Yearning is so back ✨

creative process + inner teenagers + angst 💕

s/o to @leximerritt for making me this meme in night school the other night but then I forgot to download it so i re-made it but I think thats whats called co-creation 🥰

On the phone the other say I screamed to my friend YEARNING IS BACK IN A BIG WAY. Maybe it’s the sticky summer mix of smog and humidity making the sun glaze over orange in the sky. The most recent Bridgerton season that had me STARVED for Mr Darcy hand flexing-equse moments (objectively the sexiest moment on film ever, we all know this). Or my current mood board titled “walking down the stairs in a long dress like Virginia Wolf”. Maybe its something else indescribable, something in the air, something we only taste as we lick our lips, like sweat on our tongue. But it’s the summer of yearning.

People are having less sex these days, or so says the current moral panic, and simultaneously the BookTok tables at my local book stores are FULL of romance books and the biggest show no one can shut up about (Bridgerton) where the fat weird girl gets fingered by the hot jock (someone finally read my high school diary)!!!! But, Yearning is back in a big way. And I could write this essay on escapism and why the world being on fire is the perfect time for longing. But I also think we’re all just fucking exhausted from being met with exactly what we want all the time. From overanalyzing. From pathologizing. I think we’re all wanting to simply just be.

I don't wanna "get better"

Yearning is next to anger and obsession in the category of most fruitful creative forces in my life. Yearning is extremely poetic and when its hot out side and you don’t really want to be wearing any clothing, and the world is on fire, all the girlies really have left is sit dramatically in a long dress, ankles crossed on the window sill. It’s time to yearn. 

Every time I open my phone I feel absolutely shit about myself, my life, my skin, I thought my scalp was safe but then an ad told me yesterday my scalp ages 10 times faster than my skin so now I am absolutely stressed about that when I didn’t think I had to be. Yearning is fomo’s more fun cousin, maybe less ✨mentally well✨ but ultimately less toxic for the brain.

Yearning is a young woman’s game in that my best yearning was done at the age of 16 holed up in my bedroom scrolling tumblr #aesthetic posts and painting the same nail over and over again until the polish was perfectly thick and glossy. There is a lot of chat in the online wellness spaces about inner child but I find my inner teenager to be a more inspiring place of angst. Consulting that part of me feels like a more honest guiding light than anything anyone has to say on tiktok or the nightmare factory that is IG reels. 16 year old Phoebe would not put up with the gaslighting, she would think it’d be extremely uncool to consider buying an anti-aging-scalp treatment and that is the kind of contrarian advice I need to counteract the 47 billion voices of capitalism constantly telling me I am not enough, im too lazy, too stupid and too much. To be a teenage girl is to scream when the room isn’t right, when the crazy making starts, when the room start gaslighting you into leaving your sensations.

Ultimately what I really thinking yearning allows us to do is go slow. It be with ourselves and really, our feelings. Yearning doesn’t distract me from my 58282 ideas, it leans into the simmering. Yearning is ultimately for the poets and to yearn is to connect with my poetic ancestors. Yearning is in private, even if you are in public. Sitting alone at cafe tables staring off into the distance. Yearning is for closed bedroom doors and long sighs and lingering glances. Yearning means being with myself, someone I’ve been told I shouldn’t trust. But I am learning to meet her again, and she’s quite fun, and dramatic.

Yearning is for falling in love, but mostly with myself. ✨

FINDINGS

• Latest episode of Do You Ever Feel Like where I talk more about the disappointment of season 3 of Bridgerton and being a bonafinde Hater ™️

• Retreat dates for September here 🌳 join me in the Catskills + Trust your creative spark again 🪄

I just wrapped up How to Apply to Artist Residencies and Fellowships Class with

Gabrielle Ione Hickmon

and i cannot recommend this course enough for my fellow artists trying to get their shit together 💕

xx

Phoebe

*typos are left to reflect the fury passion and 3D humaness of being a passionate freak in the world – and you know not a robot *beep boop* I am just a human girlie living on earth with a mortal brain 🤸‍♀️(and also like, don’t be an ableist freak🥰)

Thanks for reading the Creators Dispatch. A weekly essay about the creative journey (whatever that means week to week)! Here I write about being an artist, human, angry woman on the internet and living in the dumpster fire of a world that says not to make your art. If what I say here inspires you (or pisses you off 🥰) share my work with the group chat, or your best friends neighbour. Word of mouth is the most special and radical way of sharing 👼