daniella does it all

Longing doesn’t get taken seriously.

It’s often treated like a weakness. Like nostalgia. Like something indulgent you’re supposed to grow out of once you learn how the world really works. We’re told to be realistic. To manage expectations. To accept things as they are.

Wanting more — especially wanting connection, tenderness, or meaning — is framed as naïve at best, irresponsible at worst.

That framing makes sense in a world that keeps asking us to adapt to instability without ever questioning why instability has become the norm.

Because longing isn’t just a feeling.
It’s a signal.

Longing is what tells you something isn’t working. That the pace is unsustainable. That the life you’re being sold — endless urgency, constant outrage, performative certainty — doesn’t actually fit a human nervous system.

And that’s exactly why longing makes people uncomfortable.

We’re living in a moment where exhaustion is normalized and isolation is quietly encouraged. Where people are sorted, labeled, and flattened into positions instead of understood as full, complicated humans. Where speed is rewarded and reflection is treated as a luxury.

Longing interrupts that.

It slows us down when everything is built for acceleration. It pulls attention inward — not toward self-obsession, but toward honesty. Toward the gap between how we’re living and what we actually need.

Connection.
Safety.
Belonging.
A life that feels coherent instead of constantly reactive.

Those wants are inconvenient.

They don’t generate clicks. They don’t fit neatly into productivity language. They don’t keep us busy enough to stop asking harder questions about why so many people feel depleted, angry, and alone at the same time.

So instead, longing gets dismissed. Pathologized. Mocked. Reduced to sentimentality or escapism.

But longing isn’t about escaping reality.

It’s about refusing to accept a version of reality that requires us to shrink.

This is where longing becomes political.

Not because it belongs to a party or an ideology, but because it resists the conditions that make people easier to manage. A population that no longer wants anything beyond survival is easier to exhaust, divide, and control.

Longing keeps our inner worlds intact — our thoughts, doubts, hopes, and private negotiations — in a culture that keeps trying to strip people down to slogans and identities that are easier to sort.

People who still long are harder to numb.
People who still want connection are harder to isolate.
People who still believe tenderness has value are harder to brutalize.

This is why longing shows up everywhere power tries to suppress it.

In art.
In love stories.
In protest.
In care work.
In the quiet refusal to accept cruelty as “just how things are.”

Longing doesn’t require perfection or clarity. You don’t have to know what comes next. You don’t even have to know exactly what you want.

Longing simply keeps you awake to the possibility that life could be lived differently — more humanely, more honestly, more together.

I didn’t come to this understanding through politics alone. I came to it through stories.

Stories that sit with desire instead of resolving it immediately. Stories that let people want each other, want change, want meaning — even when those wants complicate their lives. Stories that remind us that what happens inside people matters, and that paying attention to that inner space is not a luxury.

Those stories don’t weaken us. They strengthen the part of us that refuses to disappear.

Reading is one of the few places where longing is allowed to breathe — and sharing stories is how we keep it alive. In a world that benefits from isolation, stories move longing between us. They remind us that wanting connection isn’t a personal failure, but a shared human instinct.

Longing is not a liability.

It’s a warning light — and a bridge.

And right now, it’s telling us that staying connected to one another, through the stories we read and the stories we tell, is not optional. It’s how we remember who we are.