Edging My Life

The other day, my friend looked at me and said, “I don’t mean to be crude, but…” He looked around to make sure no one was listening. “From the outside, it looks like you’re waiting for a huge orgasm.”

He was referring to the way I live my life. Not just the way I approach work—my little public access TV show, my books, my business—but where I live, the way I learn, how I love.

I was both shocked and delighted by the comparison. He has a way of putting his finger on the right button. “Yeah, I guess it does feel that way,” I smiled. “It’s like I’m edging my life.”

He laughed.

I’ve been thinking about the analogy for days. In the last couple of years, I’ve certainly been chasing something, and I’m not always sure what it is. A feeling? A knowing? A sense that I am home? An achievement of some kind? Validation that who I am is worthwhile? True love?

At various moments, I have experimented with different flavors of “edging,” though not in the sexual sense. I don’t have that kind of self-control in the bedroom…maybe one day. I gave up sugar for Lent once and discovered that when I didn’t immediately soothe my craving for sweetness with actual sweets, I first had to sit in discomfort—a sort of metaphysical blue balls, if you will. Eventually, I found a more potent medicine: writing. I stopped using food to soothe myself and discovered the pleasure of feeling at home in my body. I stepped away from work that made me feel important but drained me of nearly all my energy and found work that makes me feel merely adequate but leaves me enough freedom for my weird creative witchy shenanigans. I stopped having sex for a while and discovered that the energy I reclaimed from constantly being disappointed could be poured into friendships I am deeply proud of.

At first, I thought the common thread in all of these experiments was deprivation: wanting something and refusing to scratch the itch in the familiar way. But I don’t think that’s quite it. I think I have been learning the difference between the thing I hunger for and the things I use to approximate it. Chocolate isn’t sweetness. Prestige isn’t purpose. Sex isn’t necessarily intimacy. Being wanted isn’t belonging. Facebook likes aren’t the same thing as being witnessed.

The common thread is that eventually I reached a point where I didn’t want to keep doing things the same way because it hurt. It hurt to look in the mirror and not love what I saw. It hurt to give everything I had to a job that treated me like I was expendable. It hurt to keep offering my energy to men, hoping they would reciprocate in kind, only to feel that what I gave never came back in the same measure. I didn’t know what would happen if I stopped. I only had a suspicion that forgoing the familiar might teach me something that scratching the same itch the same way never had.

The irritating thing is that stripping away an old coping strategy does not necessarily remove the hunger underneath it. Sometimes it just gives the hunger a new costume.

Take writing. It is cathartic to let some of my insides spill out, to find the sweet relief of release. But I still crave validation. For a while, my habit was to post a piece of writing online and then wait for the “likes” or for someone to tell me, “Good job.” When I got a few, it felt good for a moment, but it was never enough. What I really wanted was something more sustained: evidence that my voice resonated somewhere beyond the boundaries of my own body. So I edged it. I stopped posting my writing on social media and started putting it quietly on my website, which, as far as I can tell, I am the only one looking at. I started imagining gathering these pieces into a book instead. And then, almost immediately, instead of checking social media every few hours for the dopamine hit of a “like,” I started obsessively checking my email as though some deus ex machina might appear in my inbox and announce that my voice mattered after all.

Apparently the human psyche is both annoyingly adaptable and stubbornly fixed.

But there is another possibility here, too. Maybe wanting someone to read my writing isn't a problem I am supposed to overcome. Maybe the likes were simply inadequate nourishment for a legitimate hunger. I write because something happens inside me when I do it. That part belongs to me. No audience can give it to me, and no silent website can take it away.

But writing is also communication. I don't only want to make meaning. I want to share meaning with another person and feel them make something of it, too. I want to be witnessed. And perhaps there is an edge between needing someone else to certify that my voice matters and pretending I don't care whether anyone hears it. I am trying to learn how to live there.

Love seems to present me with the same problem. I stopped having sex because affection and love without a safe place for them to circulate had become agonizing. Truly painful. Crying-in-my-car-multiple-times-a-week painful. Wondering-what-was-wrong-with-me painful. So I stopped. I focused instead on friendships, on relationships that felt reciprocal and sustaining. And then, without warning, I found a friendship in which I experienced a depth of love I hadn't expected, but one that still could not become a partnership.

Alas. I must edge again.

For a while, I thought perhaps the lesson was that I needed to become better at giving myself everything I had been seeking from other people. Love yourself. Choose yourself. Validate yourself. Build a life so beautiful you don't need anyone else to make it complete. There is wisdom in that, I know there is, but there is something in it that doesn't feel entirely true for me.

I am deeply relational; I bloom when I am witnessed. There are parts of me I can cultivate alone, and there are parts that seem to emerge only in the particular alchemy of relationship: when another person is curious about my mind, when someone delights in something I might otherwise have dismissed, when I am known and loved and get to know and love someone back.

I don't think that makes my relationship with myself deficient; I think it tells me something about the conditions under which I flourish. Maybe loving myself does not mean learning not to need other people. Maybe it means loving myself well enough to admit that I do. And maybe there is a difference between requiring another person to prove that I am worthy and allowing myself to be changed by the experience of being deeply loved.

From the outside, I imagine my life can sometimes look scattered, as though I am changing direction aimlessly. From the inside, it feels different. It feels like brushing against pain over and over and deciding not to keep reopening the same wounds. Finding the edge of the familiar and asking what might exist just beyond it.

To me, this is an edge worth living on: the unapologetic, sometimes sharp, sometimes blurry line of self-emergence. It is life lived without staying in rocky dirt (or hazardous chemical sludge) when there’s a chance at fertile soil.

But there is another edge here, too. What if I spend my entire life waiting for the huge orgasm? What if “I refuse to settle” becomes its own coping strategy? Not this. Not enough. Not yet. Something better is coming.

There is a version of that story in which I become so committed to the extraordinary life waiting somewhere in the future that I fail to notice the life already happening around me. No book deal can finally prove that my voice matters. No partner can establish once and for all that I am worthy of love. No perfect house can bestow upon me the feeling of belonging.

And yet, I still want to be read. I still want to build a home where I belong. I still want a great love.

Maybe the work is not to stop wanting. Maybe it is to become more discerning about what actually feeds me. Some nourishment I can grow myself. Some can only be made together. Neither fact cancels the other.

Later in the same conversation, my friend asked if I believed in soul mates.

I thought about it for a moment. I did, but a simple yes didn’t feel like a complete answer. “Yes…and I think context matters. A shared vision for a life matters. But that kind of complete and total acceptance for who you are? I want to believe that exists for everyone out there, and that two people can feel it for each other.”

I've thought about that answer, too. Maybe “soul mate” is just another name I have given the giant orgasm at the end of the edge. The person who finally arrives and makes everything make sense.

I don't fully believe in that version anymore. But I do believe there are people with whom we can experience an extraordinary kind of recognition. People who don't complete us but who call more of us into being. People with whom love becomes not an escape from our lives but something we build a life around.

And even if you meet someone like that, I think it still takes courage to choose them. It requires you to know you are worthy not just of their love, but of the life the two of you might build together. It asks you not to change for them, but to become radically yourself: unmasked, unpolished, vulnerable, bare.

Maybe that is what all this edging has really been about. Not depriving myself until the universe finally rewards me with the main course, but learning what actually nourishes me. Learning that something can feel good and still not be enough. Learning that wanting more does not make what I already have worthless. Learning not to mistake self-love for self-sufficiency. Learning that I can belong to myself and still want to belong with others.

None of the second truths cancels the first.

Maybe I will always be edging, always searching. Maybe that is part of my journey in this life, but I don't think I am waiting for my life to take shape anymore. A shape is forming within the edges I’ve already walked. It is there in the friendships I have tended, the words I have written, the strange little show I keep making, the work I have walked away from, the things I no longer do just because they temporarily make the ache go quiet.

Perhaps the edge isn't a place I am supposed to cross once and finally arrive on the other side. Perhaps it is simply where two truths meet. My life is already here, and I still want more. I am already worthy, and I want to be witnessed. I belong to myself, and I want to belong with others.

I don't know whether there is some enormous cosmic orgasm waiting at the end of all this. God, I hope there is. But I don't have to postpone my life until it arrives. I can try really fucking hard to love the life I am already inside while leaving room for more love to enter it.

I have to have hope.

Life is worth that, at least.

Download the accompanying Spell for Finding the Hunger Beneath the Hunger here: