Relationships

Being Needed

Daniel Berry · 1 min read · Book excerpt

Excerpt from The Inconvenient HumanWhat We Are Permitted to Become

I was comfortable being needed.

I could provide, protect, solve, work, organize, and carry. Usefulness gave me a role and a measure. If another person needed something from me, I could respond with action. Even when the action was difficult, I understood what strength was supposed to look like.

Needing someone else felt different.

It placed part of my life beyond my control. Another person could misunderstand, disappoint, refuse, leave, or simply be unable to give what I hoped to receive. Need made me visible in exactly the place where the old rule said visibility was dangerous.

The interviews kept finding that place. Desire carried the wish for companionship and the hope of being chosen. Strength raised the question of whether I could accept help without treating it as evidence that I had failed. Recognition, grief, belonging, and faith kept returning me to the people whose love mattered, the people I could lose, the people who would claim me and whom I was responsible to claim, and the God I could not reduce to self-sufficiency.

These were not separate discoveries. They were the same resistance appearing under different names.

I permitted myself to carry more easily than I permitted myself to be carried.

End of excerpt · What We Are Permitted to Become

After the passage

A note from me

Daniel Berry

When the interviews kept returning to the things I found difficult to admit, a pattern began to connect them. I knew how to be useful. I was much less comfortable being the one who needed something.

That reached across parts of my life I had thought of separately: wanting companionship, missing my father, wanting to prove myself through work. The particular circumstances were different. Being seen in need was familiar in all of them.

When I was asked what it would look like to need someone without judging myself for it, my answer was one word: Misha.

There is a lot inside that answer. Being able to let someone see uncertainty. Being open to correction. Being loved without having a finished achievement ready to show for myself. Those were things I recognized as we talked, and things I was still learning how to put into words.

I don't want that to become another job for her. What matters to me here is the room a relationship can make for honesty, including the honesty of admitting that I have something to receive.