Do you want the truth? Well, here it is. Our longings are rarely true to what we actually need. We instead pursue what we want. Want isn’t a divinely created spark, it’s a reaction. We give ourselves a ‘want’ like a parent trying to distract a crying child with a toy. We know that something is missing, and we look for that person or thing that can fill that space. The hungry want food. The lonely wish for friends. The childless wish for a new life to hold.

Why, then, can the lonely person find all of these new people suffocating and overwhelming? Given a precious new life, why would a parent proceed to mold, restrict, and impose upon their child everything they wish their life had been? Perhaps, the lonely person didn’t truly need other people but needed to stop abandoning themselves. Their own inner life had gaps that left them disconnected from their own needs. The childless deserve a baby, but not so they can abandon their own life in favor of living their child’s life for them. This, and this alone, is the reason we can be given everything we think we’ve ever wanted, only to find it still isn’t enough. As to the hungry, well, we do all need to eat. I’m not saying we get everything wrong – just a lot.

What if we took the time to understand what we truly need, instead of plastering a ‘want’ on top of our wounds like a band aid on a scraped knee? That’s the ideal and I can advocate for this all day long, but my truth is that if my mother hadn’t been grief stricken and trying to assuage her pain with another child, I would never have been adopted. So perhaps, rather than wholeness, perhaps it is the imperfect in our lives that shines a light we can follow.

The above is a section I ultimately cut from a short story I’m working on, but the prose isn’t bad and the message rings true – at least for me – so why not give it another chance to die in obscurity somewhere else? The underlying theme is a quest for belonging and how that has played out in my life. Names have been changed to protect the innocent, but many of the things I’m writing about really did happen to me.

I started this website in 2019 because I wanted to write. I had recently left a career in corporate sales and my partner and I were off on a new adventure. We’ve had quite a few since then, and I’ve spent a lot less time writing than I thought I would. As it turns out, life had other things to teach me.

I did keep a favorite quote in my story-small except to follow:

The love I have with Robert is strong enough that it’s given me the space to understand that the relationship I’ve really needed was with who is inside of me. The newborn whose mother never held her. The adolescent who lost her father too early. The teenager who understood love so poorly but craved it so much that she found herself a mother before she ever made it to adulthood. Those damaged, time stamp versions of myself will always be with me.

Robert Frost wrote, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Some might argue that our families are our first home, but couldn’t the truest expression of family be found in belonging to yourself? To give all of those versions a place where they’ll always be taken in?

I wonder – if I truly belong to myself – would I even need to belong anywhere else?