel I’ve come out, somewhat, on the other side of desire. Which is to say, I’m barely beholden to it, at least in its pure form. I remain intimate with its cousins, like beauty, like contentment. But desire? I’m not sure.
In the process of shifting, I have noticed interesting hangovers. For one, the choreography of limerence has remained with me, this dance of longing and dejection, longing and morbid hope.
A month ago or so, my partner was using his phone while we rested, and I expected to feel a rush of rejection. But it didn’t come. I felt confused, I didn’t know what to do. So I went through my usual motions: I curled up in foetal position and turned away from him as a form of protest and protection, even though the driving emotions were not there. It felt like performance without intention, form without content. Curious.
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As a last loose, extra, queerly attached limb of this piece, I’m curious about making use of desire as an affective process in my life. Without becoming subservient to craving and obsession, I want to try employing the emotional and psychological pathways of desire to arrive at un-wordable forms of understanding and revelation. To let my body continue building that hidden knowledge, even if I cannot consciously see or access it. And to stay open to all these ordinary human experiences and emotions.
These are early threads, but I’m wondering about these choreographies of desire as:
a form of partnership with my past
a form of friendship with my own addictions
a dance of detachment & devotion
Perhaps this is a form of queer use7, a way of repurposing old scores. Perhaps painful pasts, rather than being amputated, can be rehomed as spaces and prosthetics for dancing with ghosts. And if one has a clear heart—how joyous the dance, how fearless the dip, twirl, glide. We can pass through these choreographies as opportunities for improvisation, with the calm pleasure of a veteran.
I wonder if Buddha might smile at my thoughts. (I often imagine him being deeply amused by me.) Despite its seeming logic of abstinence, Zen Buddhism, as I practice and understand it, feels more like a practice of reversal and paradox. Peace is the greatest form of resistance. Smiling and doing nothing are the most radical actions. By not filling the void, you come to see how full the emptiness is. How teeming with life.
What might I find in dancing desire without being beholden to it?
⊹₊。ꕤ˚₊⊹
— buy my book, slow dream machine (2020)
— read two recent poems published in QLRS
— learn more about my work
“What Is Limerence? Definition and Stages.” Attachment Project, 10 Aug. 2023, www.attachmentproject.com/love/limerence/.
“The figure of the pervert comes up as the one whose misuse of things is a form of self-revelation.” Ahmed, Sara. “Queer Use.” Feministkilljoys, 8 Nov. 2018, feministkilljoys.com/2018/11/08/queer-use/.
Koga, Fumitake, and Ichiro Kishimi. The Courage to Be Disliked. Atlantic, 2019.
I can’t seem to find the source of this quote! Please let me know if you recognize where this is from.
I don’t see myself as any less for doing what I did, and I don’t write these things as a form of self-admonishment. Being able to articulate these things clearly gives me a sense of peace. The clarity allows me to see my younger self with deeper understanding, and to extend to her to full compassion she deserves.
I love Forrest Hanson’s compassionate sharing on this, about what’s realistic when it comes to healing and self-improvement. Hanson, Forrest. The Self-Help Industry Is Lying. This Is What’s Really Possible. YouTube, 29 July 2023, link. Accessed 4 Sept. 2023.
Ahmed, Sara. “Queer Use.” Feministkilljoys, 8 Nov. 2018, feministkilljoys.com/2018/11/08/queer-use/.