wild speculation: crushes are a symptom of "stuck" emotional energy, and are actually a form of anxiety, a socially sanctioned one that you are encouraged to enjoy instead of freak out about

so:

1) if you move the stuck emotional energy behind a crush it changes flavor. gets less frantic, dissipates, or deepens

2) very clear example of how a potentially "negative" experience that you're supposed to enjoy can be made enjoyable *by that expectation*

consider by contrast a hypothetical society in which crushes were regarded as a kind of mental illness. "someone help, i am plagued with unwholesome thoughts about this woman, they will not leave me be"; there's an initial experience and then a lot of *secondary* suffering

this is part of a broader point i'd like to make in a lot more detail in its own thread, but: basically i think this kind of secondary suffering is happening whenever we use "mental illness" as a concept, with its associated baggage of medicalization and pathologization

i keep trying to write about this and it keeps not quite being fully cooked, but just like... something wild happens when you use an ontology that was designed for the needs of a *bureaucracy* in order to *understand and explain yourself to yourself and others*

the story you tell about yourself is *important* and it *changes how you feel*; depathologizing a "mental illness," really, actually (as in not only you but the people around you are not regarding it as something bad or wrong) could shift a large fraction of the symptoms

depathologizing is v related to this point about accepting whatever is arising as a key component of emotional care; pathologizing is a strong form of rejection https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1221970041345724416?s=20

depathologizing also comes up in this post from richard schwartz, the IFS guy, about depathologizing borderline: https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1198017234334969856?s=20