I think about this Virginia Woolf quote often. To me, it speaks to love’s power as an act of invention, the way certain people draw out a version of you that didn’t exist before they arrived. They witness you, and thus, rearrange you. In their presence, words you didn’t know you knew tumble out. Your thoughts sharpen, colours seem richer, you inhabit yourself more fully.
We all carry endless hidden selves and latent worlds, waiting for the right gaze to bring them to the surface. I’ve felt this in my bones: relationships that have remade me, expanded me, taught me. Time and again, people have been the most transformative engine for becoming I’ve ever known.
Every enduring friendship, every romance worth the name, behaves like a kind of psychic technology. Two minds meet, exchange a pattern of attention, and, almost invisibly, each begins to reorganise around the other. What starts as perception becomes structure.
Henrik Karlsson captures the mechanism simply: relationships are co-evolutionary loops. Beyond sociology, it feels like spiritual physics. Who we choose to orbit defines, over time, the texture and colour palette of our becoming. Love becomes a technology of transformation, a living interface between selves. To love well is to take part in someone else’s unfolding, even as they take part in yours. (...)
I’ve often felt how literal that process can be, like a slow annealing of the self under another’s attention. A few months ago, I read an essay that rearranged me: What is Love? by Qualia Computing, which frames love as a kind of neural annealing. In metallurgy, annealing is the process of heating metal until its internal structure loosens, then cooling it slowly so it hardens into a stronger, more resilient form. The lattice reorganises; the material changes.
The essay suggests that in high-energy emotional states, such as falling in love, grief, awe, psychedelics, deep meditation, the brain becomes molten, its patterns loosened, more open to reorganisation. The person we focus on in these states becomes like a mold for the cooling metal, shaping how our thoughts settle, what habits crystallise, what identities take hold.
This is why the right gaze, the right conversation, can change you down to the grain. Emotional heat loosens the architecture of the self, and in the presence of someone who sees you vividly, the molten structure reforms around their image of you. What remains afterwards is stronger, different, marked by the shape of their attention. Attention becomes anchor; identity reshapes in response to their rhythms, their gaze. Perhaps this is why the right presence can feel like destiny: whole inner continents, hidden selves and latent worlds, begin to surface, shaping you into someone you hadn’t yet met.
by Maja, Velvet Noise | Read more:
Images: Virginia Wolff; Banksy
Images: Virginia Wolff; Banksy
