Admitting You Need Something Sometimes Feels Like Failure

You need something and the first instinct is to hide it because it feels like it is shameful. The need and the shame about the need exists and they are tangled together so closely. It’s hard to separate them.

Needing things makes you vulnerable. It makes you dependent on someone else caring enough to help. It makes you admit that you are not completely fine on your own. All of those things feel dangerous even when they are just human. Everyone needs things but needing things still feels like failure.

The shame tells you that you should have figured this out already. You should be able to handle it without asking. You should be strong enough to not need help. You should be independent enough to not need support. The should is so loud that the actual need gets quieter and quieter until you almost don’t feel it anymore, and so you don’t ask.

You handle it alone even it’s harder to handle it alone. You suffer through something that would be easier with help but you don’t get the help because asking for help feels worse than suffering. The calculation makes sense on some level except it doesn’t make sense at all.

Other people have needs too. They ask for things and get them. They seem okay admitting they need help. They don’t seem to carry the shame about it the way you do, but their doing it fine doesn’t make it feel fine for you. Their comfort with needing doesn’t translate into your comfort with it.

What’s underneath the shame is probably old. Messages about being too much, about needs being inconvenient, about having desires being selfish. Those messages got internalized and now they are running the show. Now needing anything feels like you are the problem and not that needing is normal.

The wanting and needing get confused together. If you want something you are greedy, if you need something you are weak, or if you express either one you are burdensome, so the wanting and needing both stay hidden and you move through life pretending you don’t have either. The pretending works until it doesn’t. 

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