Say What You Need

I grew up in an enthusiastically loud and beautifully large family. I am wholeheartedly and eternally grateful for each one of my siblings. When you grow up with a lot of brothers and sisters, you naturally have to sacrifice some of your own wants and desires. Sharing clothes and shoes and rooms and cars is the norm.

And in many ways, this is a really good thing. It teaches you not to be possessive or selfish. It pulls you out of yourself and allows you to focus on others.

But I think it can potentially cause you to subconsciously, or sometimes consciously, stop speaking your needs. When I was young, this wasn’t much of a problem because that third chocolate chip cookie wasn’t so much a need as it was a want.

As I walk through the different seasons of my twenties, however, I am learning that the needs of my heart are exactly that: they are needs. Not wants, but needs for my emotional and spiritual well-being.

Now maybe it wasn’t your family or your upbringing that made you neglect voicing your needs. Maybe it was a toxic relationship or a difficult work environment. Maybe it was someone who told you that your needs were selfish or that the desires of your heart didn’t matter.

Whatever it was, I urge you to identify those people or experiences or situations and start using that knowledge to change.

I was at dinner one night and my friend looked at me across the table and asked me, “What do you need?” I was taken aback. No one had asked me that in a long time. A really really long time.

People tend to ask questions such as, “What do you want?” and, “What can I do for you?” and, “What makes you happy?” But how often do we look at one another, truly look, and ask, “What do you need?”

At the time of that unexpected question, I couldn’t answer it with any certainty. I didn’t know what I needed.

But since that dinner conversation, I have begun to think more and more about what it is that I need. I spent some silent time pondering the depths of my heart and the fears that I tend to suppress on a daily basis.

I am not perfect at it by any means, but I am now much more likely to speak my needs. If I am having a rough day, I will text a friend and ask for a word of encouragement. If I am unsure about a decision, I will speak up and say that I need some time to discern what is best. If I am holding onto some hurt, I will tell someone that I need to talk it out. If I am proud of an accomplishment, I will ask my family and friends to celebrate with me. If I need a quick break at work, I will ask a coworker to help me. If I need a hug, I will ask my sister (fun fact: according to some therapists, you need at least three hugs a day to function as a normal human being).

So this is an invitation and an encouragement for us all: let’s think about and speak our needs. Let’s take time to ask ourselves what we need in order to be fully alive and fully present and fully ourselves. And when we figure out what it is that we need, let’s have the confidence to say it.

[Photo by Nathan Dumlao via Unsplash]

Meet the Author

Catherine Gilmore

Catherine Gilmore is a twenty-something living in St. Louis. She spends most of her teacher income on sweet potato fries and flights around the country to visit her friends. In her free time she enjoys reading good books and drinking espresso, ideally at the same time.

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Featured

Why did you move?

A cardstock print sits propped against the lamp on my desk: a taupe watercolor swipe outlining a peakside Saguaro, the sun a tiny ring above. Beneath this minimalist illustration are these words in typeface: “I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”

I happened upon this notecard-sized print on the way out of a shop last weekend, after already having completed another purchase. It was the last print of its kind in the pile. I had to have it. I returned to the cashier: “This one, too.”

You see, this verse has been a thread weaving through my story, simple words spoken by a prophet long dead, a passage of comfort I’ve returned to again and again since my pilgrimage to the desert four years ago, when I inked a cactus on my wrist.

The Good Old Days

Last week was National Margarita Day.

I did not, however, celebrate the holiday. Truthfully, I’ve yet to find THE Mexican place here in Phoenix. You know the one: gaudy decorations, cheap food, even cheaper margaritas.

But there’s a Mexican restaurant at the corner of Charlotte and Whitebridge in Nashville, TN.

You may have heard of it.

10 Life Lessons This Cross-Country Move is Attempting to Teach Me

There are a few lessons life has attempted to teach me since my move — all things that I haven’t yet spiced up into a full essay, but deserve to be memorialized by my metaphorical pen nonetheless.

So I present a collection of lessons I’ve learned — and am still learning — in the last 3 months.

When The Hardest Thing & The Right Thing Are the Same

“Nuh uh!” I had protested.

The best thing about being 15 years old is that you know absolutely everything there is to know about life.

I certainly did.

I was arguing with my friends over the line in a song from The Fray (#tbt to moody middle school days): “Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.”

Doing the right thing should never be hard, I confidently claimed. Anytime you have the choice to do the right thing, the healthy thing, the thing that builds up rather than tears down, it should never, ever be difficult to choose that.

Like I said, I knew everything.

Of course, 13 years later, I know that I don’t actually know much at all. And I also know that the hardest thing and the right thing are just about ALWAYS the same. It’s madness, really.

A Holy Yes to the Real Things: On Setting Social Media Boundaries

Two and a half hours.

That’s how long I had spent on my phone that day. Reading emails, sure. Responding to texts, some. Catching up on news, a bit. But mostly: scrolling through Instagram.

I had spent an hour of my day clicking through clips of someone else’s life. The sad truth? Some days, I’ve spent way more than just one hour lost to Instagram.

This is where the High School Musical cast flash mobs my brain with “we’re all in this together”—because my educated guess is that you can relate to this daily scroll-fest, too.

Who You Are Now: On Outgrowing Earlier Versions of Yourself

In the last few months, I’ve realized, much to my dismay, that I look older. That I am aging. This sounds dramatic coming from an able-bodied twenty-seven-year old, but it’s true. I didn’t know I found so much worth and security in the way that I looked until I started to notice a difference.

As humans, we note the passing of time in the changes around us. The tree that was once green is now orange, now yellow, now brown and bare. The crack on the stoop starts to grow weeds and crumble. The basil plant gets bigger, the dust on the shelf gets thicker, and the water stain on the ceiling expands to look like a dinosaur. We note these changes with surprise, as if they’ve happened all of a sudden instead of one day at a time.

On Navigating Grief During the Isolation of Quarantine

I read about the third suicide that had happened while we were in quarantine via email from my supervisor.

“I apologize for my absence. As some of you may have heard, my brother committed suicide over the weekend, and my family and I have been grieving this loss.”

I wrote back to the mass email individually saying how sorry I was for her loss, and that I, too, had suffered a loss at this time. Within the last month, I had lost my uncle to a surgery that left him paralyzed for weeks in the hospital. Alone. Without family. And that that had filled my heart with grief in a confusing time that didn’t allow people to gather and grieve the loss of a loved one. Let alone, let them say goodbye.

No Man Is An Island: An Ode to Our Neediness

The last few years of my life—so basically my Full Grown Adult Years—have been a reinforced lesson in this one simple yet slightly-jarring fact: we need each other. I mean, need-NEED each other.

“No man is an island,” says Thomas Merton, and my bae C.S. Lewis backs this up further by writing, “We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.”

We’re meant to be needy, but why is it so hard to acknowledge and accept this?

Say What You Need

Whatever it was, I urge you to identify those people or experiences or situations and start using that knowledge to change.

A Beginner's Guide to the Enneagram

Maybe you, like me, have become curious about the Enneagram because it is popping up everywhere in conversations and on your social media timeline. Maybe you know everything there is to know and have become quite fluent in Ennea-lingo (you even know that there are sub-types!).

Maybe this is the first time you’re ever hearing about this weird test and you’ve spent the last four paragraphs trying to figure out how to even pronounce the word “Enneagram” (In-ee-a-gram, for the record).

No matter where you’re at, we can all use some guidelines when it comes to personality tests, because none of us are immune to over-identifying, self-shaming, and becoming a walking personality-test-fulfilling prophesy. So, without further ado, here are my dos and don’ts of Enneagram-ing.

The Battle to Overcome Your Rejection

Rejection is an issue I’ve had to wrestle hard with over the last three years. Every time Rejection and I had to face off in the boxing arena, I would always end up slammed and pinned down. In boxing, you have ten seconds to get yourself up before the game is over. For me, it took months before I could even peel my head off the floor.

How to Respond to Someone Else's Grief

But this post isn't about my own grief. It's not about the tears I've cried, or the questions I've asked. It’s not about my own days where getting out of bed felt too hard.

It's about a different side of the fight. It's about your mom's grief when she loses her college roommate. And your best friend after she has a miscarriage. It’s about all the people you encounter, telling you about their grief.

Health, RelationshipsCatherine GilmoreAugust 10, 2019FeaturedComment

Say What You Need

Catherine Gilmore is a twenty-something living in St. Louis. She spends most of her teacher income on sweet potato fries and flights around the country to visit her friends. In her free time she enjoys reading good books and drinking espresso, ideally at the same time.

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