in defence of yearning

Author: MAJA
Source: https://velvetnoise.substack.com/p/in-defence-of-yearning
#essays #relationships

Summary

To yearn is to desire, and despite the culture of cringe surrounding it, there must be a counterculture in defense of it.

Takeaways

We call it “simping” or “cringe,” and suddenly the gestures that make connection possible are treated as shameful.

desire is not weakness, distraction, or cringe, but rather the first motion of life, the fire beneath the form.

Desire is a blueprint for expansion, a tug toward something that doesn’t yet exist but might. If we never desired, we would never build, never leave, never create.

We’re taught to distrust desire, told it’s greedy, shameful, unrealistic. But who does that story benefit? Who profits when people shrink themselves into lives that are “fine,” when they trade wanting for appeasement?

Desire is dangerous to systems that thrive on stillness, because it ignites change and cracks open the familiar.

• A desire to learn, a certain level of curiosity topples the building blocks of an organization tattered in holes and secrets.

A crush, then, can be a rehearsal for intensity, a reminder that you are capable of being moved. Sometimes the real gift of yearning is nothing to do with consummation, but in the way it awakens you to your own aliveness. To feel your pulse quicken is to find that you still have a pulse at all.

To love is to invent, to reconfigure the world so that someone else might live more freely. Desire materialises as forms, objects, movements, new possibilities, far beyond just an inner sensation.

Their private ache became a map for the rest of us, proof that grief itself can invent.

• Without desire, there is no love, and without love, there is no grief. How then, can we recreate ourselves and become better, if we are not acquainted with these feelings?

To desire is to resist the forces that would rather we be numbed out, efficient, and manageable. It is to say: I will choose intensity over indifference, invention over appeasement.

• And to this, I say, desire is to rebel against the increasing apathetic state of our world.