NdukuOutLoud

“Lord, if they are not for me, take away the yearning.”

It’s a familiar refrain. You see it floating across social media, whispered in late-night prayers, or echoed in casual conversations about moving on. (Though, now that I think about it, I’ve rarely heard a man express it quite like that—maybe that’s an algorithmic bias, or maybe men process emotional lingering through a different vocabulary entirely. Who knows.)

Then there is the logic popularised by writers like James Clear in Atomic Habits: If you don’t have the discipline to work for it, drop the desire.

On paper, it sounds airtight. Pragmatic, even. You cannot reasonably claim to want an outcome if you are unwilling to execute the daily labor required to achieve it. If you aren’t doing the work, perhaps you don’t actually want the thing; you just like the idea of it.

Maybe.

But if it’s really that simple, why does the thought keep bothering you? Why do you keep wanting it? Wanting them? Why does the longing linger even when logic has clearly demonstrated its uselessness?

More importantly: why have we made the desire itself the enemy?

Both of these frameworks—the plea to have the feeling stripped away, and the productivity rule to drop what you aren’t actively pursuing—are designed to do the exact same thing: extinguish the desire. Neither is designed to quench the thirst; both are designed to destroy the appetite.

We default to these strategies because wanting something “non-logically” feels dangerous. To want someone who isn’t good for you, or to want a life outcome you aren’t currently taking steps to build, feels like a structural defect in our character. So, we ask God or the universe to perform a clean emotional amputation, or we use discipline-talk to shame ourselves into silence.

We treat desire as something to be managed, disciplined, or exorcised. But what if the real work isn’t ending the desire, but interrogating it?

Why do you still want them so deeply, regardless of what they have done, that you have to pray for divine intervention just to survive the weight of the feeling? Why do you still crave a goal that you haven’t laid a single brick toward?

When you ask for a desire to be taken away, you are asking to skip the process of understanding it.

Instead of praying for emotional anesthesia, what happens if you stop and face the yearning directly? If you want something but consistently fail to do the things required to get it, the answer isn’t always “you don’t want it enough.”

Sometimes, the desire isn’t even yours—it was imposed on you by expectation, culture, or ego.

And if it is genuinely yours, then the resistance you feel is a message. There is a part of you that wants the outcome, and another part of you actively sabotaging or protecting you from the steps required to get there.

Instead of trying to kill the desire, consult the part of yourself that is standing in the way. Figure out what it’s afraid of. Listen to what the longing is actually trying to tell you about your unmet needs, your fears, or the narrative you’re holding onto.

Don’t pray to have it taken away. Address why it’s still there—and appease the part of you that is holding on.