Dear readers,
I wanted to say hi to all of the new folks that just subscribed over the past week and say thank you to everyone who signed up for a paid subscription since my last post!! I’m now sitting at 123 paid subscriptions, up 20 from last week!! Thank you for getting me one step closer to living out my dream of being paid for my writing. My goal is to reach 250 paid subscribers by the end of this year. This would mean that my substack would bring in 1/4 to 1/3 of my monthly income. It would mean the world to me if you’d consider helping me achieve this goal.
With love and gratitude,
Margeaux
The Myth of Neediness
I’m standing in the kitchen with my partner, F, as we make dinner together. I feel their arms wrap around me from behind, embracing me in a hug as I chop tomatoes. When I turn around to kiss them, F tells me “I feel so needy right now.” Immediately, I get up in my head and give them a cerebral response to their bid for reassurance: “Neediness is just a myth that is useful for the patriarchy and capitalism because it ensures that we only get scraps — and convinces us that that’s all we deserve.”
I didn’t want to respond by saying “You’re not needy,” because, frankly, I move back and forth between wanting to eradicate that word from my vocabulary and wanting to reclaim it, as I’ve done with the word “hysterical.” And yet, in that moment, I can see how my intellectual response was not what F needed or wanted in that moment. In hindsight, what I wish I’d said is “If you’re needy, then I’m needy too” or “I love neediness. I love how vulnerably you make your need of me known.” It is truly one of their most beautiful qualities.
And yet, we’ve been made to feel like neediness is a problem. When I search for a definition, here’s what I find:
Low self-esteem, insecurity, fear of abandonment;
Need for validation; constantly seek reassurance, approval, and support from others;
Clinginess; difficulty being alone; may cling tightly to relationships;
Struggles to make decisions without reassurance;
Hard feelings when partner isn’t around / is with others;
Need for intimacy; want to be very close to their partner and fear that their partner doesn't want to be as close as they want;
Wants constant attention.
What gives me pause about these defining characteristics is that we live in a culture that is so uncomfortable with validation; that sees our need for approval, support, or reassurance as a negative — as if our choices don’t impact others. In this world, commitment can all too easily become synonymous with clinginess, and missing your partner and wanting to spend all of your time with them = weakness. I just can’t help but LOL at the fact that “need for intimacy” is literally a bullet point here. In a world in which we’re constantly on our phones and scrolling social media, wanting attention might easily feel like neediness.
As a human with a deep fear of abandonment, I do need pretty regular affirmation from my partner and my chosen humans. They have never perceived this as too much or a negative. When I ask “Do you love me?” I am met with “I love you so much!” At the end of the day, it’s true that no amount of external validation will ever be enough if we haven’t done our internal work. But enough with the “you can’t love others until you love yourself” myth while we’re at it! We learn to love ourselves through the love we receive growing up. And if we didn’t receive that love, then guess what? We’re going to need to receive it as adults.
Despite the fact that I can intellectually challenge how we define neediness, I get F’s fear of being needy. It’s hard for me to pinpoint a single clear memory, but I know that I’ve been told I’m needy countless times from my adolescence and into my adulthood. More often than not, it’s not an explicit statement but rather a response to my needs that has made me feel like I’m asking for too much, that what I need exceeds the bounds of what is reasonable. Being needy and irrational tend to go hand in hand.
What I also find so compelling about neediness — and here the desire to reclaim it emerges — is how we’ve been taught to be disgusted by it. I open another window and google “the myth of neediness” to see what comes up, and here’s what I find:
In response to the question “Why is neediness such a repulsive characteristic?” people share a similar answer: that we label people needy when really the issue is that we don’t want to give them what they need or don’t want to receive what they want to give us. In framing the other person as needy, we place the blame on them, and do not interrogate it why it is that we feel this repulsion. For when repulsion is present, there’s always an underlying message waiting for us.
The other reason most commonly listed is that we see neediness as antithetical to independence and that it can lead to a co-dependent relationship. What I always find so fascinating when reading about co-dependence is the lack of discussion around interdependence. Either you’re independent or you’re co-dependent. But interdependence teaches us that we fundamentally need one another. I’ve learnt so much about how important it is to have our attachment needs met in our early development and the scary reality is that so many of us grew up with unmet needs. To add insult to injury, we may have been taught that our needs did not matter and/or made others angry or withholding. In this landscape need becomes neediness.
I get why we’re so focused on independence and ignore or simply don’t know that interdependence is another viable option. Systems of oppression understand that community and connection are threats. We are stronger together. By isolating us, by pitting us against on another, by championing the just pick yourself up by the bootstraps mentality, these systems maintain power over us. The concept of neediness becomes a tool that enables these systems to thrive.
We can see evidence of this in the way that calls for mutual aid are suppressed by the Instagram algorithm — and that’s just one example. I also can’t help but acknowledge how those in greatest need are those most likely to give to others in need: poor4poor mutual aid. Because we know that we need each other — that the institutions that are supposed to support us will do little to nothing to help us.
I guess what I’m saying is that I want us to be needy — in a consensual way of course! I want us to get curious about our own discomfort at someone else’s needs. To get to the root of why we’re so quick to label one another as clingy or needy. Because when we do that, I think that we might find a deep desire to be needed deeply by another. That our neediness is what makes us vulnerable and our vulnerability is what makes us human.
Culture Diary
This week has honestly just been more of the same with a lot of my attention going to reading about and watching the student protests on campuses across Turtle Island. I’ve been so deeply moved by their activism and enraged — but not surprised — by the university’s investment in imperialism and colonialism. Here’s a video I watched of a father showing up to support his child at the USC campus on Wednesday that pretty much made me cry.
And I loved, loved, loved this post from Palestinian poet Hala Alyan:
Finally, I made a series of memes talking about activism as trauma healing, and my amazing friend and collaborator at Disobedient Goods and Apparel offered to turn them into coloring stickers!! All of the profits will be supporting a Palestinian family in need. If you’re interested in the stickers and don’t wanna miss out, you can respond to the pinned comment on the post — and if you’re not on IG, you can drop a comment and I’ll let you know when they’re ready to go!
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I’m not on IG but would love to know when the collab stickers are available! ty 🩷