My Favorite Color is Someone Else’s: How Yearning Took Power Over My Life

Icebreakers in high school are not known for breaking the ice. Often, they result in awkward smiles and a surprising lack of eye contact as you wait for the teacher to call time on a stilted conversation that started with a question about your favorite color and ended with the answer. This had been my life for the first week of sophomore year. Tugging on my shirt self-consciously, I cast my eyes around the classroom. Most of my peers had already paired up for their own stilted conversations, and I was left looking at the boy I wanted to talk to, knowing that I wouldn’t. He was a year older than me and he was a boy. I couldn’t go talk to him, and he certainly wouldn’t come talk to me–

“Who’s your favorite character in The Office?” 

My thoughts were interrupted by the very boy I had been thinking of. Suddenly, he was directly in front of me, the sun bathing him in light as if to say, This is it. This is your meetcute moment. All of the rom-coms I spent hours watching, the romance novels I stayed up to read, this was how they all started. I finally managed to stutter out a response befitting a moment of such significance, “Uh, Dwight.” 

“He’s mine, too,” he said, and those few words were all it took for me to fall in love. He asked me one question, gave me one smile, and my fourteen year old self started something that I wouldn’t be able to stop for the next two and a half years–yearning. 

Yearning. It’s an often painful longing, an unexplainable wanting for someone or something, a craving for something that is just out of reach. My first examples of yearners became my favorite characters, and consequently, the people I aspired to be like. Ken from Barbie, who only had a good day when Barbie smiled at him. Han Seo-jun from True Beauty, who spent years taking care of a girl who loved his best friend. Eponine from Les Miserables, who sacrificed herself to keep the boy she loved and a stranger together. Over time, characters like these taught me that losing yourself for someone you loved–letting yearning take power over your life–wasn’t a bad thing, it was beautiful. 

So for a long time, I believed yearning was beautiful because loving someone is beautiful. What did it matter if I was losing myself in the process? Every time I talked to him it felt like the world stopped swirling and I could finally breathe. Wasn’t that beautiful? Wasn’t it beautiful that the things I knew about him became the things that people knew about me? I listened to country music, became a fan of the sport he liked, and his favorite color–green–became mine. Every backpack was green, every shirt was green, everything was green, because he was in everything.

But then he left. Suddenly, I found myself faced with a life where I would never see him again. I had spent two years seeing him as the sun and myself as a planet far away, forever in his orbit but too distant to do anything. And now someone had taken the sun. I didn’t have anything to orbit. 

I searched for another boy who could distract me just enough from the ache of losing the sun, and when I found a star, yearning once again took power over my life. I told myself that this was the rom-com script I so desperately wanted, the new meetcute moment. It was romantic to wait until two in the morning for him to text that he was home despite the fact I’d have to wake up at 5:30. It was romantic to wear tighter clothes and more makeup, listen to his bands like Cigarettes After Sex or Wave to Earth instead of mine, and spend parties and functions worried about where and how he was. It was romantic that the first nail extensions I ever got were French tips, because he told me those were his favorite. They were green, though, because even after everything, I couldn’t replace the sun with a star. 

And that was when I looked down at my hands and I didn’t recognize them. 

The nails I had chosen weren’t mine. They were someone else’s. I scrutinized my nails, the almond shape, the arch of green. I didn’t like the French tips. I didn’t like the color. The truth that I had been trying to avoid for the past two and a half years finally hit–my favorite color wasn’t green. But I didn’t know what I liked outside of it. 

It was a funny feeling. The most basic thing to know about someone–their favorite color–I didn’t even know mine. And like an avalanche, I realized I didn’t know a lot of things. Did I even like Wave to Earth? Did I actually like the sport I said I was a superfan of? And all of the things I told him in an effort for him to like me–did I mean any of them? 

No matter where I looked, yearning held power over my life. The boy I loved for two years left, and instead of letting myself breathe, I tried to find a different boy to orbit. When I asked myself what I liked, it wasn’t things that I liked–it was what others did. So I lost myself, over and over, collecting pieces of people and claiming them as mine, imagining myself as a puzzle where every piece was someone else’s. And it took a trip to the nail salon to realize that those pieces cannot be all I am. 

I don’t think I’m done yearning. I don’t think I ever will be. There are pieces of me that cannot be removed, dozens of colors and places and people who are a part of me. But letting yearning take power over my life, being a puzzle of other people’s pieces, doesn’t have to be my reality. I’m getting to know myself instead of someone else, learning things about me the same way I’ve been doing for others all these years. In all of my time orbiting other people, I’ve learned what I couldn’t learn otherwise: we keep devoting ourselves to knowing others and forget we owe that same devotion to knowing ourselves. So I’ll ask you–and myself, again–what’s your favorite color?