Mara Glatzel - Needy: How to Advocate for Your Needs and Claim Your Sovereignty

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

This book is for humans who have needs, especially those of us who pretend we dont.

This book is for those of us who are longing for something we cant even name.

This book is for those of us who are overwhelmed and those of us who are just one yes away from complete and utter burnout.

This book is for those of us who believe that what we do makes us infinitely more interesting and worthy than who we are.

This book is for those of us who are preoccupied by mentally scanning every room we walk into and anticipating every need around us.

This book is for those of us who learned to mask our needs under an armor of self-reliance because our needs werent met as children.

This book is for those of us who dont often feel seen, held, or heard.

This book is for those of us trying to tend to our needs in the hidden corners of our lives to protect ourselves from the intimacy of having our messy humanity witnessed and judged.

This book is for those of us who carry the story that no one would stay if they really knew us.

This book is for those of us who abandon ourselves in an attempt to belong.

I felt my frustration rising up from the pit of my stomach as my partner and I made our schedule for the week. My partner outlined their needsthe hours their business required of them, the classes at the gym they wanted to take to feel good in their body, and the lunch adventure to a local restaurant they hoped wed take as a new family. I wanted to be supportive, but as I listened, I felt consumed by a familiar swell of anger and resentment.

Barely four months after the birth of our first child, my neediness felt like a pot boiling over, and Id never had less personal time or space to figure things out. I was accustomed to shielding my true self from the humans around me for fear of overwhelming them, a lesson learned from a lifetime of being told I was too muchtoo ambitious, too big, too loud, too many feelings, too many needsplus the steady social conditioning of what a good woman should be. I had learned to tend to myself in the shadowy corners of my day, during the infrequent moments when my to-do list was complete and no one else needed me.

Somewhere along the way, I learned to believe that minimizing my needs was what it meant to be a good wife, friend, mother, coach, sister, and daughter because that image was reflected back at me from the heavy onslaught of media messaging, but it was deeper than that too. Many of my adolescent role models diverged from this ideal, but I rejected them as outliers in a pursuit for unconditional belonging.

I wanted to be liked. I wanted to be seen as good, as worthy. I wanted to fit in. I wanted the safety that I assumed homogeneity would give me. And so, I groomed myself in this way, strictly monitoring myself in an attempt to keep the peace and make other people comfortable, even when it meant that I, myself, was uncomfortable. This messaging felt unimpeachably true because the reminders were mirrored back to me from every angletake care of yourself, dont make a fuss, be chill, downplay your feelings, be good. Be less, so that someone else will find you attractive. Keep yourself safe from rejection or abandonment. Somewhere along the way, I learned to believe that making myself invisible in this way was necessary in order to secure the love and belonging I ached for.