Needed

By Erin Deborah Waks

Asking for help is akin, for me, to admitting defeat. To accepting I need it.

And that’s not fair. It’s not fair to insist profusely that I don’t need anything from anyone. It’s like I’m setting people up to disappoint me, almost as if to remind myself I am the only person I can truly rely on.

But that’s absolute nonsense. I have people in my life who would quite literally drop everything to answer my calls, who would (and have) drive for 8 hours straight or fly overseas to see me, who offer all the kindness in the world. I’ve got a jar in my bedroom of beautiful things people have said about me, and get a million other reminders every day.

It’s also nonsense because in other respects, I have stellar ask-for-what-you-want skills. I know my boundaries and what I deserve from the people in my life. Apparently, though, I don’t seem to apply them to small daily acts of service. To anything I’ve deemed excessive or unnecessary.

The problem is not the people in my life. It’s me. I don’t let myself indulge in things I consider futile - and that’s become abundantly clear to me as I lie at home with tonsillitis, feeling alone, bored and in pain. ‘It’s not in my nature to ask for help,’ are, I think, the exact words I used today. And that’s not a good thing. That’s not how I want to be.

I’m scared to be a burden to people around me, scared they will one day wake up and reach the same conclusion I used to about myself: that I’m too much, take up too much space, am too high-maintenance.

That’s an old narrative though, one a terrified 15-year-old Erin invented in order to get the attention she so badly craved. Ignore your needs, be relaxed and everyone will love you, right? Wrong.

I read a quote that resonated. ‘In our efforts not to appear inappropriately needy, many of us have tried to shut down our needs entirely. The appropriate needs get thrown together with the inappropriate ones and we swallow them all. Yet this, in turn, only creates more hunger because it’s simply not normal for us to not have needs in our relationships with others. When we try to pretend that our needs don’t exist, or treat them as though they were pathological, we only feed the hunger in our hearts that much more intensely.’

I fed that hunger so badly today, purely because I didn’t want to be an inconvenience to others. I almost didn’t take the day off work, despite visible swollen glands and an inability to eat anything other than soup. I turned down my boyfriend’s offer to bring me ice cream or order me a takeaway delivery. I told my mum I could ‘handle it myself’ when she asked if I knew what painkillers I should take and if I had enough. I didn’t tell my dad I was off work, even as we shared banal texts about our week. And then I still wanted the whole world to read my mind and show up at my doorstep with flowers and a hot chocolate. Unreasonable. Unreasonable, given how adamant I was I didn’t need any of this.

What did my stubbornness leave me with? A feeling that no one cared, that no one realised I deeply desired these small acts of service that show how important you are in someone’s world.

But it’s truly not because they don’t care, or don’t love me. It’s because I don’t allow myself that luxury, the luxury of needing things, especially from other people. In denying my own desires because I feel like a burden, I deny other people the option to show their affection. I don’t allow myself love when I’m not at the top of my game, so it’s no surprise I don’t permit it from others.

Sure, it’s nice for other people to pre-empt our wishes and desires, yet in my pursuit of total independence, in my abhorrence of manipulating people into doing my bidding, I also create an inability for people to feel needed in my life. It’s okay if people go out of their way for me. I’d do it for them in a heartbeat. Yet I’ve built an infallible circle around myself where it appears as though I can fully take care of myself. Which I can, naturally. I’ve proved myself more than capable.

But I don’t always want to. And more than that, I don’t always need to.