People who want strange things

The title of this essay comes from a novel I read years ago. In that story, "wanting strange things" meant wanting what the surrounding culture couldn't quite make sense of. The phrase has stayed with me ever since — not because I think unsanctioned longings are strange, but because so many of us silently wonder whether they are.

Some desires are easy to admit.

"I'd like more time."
"I'd like more money."
"I'd like a holiday."

Nobody looks at you oddly if you say those things. They're familiar wants, with familiar solutions.

But then there are the other longings. The ones we mention only when we're very sure of our company.

The longing to feel more yourself after a conversation, not less.

The longing for work that enlarges you, rather than simply rewarding you.

The longing to feel good about the way you move through your days.

These are harder to talk about.
Because they can sound... strange.

Not strange in themselves, perhaps. Just strangely unsupported.

Our culture has plenty to say about ambition, success and optimisation. There are bookshelves devoted to productivity, influence and performance.

There are fewer shelves for conversations about grace. Or what it feels like to stop performing your own life.

When our deepest longings don't seem to belong anywhere, it's easy to assume they don't really count.

Perhaps we've become too idealistic. Perhaps we're overthinking. Perhaps we should want something more sensible instead.

I wonder whether something else is true. What if these aren't strange desires at all?

What if they're simply desires our culture hasn't yet learnt to talk about?

After all, every genuine shift begins as an unusual conversation. Every new possibility sounds improbable until enough people discover it together.

Perhaps the deepest longings always arrive before the vocabulary for them does.

No wonder they can feel lonely. Not because they are rare. Because they are still waiting to be recognised.

For a long time, I imagined these longings belonged to a tiny handful of unusually reflective people.

I don't think that anymore. I think many of us carry them. We simply don't hear them spoken aloud very often.

Perhaps this is a form of uncommon luxury. Not the luxury of having everything you want. The luxury of trusting what you truly want before it becomes fashionable, measurable or widely admired.

The luxury of allowing yourself to take an unsanctioned longing seriously.

The luxury of discovering that your heart may know something your culture has not yet learned to recognise.

There are longings that don't disappear simply because nobody around you speaks about them. Sometimes they are simply waiting for someone to say, "I thought it was just me."

Until that moment, it's surprisingly easy to assume the longing itself is the problem. To edit it. To try to outgrow it. To settle for something that sounds more sensible.

There is a different possibility.

The luxury of trusting a longing before the world has caught up with it.

And perhaps the rarest luxury of all is discovering that you no longer have to carry it on your own.

That somewhere in the world, there are people with whom you wouldn't have to explain quite so much.

Which sentence stayed with you?

I'd love to know.

Drop Margarita a line