I Want and I Need

Before any of us had language for want or need, we had a body. And that body was already learning, long before we could name it, what was safe to reach for and what wasn't.

So many of us grew up in homes where children were meant to be seen and not heard, where a want voiced too plainly got called greedy, or too much, and a need voiced too plainly got met with irritation, or silence, or something worse.

As children we took what was offered, what was allowed, because that was the only version of love available to us, and a child will always choose the love that's on the table over no love at all. So the body adapted.

It learned to collapse the reach before it even became a request.

You can still feel that adaptation now, years later, in the tightening of the throat right before you try to ask your partner for something, in the breath going shallow while you rehearse the sentence in your head before you've even said it out loud.

That's not nerves in the abstract.

That's a very old, very intelligent survival response, still running the same protective loop it built when reaching wasn't safe.

There is a difference between wanting something and needing it, and most of us were never taught to feel where that line sits.

A want moves through you like weather.

It arrives, it's real, sometimes intense, and if it goes unmet you feel disappointment, maybe a small grief, and then you keep living.

A need is different.

When a need goes unmet, something in you starts to come apart. You dysregulate. You protest, or you go quiet in the exact ways your body learned to protect itself long before you had words for any of it.

You can feel this difference in the mouth if you say it out loud. I want you to text me back sooner. Light. Almost breezy, you could say it over breakfast without your voice changing. Now try, I need to know you're safe when you go quiet for hours, it takes me back to being small and unheard. 

That one catches somewhere on the way up.

It sits lower, in the chest or the gut, and takes longer to get out, because some part of you is checking first whether it's even safe to ask.

Speaking a need is the more vulnerable act, and it holds more, for longer. 

It's a bid that says please see this deep part of me, and stay. That kind of exposure can't be walked back once it's in the room. A want is faster and lighter. Refused, you go looking elsewhere, or you shrug, or you try again another day.

The self isn't as fused to it.

This is why so many needs get smuggled out disguised as wants.

I guess it would be nice if... said instead of I need this, or I start to disappear inside myself. The disguise feels safer. But it means the need never actually lands, because the person hears a preference, not a plea, and responds accordingly. Then resentment builds quietly, because you gave a want's worth of asking to something that needed a need's worth of honesty.

And here is the part that runs underneath so much of this. As children, we were given what was offered, what was allowed, and nothing more. 

We didn't get to negotiate it.

We couldn't say actually, I need something different from this, I want something more than what's on the table. We took what came, because that was the deal, that was survival, that was love in whatever shape our particular home could offer it.

And so many of us stay there.

Grown, capable, sitting across from a partner who would probably give us so much more if we asked, still quietly living inside that childhood arrangement, still only reaching for what seems to already be on offer.

That mindset doesn't announce itself. It just looks like being easy, or undemanding, or low maintenance. It looks like gratitude for whatever you're given. But underneath it is often a much younger part of you, still waiting to see what will be allowed today, still mistaking the ceiling you grew up under for the actual size of the sky.

But sometimes it isn't even fear that keeps the want or the need unspoken. Sometimes it's simpler and sadder than that, we were never given the vocabulary. Nobody sat with us and named the difference between a preference and a longing and a need that, left unmet, would actually cost us something. Nobody asked us as children what we wanted, really wanted, and waited long enough for an honest answer. So we grew up fluent in what was expected of us and illiterate in our own interior, unable to reach for something we didn't even have language for yet.

You cannot ask for what you cannot yet name. 

And the world, however willing, cannot meet a need it was never given words for. This is its own quiet grief, not being denied, but never having learned the shape of your own asking.

Here is what I have come to believe, sitting across from couples and polycules and individuals in the quiet unravelling moments of a session. Both of these need a voice. Not one over the other.

Both are required for healthy relating, and for a sense of your own worth.

Because if you can't speak your wants, and you can't speak your needs, you end up permanently on the receiving end of your own life. Only ever getting what you're given. And from that place, you may never feel fully satisfied, or fully seen, no matter how much is actually being offered to you.

Resentment builds there.

Loneliness builds there.

Quietly, over years, in a home that might look, from the outside, like ease.

I think this is the part people miss. We become fluent in reading what our partner needs, and terrible at locating our own, because somewhere along the way needing felt like too much, or wanting felt selfish, or both got met with enough discomfort that the safest position became needing nothing and wanting nothing and just waiting to see what gets handed to you.

That is not low maintenance.

That is a starvation dressed up as ease.

A body that has learned not to reach doesn't stop needing. It just stops asking. And a body that has stopped asking will eventually stop believing anyone is coming.

But I have also watched what happens when someone reaches, finally, after years of not, and the reach gets met. There is a particular kind of exhale that happens in a body in that moment, the shoulders drop, the breath finally reaches the bottom of the lungs, something that has been braced for a long time lets go, just slightly, because it turns out the sky was never as small as the ceiling suggested.

That exhale is what you're working toward.

Not perfect asking.

Not fearless asking.

Just enough reaching, in words the world can actually hear, that your body starts to learn, again, that it's allowed. Because you will not get your needs and wants met by a world that cannot hear what you're asking for, and that includes the times you're not entirely sure what you're asking for yourself.

Learning the vocabulary is not a small task.

It might be the whole task.

It might be the work of years, sitting with yourself long enough to find out what was buried under all that early silence, and then finding the courage to say it in a language someone else can actually receive.

So here is what I would ask you to sit with, gently, this week.

Which one costs you more to say out loud, want or need? And where in your life are you still only reaching for what's already on offer.

Slow down enough to find out what is actually true underneath, and let yourself say it, before resentment says it for you. With love, Narla.