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What’s The Difference Between a Craving and a Desire?

Permission to Play is Always Ours

Ayana Zaire Cotton's avatar
Ayana Zaire Cotton
Oct 10, 2024
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“No matter how I held myself, what contortions I forced my body into. The glow was irrepressible.”1 I read this dream as an allegory for an intense feminine and feminist desire that resists concealment, bursts beyond interiority, and permeates the space and people around it.

— La Marr Jurelle Bruce, How To Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (2021), “A Portrait of the Artist As A Mad Black Woman”, pg. 123

Dear Worldbuilder,

Today I went down my graduate school rabbit hole again.

And the usual end of day refusal returned.

This time, not because of the trauma of undergrad. This time, because I detected the craving.

What’s the difference between a craving and a desire?

A craving is here today and gone tomorrow. The craving of graduate school will be gone tomorrow. The desire for an expanded sense of creative permission will not. Desire is here to stay. A reliable, persistent, annoying, erotic, eternal flame. A heat that won’t leave you alone even on the nights …

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