TOW: How Needy

Love me.

I'm begging you.

If you don't, I might just hurl myself off a cliff.

Um, a...cliff....of despair?


...

High maintainence reaction aside, it's been a pretty needy week. I've been feeling needy. Why have I been feeling needy? Probably because I have finally recovered from a very long stint of bad relationships, toxic friendships, and other things that go bump in the night.

It's kind of sad to say those things to yourself, to say, "Yeah, I had some pretty bad relationships in my life. I'm kind of surprised at how easy my life is now that they're not in it."

Of course, the downside of letting people out of your life is that there are holes in your heart. AND THEY'RE STILL BLEEDING. BUT DON'T WORRY. JUST A FLESH WOUND. Er, medic?

Though all this want and desire and pain is that you still have needs. Once you have shaken all the darkness out of your hair, you can finally look in the mirror, and say, "I'm ready to be me again."

That's hard.

Because once you can say that, you can turn your emotions back on because you aren't constantly repressing how you feel. You aren't constantly telling yourself things'll get better. You can finally think that things are better, and you're in a place to enjoy life again, no matter what that means.

Loving yourself is hard.

And once you can love yourself again, you can bring people into your life, and no matter how happy or sad they are, you can love them for who they are, yes, even if they are needier than you.

But that's the easy part. Because love, in all the ways you can love, that's easy. It's when you don't have people to love you in your life that you get needy.

I used to think, it was ok to surround myself with people, and eventually something good would come of it, even if those people weren't right for me. But that's mistaking compassion and patience with your own personal values. Being yourself means surrounding yourself with people who make you more than you are.

And while we all need interaction, sometimes what we need more than anything is interaction with ourselves, so we don't forget what we want. And what we need.

What I have realized is that love doesn't make you needy. Love makes you want more good things to happen and gives you the energy to make those things happen. When we are needy it's because something in our life isn't letting us love ourselves. And we have to be aware of our feelings, so that we can keep them in check, and do the things we really want to with our lives.