When Wanting Was Enough
For the girls who know and love August
It’s not a secret that the song August by Taylor Swift has been my most-listened-to song on Spotify for about three years running. Maybe longer. I plan to get “to live for the hope of it all” tattooed on my body at some point. While it’s not what one could call a cheerful song, it hit at a time when I needed it the most — when living for hope was enough, when wanting was enough.
There was a global pandemic. I was in love, but I strongly suspected that the person I was in love with was slowly and steadily pulling away. My chronic illness was worsening, and every month I lived purely on hope that I would survive it. I needed every single lyric and chord of that song.
Over time, the meaning has shifted for me. It still reminds me of who I was and what I was going through, but now, it carries that bittersweet nostalgia of loving someone I knew I couldn’t keep — of knowing that the relationship was fragile and momentary but still so incredibly important. It’s the windows down on a hot summer day and the radio up, singing “meet me at the mall” at the top of my lungs.
Was Wanting Ever Really Enough?
Of course, now I realize that just wanting and hoping isn’t enough to hold a relationship together. But I understand how that version of me, still healing from childhood trauma, could want to stay living inside that beautiful hope. Denial is powerful, and I badly wanted to be wrong about the direction I saw my relationship heading. I wanted to believe that the person I loved would see me, love me, and choose me.
But wanting that alone was never going to work.
We’re not supposed to feel alone in our relationships. We’re not supposed to just live on hope and wishes rather than actions and follow through. Healthy relationships match our love and longing. Unhealthy ones simply reflect our own back to us without ever returning it.
We Should Live for the Hope of It All
Maybe wanting isn’t enough, but I maintain that living for hope is all we can ever truly do. There are no guarantees. We hold on to what we can. We can live for hope, but that doesn’t mean we should hold onto unhealthy relationships in hopes that they’ll change. That isn’t the kind of hope I mean.
When I first became sick with a chronic illness, I had a monthly visitation of suicidal ideation. It was cyclical, and it came with a lack of impulse control. That combination was terrifying. I clung to hope and life, white knuckling my existence for two weeks out of every month until my doctor found a treatment that would help alleviate it. I was holding on in hopes of better days, and it’s the only reason I’m still here.
With the world in chaos and the political landscape a fascist mess, it’s hard to wake up and face each day with its new horrors. But so many of us are living for hope. We’re getting up every day and doing what we can to create change and make good trouble. We don’t allow the events of each day to defeat us but cling, instead, to the hope of better days. Moreover, we back that hope with action and intention.
Never Mine to Lose
There’s something to be said for acceptance. While I’m a big fan of changing what we can, I know that doesn’t ever involve other people. We can only change ourselves. Other people have to work on themselves.
Acceptance looked like accepting that I could love someone with my whole heart, and it still wasn’t a guarantee of forever.
Acceptance is knowing that we can only ever belong to ourselves, and other people belong to themselves. We can’t lose what was never ours.
Acceptance was recognizing that I had a chronic illness that I’ll have to manage and keep managing.
Acceptance is understanding that everything has its time, place, and season. August isn’t meant to last forever. Nothing is.
A Note for the August Lovers
The song is still my favorite. I can’t say exactly what about it holds me in its grip, but it is still the one song I’ll never skip. It has layers of meaning, and if I’m not scream-singing it in my car, I feel like I’ve missed an opportunity.
But here are reminders for all the August lovers, the people who want to be The One but aren’t, and the ones who love with their whole hearts but don’t always get that same energy back:
We don’t cancel plans just in case they call. We’re too brilliant, beautiful, and busy living our best lives for that.
We need more than salt air, rust, and an almost-love. We deserve to be someone’s Betty (iykyk).
We’re not meeting anyone in secret. We aren’t the situationships they call when they’ve got nothing else going on. We deserve to be loved out loud.
We deserve love for more than a season. We deserve a love that lasts a lifetime.
We deserve a love that is sure of us and never makes us doubt it.
I often think that I’ll always be an August lover in that I will hold love and acceptance for the past while still moving on to live my life. I’m not the same person who first heard the song and was moved by it. But I will always remember who I was then and how far I’ve come from the woman who could love so much while holding onto hope.