What Are You Longing For?
Life comes at us fast. Work, bills, family, the next thing and the thing after that. And all the while the world is telling us how our lives could be better. Adverts for the better kitchen, the better body, the better holiday. Feeds full of other people’s lives, polished and filtered and looking wonderful.
Most of us know those posts aren’t the whole story. The people sharing them want to be seen as much as anyone. They just can’t show you the struggle. Nobody posts the argument in the car on the way to the beach.
And still we compare. Without quite meaning to, we start wanting our own lives to look that good. We chase it for a while. But even when we get some of it, something underneath stays hungry. A longing for something deeper that no new kitchen is going to touch.
The Welsh have a word for this kind of longing. Hiraeth.
English has never managed to translate it. Homesickness comes close, but it isn’t big enough. Hiraeth is a longing for home, often for a home you can’t go back to, or one that never really existed at all. The writer Pamela Petro describes it as “an awareness of the presence of absence.” It’s the feeling of knowing something is missing, even when you can’t say exactly what.
The word itself holds a clue. Hir means long. The second part is usually linked to grief or sorrow. So hiraeth is a kind of long grief. There’s warmth in it, and sadness too.
I think the hiraeth of our time is this. Underneath the comparing and the chasing, we want to be seen. We want to be known. We want to stop running the same cycle and simply be ourselves.
That’s the home most of us are longing for. To be fully known, as we really are.
I know that longing well. For most of my life I wanted to be seen. I wanted people to know me. And at the same time, I couldn’t let them see everything.
The fear ran deep. If people saw all of me, the doubts and the history and the parts I wasn’t proud of, I was sure they’d decide it wasn’t enough. So I showed them the parts that worked. The funny one. The capable one. The one with the answers. The one who could tweak a story so people would like me a bit more. On the drive home from almost anything, the same question would come: is this really me?
The truth is, I couldn’t have shown anyone the real me even if I’d wanted to. I didn’t know who he was.
Counselling started to peel back the layers, and I began finding things out about myself. Bit by bit, I got to know the man underneath all those versions. I started to like him. Then I started to feel at home in him.
That’s where the freedom came from. Once I knew who I was, I didn’t need each room to tell me. I stopped needing other people’s approval to feel all right about myself. The chase to belong, which had driven so much of my life, began to fade, and freedom took its place. The question in the car stopped coming, because I knew the answer. Being myself with other people followed on from that. But it started on my own, getting to know who I was.
That’s what hiraeth asks of us. To look honestly at what we long for and what we grieve. To ask what the ache is really pointing at. And then to build on it, so we don’t spend our lives sitting in the longing.
Because you can sit in it for years. You can keep scrolling, keep comparing, keep waiting for something outside you to fill the gap. The ache becomes familiar, so you keep it.
Or you can let it lead you somewhere.
There’s another Welsh word that shows where it can lead. Cynefin.
It means something like habitat, or haunt. It’s the place you’re familiar with and rooted in. Hill farmers use it for the patch of mountain their sheep know as home. The sheep keep to it without a fence. They don’t need one. They know where they belong.
That’s what being at home in yourself feels like. Rooted in who you truly are, instead of who the world tells you to be. Loving all that you are: the good, the bad and the ugly. Stop chasing perfection. Chase freedom instead, out on the mountain with no fence needed.
So where do you start?
Reflect on your longing. Name it honestly. When you compare your life to someone else’s, ask what you’re really reaching for. Often it isn’t the kitchen or the holiday. It’s the feeling you imagine they have.
Release the version of yourself you’ve been trying to become for other people. The polished one. The one built for the feed. Grieve the time you spent chasing it if you need to, then put it down.
Reclaim the person underneath. Spend time with yourself without performing. Notice what you love, what you think, what brings you alive. Let yourself be known by people who see you clearly. Get to know the ground you stand on.
Hiraeth will probably never leave us completely. There will always be something we miss.
But the longing can lead you home. To cynefin. Rooted in who you are, known and free.
So I’ll leave you with two questions.
What are you longing for?
And what are you doing about it?
If those questions have stirred something, The Story So Far might be a good place to start.
It’s a small group running through November, with a week each to reflect, release and reclaim, so you can stop and look at your life so far before the year ends. You can find out more here.
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