“I *need* you.”
If I’ve actually said these words before, out loud to another person, I can guarantee I didn’t feel good about it. Why? Admitting need — that something in my life is insurmountable, un-handle-able, unfathomable without help — is something I’m never willing to admit in my finer moments. Saying that I need anything or anyone feels, to me, like admitting weakness or, worse, defeat. Like most people, I’d rather admit neither.
When it comes right down to it, need is a tricky concept. Do we ever, truly, ‘need’ someone else? The very notion is dubious; each of us has within us the capacity to deal with much and accomplish even more. Others help, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean we would stumble and fall in a permanent, damaging way absent that help… right?
So I sit, mum, unable to form the words that would communicate that, at times, my life feels all too isolated, like I’m forcing myself to prove — mind you, to nobody other than myself — that I can do it all alone, that I’m strong and capable and autonomous. But the truth? I falter. I’m not always strong. I’m unhappy when isolated. I need to be talked to. I need to be hugged. I need tender face touches and to be held tightly and to exist so physically near another that I’m not sure whose pulse I’m feeling at times. Not always. But when I’m at my weakest, erecting walls and taking fabricated stands in my mind, making tiny little moves that are narrated in my mind with a whiny punctuation of “fine!”…. that’s when I need these things the most, but am — inevitably — least likely to get them.