Having Needs Doesn’t Make You Needy

For the longest time, I was so scared to voice what I wanted because I was scared I was asking too much. I thought that I wouldn’t be as desired or liked, that my demands would lead to rejection, or that I would come across as crazy and high maintenance. As I lived with this mentality, I was endlessly creating friendships and partnerships where I was completely dissatisfied.

I still do this from time to time, I think we all do to an extent. We keep things to ourselves to avoid discomfort or rejection. 

I get it, though. No one exactly wants to be the friend that says to their platonic friendships, “Hey. When we only talk a few times a month and you don’t check in I feel like you don’t care about our friendship” and no one wants to say to their partner, “When you don’t compliment me on things I try really hard on, I feel unnoticed”. Expressing our needs is scary.

When we express our needs we essentially are sharing our most vulnerable parts of ourselves and we ultimately are opening the door for someone to not meet them.

. But if we do not voice our needs purely based on fear of rejection or discomfort, what happens? We are stuck with a friendship where we aren’t getting the communication we need, or we are in a partnership with someone who we feel unnoticed by. Therefor, we will never be able to fully feel valued and respected, simply because we are not demanding/stating our need to be.

The bottom line is:

Any kind of relationship where both people do not have needs/voice their needs, will never be a successful or happy one. Ever.

We have to voice our needs so that others know what we need from them. We have to voice our needs so that others can know our boundaries and know where to be extra sensitive, and where to love extra hard. We have to voice our needs so that we can successfully function in the relationship we are attempting to create.

Having needs makes us human, it is completely and utterly inevitable.

All having needs really means is acknowledging our humanity and our story and knowing what we need in order to be successful.

Having needs comes from a place of wholeness, it comes from a space of knowing ourselves.

Being needy, however, comes from thinking another person’s actions can complete you and needing something from outside sources to feel full. Being needy is putting your power into others and letting them drastically change your overall state of wellness.

Having needs, is simply sharing with others what makes you feel good and what makes you not, and gracefully leaving it up to them if they are willing or able to meet you where you’re at.

What matters most is not whether or not others can meet our needs; but that we are continuously creating relationships with the people that ARE willing to meet our needs, so that we can feel the healthy connection we deserve, and quite frankly need in order to happily exist.