I want to live.

Of course I want to live.

But I don’t just mean surviving long and well enough to live to see another day. I mean I want to live. I want to be so passionate about something that the rest of the world ridicules me for it. I crave the kind of intimacy that feels so rich and abundant it encases me in its all-consuming embrace. And, I’ll be the first to admit, I actually like that twang of regret in the morning when I realize that maybe I shouldn’t have had that final drink at happy hour last night, because it makes me feel like I’ve made the most of my night (Will it stop me from making the same mistake at the next happy hour? Probably not). These sensations are what make me feel most alive; yet, sometimes, they’re also what make me feel most alone.

There’s something ironic about being able to crave feelings and sensations almost as much as we crave material things, as if by equating the two, we are thereby extricating feeling from something we experience to something that we might acquire. I’d then have to ask myself, “did I just cure depression?” It would be easy: if people could simply acquire happiness like they could a piece of chocolate, for example, anti-depressants would become a thing of the past. But that’s besides the point. In any case, happiness seems far more complex than that; a piece of chocolate alone couldn’t possibly give us complete fulfillment in life.

Growing up, I took for granted the spurts of ingenuity, however cringe-worthy they may have been, that struck during what was possibly the most formative period of my creative life thus far—middle school. Back then, writing poetry might as well have been called witchcraft, as caring about anything more than one degree of separation away from popularity or parties or breaking the rules was deemed inherently uncool. Riddle me this: why did we belittle genuine passion? Why did we ostracize the kids who didn’t quite fit in because they were “weird,” only to find out later that they had spent their time developing software rivaling that of Google? Founding their own nonprofit? Producing art for the greater good? Or, even just exploring what exactly there is to life before the stakes got higher and more consequential? When did being cool position itself as being fundamentally opposed to caring? More alarmingly, however, when did we become so okay with letting living, in the normative sense, come at the cost of caring?

So here I find myself, at a crossroads between wanting to truly live yet sick of feeling alone in wanting to shamelessly pursue the things in life that I genuinely enjoy, no matter how good or bad I might be at them. Surely, I can’t be the only one who is knitting scarves with strands of yarn that look like they’re holding onto each other for dear life, releasing mediocre-at-best songs into the ether that I’ve spent way too much time and passive aggressive energy creating, or throwing a random assortment of vegetables and some broth into a pot and subsequently naming myself a culinary genius. Then again, there’s also the monopolization of the term “passion” by the perennially soulless Soul-cycle moms who take one hot yoga class and, all of a sudden, declare their lifelong passion for shavasana. According to my own line of logic, though, they are, too, shamelessly living.

Clearly we can’t win all our battles.