Yesterday, I had a lovely video chat with one of my best friends from grad school and, among other things, in our conversation they quoted a very powerful and enlightening sentence from the book Wintering by Katherine May: “My needs are reasonable”.
Encouraged by this and another close friend, I read the book Wintering during my own “wintering” here in Colorado in February 2022. I didn’t remember that speficic sentence from the book but I’m glad my friend quoted it yesterday — and I will definitely remember it now!
Like many of us, I wasn’t taught that my needs are reasonable. On the contrary, I was often given the message that my needs were unreasonable, unworthy, out of place, or irrelevant. And that other people’s needs were the really important ones, more important than my own, and that as such they should be heeded and met before/rather than my own.
Fortunately, I also met many persons along the way who saw, understood, and valued me & my needs, and gave space to them. Learning to actually make space for myself & my own needs, though, has been a long, late, and often difficult lesson for me to learn — one that I am still learning and trying to practice.
Often, I’ve realized, I need to get to the “breaking point”, to the point where “I’m done” and so anger or frustration become the main fuel for me to make my needs heard. I’ve learned to harness this anger into a form of constructive energy to move me forward, but still I think there could be less painful ways of making space for myself and my needs. For instance, by keeping in mind that seemingly simple but extremely powerful sentence: “My needs are reasonable”.
The Little Prince and the Fox 