“I keep habitually mistaking my need for physical strength, spiritual connection and purpose in work for hunger for food and romance and love.
Is this a gender programmed thing?”
Then I will ask — What do you need out of life? What determines what you need out of life? (This is for you to answer, of course.) It is widely repeated that humans must fulfill their tiered physiological, then security, then belongingness, next self-esteem, finally self-actualization needs. The legend goes that you must complete each layer of the pyramid before building higher.
The order these needs are fulfilled are dependent on what is needed in your life, to a certain level. Physiological needs often cannot be outright denied, but they can be delayed or paused to different extents, and different effects. The higher needs can be delayed, paused, and even wholly denied over the course of someone’s life. Sometimes, the scaffolding of a higher need is required to generate the will precedent to the lower needs. Therefore, we need to use more nuanced derivations to discuss this.
A need is one that you can fulfill without much effort, without grasping and struggling for the motivation, or the energy, to fulfill. Air is one of these, until you realize you need to re-learn how to breathe, after you’ve cleared a bunch of other residuum out of the way. If it is not easy, then at least it is one that you know how to complete, and how to if you cannot. Otherwise it transforms into a need.
A need is one that exists just beyond reach, until it doesn’t anymore. It could be a known or unknown unknown. There is an art to discerning what these needs are, as often they are expressed first as structures of feelings and only crystalize when others are met, or when conditions are right, or when the world requires them from you.
There is an emotion to needs, and especially to needs. When you are young, you can feel hunger or danger or the desire for a hug in your hands, your legs, your stomach, or your mind, or however you feel. Over time, you might resolve some of them, and they become needs, whispers that instruct you without much effort, when you have them figured out. The needs are confusing, and sometimes impenetrably so, but usually there is a path to accomplish them or some similarly satisfying end, with some exploration.
The actions and discernment you enact are the path, and if you look at what you do and what you have done, you can separate the psychological pull of the needs you know, or at least know how to not know, from the ones that are new or foreign.
The question above asks how we can tell between being caught in a loop of needs by an unfulfilled need.
When you need something, sit with it for a moment. Let it get a little larger, and ask your body, or mind, or soul, what it thinks you need. Ask yourself to be specific. You can fulfill the need, if it doesn’t seem especially harmful, but do not allow the state of confusion to imbalance you.
If you have enough of these needs on reflection but still feel urges towards continuing to fulfill them, consider:
1. Whether you are getting them in high enough quality that they make a notable positive impact on your life (high nutrient foods that you enjoy eating; good quality people who you resonate with)
2. Whether you are getting them in high enough quantity that it actually is enough (diversity of thought and kinds of engagement with others, restricted quantities of certain food groups/general restriction of food that you tell yourself is enough)
3. Whether you are lacking in a different need you don’t normally think about or have not checked on in a while? (health? water/air quality? psychological clarity? etc?)
If you still think you have enough of these things, you may need to recalibrate and clarify what your felt-sense of need is asking for. If you are not accustomed to needing things like physical strength, spiritual connection, or purpose, you may not be able to innately understand this is the cause of your longing and address it appropriately.
To do this, you may develop a need to delay your need, and speak with it. Let it expand inside, after you know you have satisfied these base tier needs, until it is the last that remains, or the largest one. Then you must figure out what to do with it, if anything.
Here is how I discerned one of my own, unspecified needs that hung over me like a cloud. I am transgender, and Gender is one of my base needs that I am not really able to naturally fulfill in the same way many others do. It is not a matter of social acceptance: it is one of internal right-hood and resonance between my body and Spirit and brain. When I am on testosterone, everything functions as it should, as I assume that others’ are coordinating by default in the most optimal circumstances. I can think; I can be. When I am on estrogen (my base setting) I feel hazy, abberational, incompetent, and craven.
For years I endured this acid miasma swirling within. I tried addressing the impacts it had on my life, the crushing mental illnesses and social difficulties and physical self-incompatibility, but nothing cleared the fog between me and the world. I became allergic to the standard antidepressant fluoxetine (prozac) within months of taking it, the only case my doctor has heard of, and it was the same with ritalin and with engineering school and with anorexia. I abused my body and mind with these social technologies until I decided to just let myself hate myself in a loving way. Acceptance.
That mental state fortunately coincided with an extremely positive period in my life, law school. I was surrounded by other similar nerds, and at last I had autonomy.
This autonomy let me fulfill so many of my base and even higher needs, which then receded into being needs, that I was able to see clearly the storm which had brewed inside me since i was small, and knew nothing but that it all felt wrong. Then the need finally found the conditions it needed to crystalize and birth into my awareness. I could ignore it and know it, or i could commit and feel it. I chose to commit.
The needs, given the space and time required for it to flourish, has transformed me into a better version of myself and continues to every day. It allows me to navigate the world with a kinder and healthier relational field, because I do not hate myself or feel constantly unfulfilled. It has become a need at last.
This brings us to the other end of this equation. Do you feel better off, having expressed and enacted the need? Has your acid miasma hurricane, or whatever your metaphor is, evaporated in the light of your own fulfillment and ease?
Beyond that, what happens if you require the structure of self-actualization or self-esteem to want to fulfill, or to fulfill your actual, security and physiological needs? Will the equilibrium you find, that generates your security, reorder itself so thoroughly around you that you recognize yourself in the world rather than it in you? What next, if the process reorders you as well, and makes you reconsider all those automatic needs?