Wanting Without Asking

Desire vs. Choice

It’s not being chosen that scares me. It’s the other side of the coin.
Not being chosen. Not being loved. Not being understood.

It’s easier to feign indifference than to acknowledge the hollow in your chest – the part of you that still speaks in the language of a child who just wants to be loved the way she knows how.

I learned very young how much it hurts to want something and not get it. I told myself other people worked for the things they were given, so I decided to do the same. I did chores. I earned. I waited. And when I finally asked, it felt rewarding, like proof that effort could protect me from disappointment.

But watching others receive things simply by asking did something to me.
They didn’t have to earn their wanting.
That part of me never healed.

I still live by the same logic now. I’ve worked hard to make myself valuable, because if someone rejects me, I can tell myself it’s their loss. I can survive that story. But asking without anything to offer – asking with open hands, terrifies me.

I learned early that love is conditional. That sometimes it’s hard to love what you don’t understand. That doesn’t make anything less valuable, that’s easy to say when you’re trying to soothe the ache. It’s much harder to accept when people struggle to love you because you’ve built a fortress around yourself and called it dignity.

Silence feels like dignity to me.
Rejection feels like the end of me.

So I learned to be curious about things instead of people.

I hear people talk about wanting friends desperately as children, then becoming the center of attention later, loud, charming, loved, only to feel hollow. I recognize the longing, but not the transformation. I was never the center of attention. I always said the wrong thing. Or the right thing, wrong. My words weren’t soft enough to pass as jokes, and it hurt to watch people get angry with me.

I never corrected it. I was too proud to say I was only joking.

I would come home and hug myself, convincing myself they were idiots. And for a while, it worked. But the question never went away.

How do I convince myself that my currency is valuable if no one wants it?
If I’ve been looking for its recipient for decades and still haven’t found one.

Does that make it rare?
Or simply unwanted?