Want vs. Need...

I think in my life I haven’t felt wanted, a lot.  Like a lot, a lot.  And somewhere along the way I found out that that feeling goes away if you make yourself feel needed.  And I realized the other day that is what I have been doing my entire life.  Confusing want with need.  On oh so many levels.  In fact, I am not sure, even with today’s insight, I could tell you the difference, really.

Oh, I could make a good run at it and likely produce some interesting and convincing bullshit.  But that is all it would be in the end.  I get the intellectual concept of want vs. need.  But that is about where my understanding ends.

Looking back as far as I can in my relational history, I can see where it all went wrong.  5th grade.  It was at this time that I did not feel wanted.  I made some decisions about myself at that time and those fuckers are still having impact in my life right now.  40+ years later.  For reasons real and imagined, I did not feel wanted.  I felt like I had missed the bus on the entirety of social interaction and attractiveness.  So I accommodated all of that lack by exchanging want for need.  If I couldn’t be wanted, perhaps, maybe, I could be needed.

And so the die was cast for the rest of my life. Until 2022, anyway.  Then I had an awakening that was life altering.  While I could not have articulated it at the time, I was having a crisis of need.  My ability to be present in my life and deal with how very much I was needed but still not really wanted, came to a crisis point that then took the next two years to sort through.

And I guess, if I am honest, I am still working through it as we speak.  How much I conflated the two.  How much I thought someone needing me was somehow better than wanting me.  Or that if they needed me, eventually that would lead to them wanting me.  And in this whole process of being overly concerned about the want and need of others, I got lost along the way...

And it is the kind of lost that takes a good amount of time to sort through...thus, why I am still here writing about it.

This whole deal is percolating currently but I am happy to report I have made changes.  I have seen how being needed but not wanted by someone leaves you heartsick and broken.  I have seen how being wanted and not needed brings on a similar heartsickness but in other ways...

I have no real answers today.  I guess I just wanted/needed (see what I did there?) to own my realization that I have gotten this wrong a lot and that want and need do not ever equate with love.  Want and need are components of love but in and of themselves they do not produce love or loving relations.  In my case, they produce toxic unions that grow you up but also take a little part of your soul in the process of all that growing.

Perhaps loving requires way more than I have capacity for?  Perhaps I do not understand what love is really all about. I know I have tried for the whole of my life and it has always felt like something that will forever remain out of my reach. Not to be a downer on hump day...but this is where I am this morning.

Again...still.