These past months, I have been feeling down. I had this deep feeling of dissatisfaction about everything: my photography, my life… No matter how hard I thought about it, I couldn’t find why I was feeling so unsatisfied. I was helpless till I started to realize the source of my torments.
Desireless
You can assume from what I wrote above that I was desireless and you’ll be right. Desires are a capital drive for me (and I guess most of us) when it comes to leading my life, making the right decisions, and making the right commitments. Without desires, I’m not feeling alive and I’m just numb. But why did I end up becoming desireless? This is an important point I just realized.
You see, our true desires are aspirations often hard to attain. Finalizing and publishing my first book, developing the styles I have envisioned, living fully as an artist-photographer… These are all challenging ambitions for a broke and tired guy lacking a long experience. That’s the important point: the difficulty of achieving my true desires made me unconsciously hopeless about them and I became numb, desireless. No desires, no related difficulties to deal with, you see how this poison works. But you end up dealing with the pain of an unsatisfactory life, feeling lost: a life out-of-focus.
How I dealt with being desireless
Our willpower isn’t eternal: it weakens with time and we have to strengthen it. Confronting my true desires, helped me in this purpose. I had to acknowledge the difficulties I had to overcome and the efforts that I needed to undertake to move forward. But it isn’t enough. Here’s a capital point: I had to commit to myself to overcome anything between my true aspirations and myself. Without commitments, it’s just empty promises, lies to ourselves. This is why willpower is so important: it’s the thin line between holding on and giving up.
Hold on to your true desires
I hope my own troubles will be helpful to you. No matter that you call them dreams, ambitions, or aspirations: hold on to your true desires. The ones that really matter to you. Identify them clearly, acknowledge the misery you’ll face on the road to them, and commit to them!
