diversity | Harvesting Stones

Neighborhood

by Jenny Rose | Aug 17, 2024 | Connection & Community, Emotional Intelligence, Holistic Management

I walk the short distance to work whenever I can. My route takes me to a grassy hill between the neighborhood and the hospital (I work in Rehab) emergency room parking lot. A small pond (sadly, lots of trash) is on one side of the path at the foot of the hill. The other side is a watershed, thick with growth and, I’m sure, ticks. The path leads straight up the hillside and walking it is a daily blessing.

This small patch of land surrounded by structures, roads, parking lots, and traffic is abundant with life in spite of the trash that comes to rest there. I frequently see ducks on the pond, though they don’t seem to nest there. I wouldn’t, either. Frogs sing and croak. Birds, insects, and an occasional urban deer, fox, skunk, and woodchuck make this wild area home.

Photo by Nanda Green on Unsplash

What I pay the most attention to, though, is the plant life in the meadow. Once or twice a year it’s mowed, but in between mowing it’s left alone and the footpath wanders through, giving me an intimate look at the cycles and seasons of local grasses and plants.

This is what I want my little piece of the world, the corner lot where I live, to look like. I don’t want a neat, unnaturally green, scalped, herbicide-soaked, artificially fertilized sterile lawn with dead soil that looks the same from May to October. I don’t want concentration camp gardens filled with ornamental non-native plants, each pruned, dead-headed, and isolated in beds of dyed mulch.

My time outside in the garden is a lifeline. On Fridays I feel undone: exhausted, hypersensitive, overstimulated, overwrought, and depressed. I wonder what it’s all for, the striving, the giving, the endless tasks not only at work but in general. Groceries. Recycling. Feeding myself. Caring for the cats. Laundry and housework. The news cycle, a never ending hurricane of crashing real estate markets, apocalyptic weather events, fire, pollution, social unrest, war, and politics.

But then I have a day in the garden. It’s not too hot and humid. It’s not raining. I don’t have other obligations. I put on my gardening clothes, spray bug dope against the mosquitoes, gather tools, and step into another world in which my mind is empty, my spirit soothed, and no person needs me in any way. I become part of the green world, just another life in the garden, my knees rooted in dirt, my hands muddy and stained with sap, my nose filled with the scents of life. I remember this is what it’s all for: just the experience of a humble life among uncountable other lives.

One of my neighbors mentioned crabgrass the other day as we chatted. She was complaining about it “popping up everywhere” in her nice, neat, closely shaved lawn. I was conscious of the sprawling crabgrass lining my own sidewalk and driveway a few feet away as we talked, half amused, half embarrassed. She and her husband are retirees. I work 32 hours a week, in addition to writing as many hours as I can. It’s been a hot, humid summer, and I don’t work outside when the heat index is high.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Even if I wasn’t so busy, I wouldn’t be mowing frequently or so brutally as most people do. In fact, my goal is to eventually mow (or better yet, build) a simple path around the property and call it good. I won’t, under any circumstances, use herbicide. I let many leaves lie where they fall in autumn. If I do rake, the leaves and debris go into the compost. I refrain from raking early in the spring because I know winter debris provides cover for countless small creatures just beginning to stir and warm into life.

A weed is defined by Oxford Online Dictionary as “a wild plant growing where it is not wanted and in competition with cultivated plants.” I looked up crabgrass, along with purslane and creeping Charlie, both of which I have on my property. Neither crabgrass nor purslane, according to my search, are original natives to Maine. On the other hand, they both grow everywhere around the globe now. I wonder, at which point do we stop distinguishing between native and non-native plants? After 50 years? 100 years? Centuries?

How about people? Is immigration status more important than our shared humanity? How much time passes before we’re “natives” to any particular place, how many generations? Aren’t we all natives on this planet?

To all intents and purposes, both purslane and crabgrass are native to Maine now. Purslane can be eaten by humans and has traditional medical uses. Crabgrass functions to bind the soil and stop erosion. That seems valuable to me in a world full of increasing flooding, fire, and disturbed ground. Anything that fixes the soil in place is helping build healthy soil. Need I mention we depend on healthy soil for all our food?

Who, I wonder, is growing “weeds,” Mother Nature or I? Mother Nature’s agenda is to build healthy, diverse communities, both within the soil and above it, perfectly suited to Maine’s climate and animals. If I spend the rest of my life on my hands and knees digging up crabgrass and other “weeds” and/or spray poison all over the property because of “pests” and “weeds” while nurturing exotics of no benefit to the biome because I (and the neighbors) like the way they look, it seems to me I’m waging an expensive (in more ways than one) war I can never win trying to grow ornamentals that will be out-competed at every turn by native plants that feed native insects and birds.

Photo by Henry Be on Unsplash

I think of all this as I walk up and down the hill to work several times a week. I bring sprigs of plants inside from my garden and yard and the hill to identify. I keep running lists in my head, admire nature’s color combinations and mingling of low understory plants and taller, more showy ones. The hill is always in bloom, from last frost to first. No human designer or planner needed.

I often think about balance, which seems to me a key to life. I often think about diversity. We know now healthy landscapes have a large quorum of plants of all kinds. My “lawn,” by which I mean the grassy areas we currently mow, consists of grasses, yes, (including crabgrass), as well as ground ivy, or creeping Charlie, three different kinds of clover, wild strawberries, plantain, several varieties of aster, and who knows what I have not yet identified? I don’t want fewer “weeds,” I want more.

On the other hand (and isn’t there always another hand?) I do pull out bindweed when I find it. I dig up dock and don’t let it go to seed. I pull wild strawberries and creeping Charlie out of garden beds. I keep certain things in check, but I don’t want to eradicate them altogether. They live here. They feed other creatures that live here. There’s enough genocide in the world, don’t you think? If one variety of plant is out of balance in any given area, I work to understand why. What other natives can I add to that area? How can I amend the soil? What are the conditions dislocating the balance? Certainly, some non-native plants are invasive; they will take over and push out native growth if allowed.

So why insist on planting them?

I also compost and compost and compost. I disturb the soil as little as possible. I build new beds without digging. I don’t commercially fertilize or buy soil or mulch. I don’t dead head much; I want things to self-sow.

Photo by Alejandro Escamilla on Unsplash

Gardening is a practice, one that never ends. My little piece of land doesn’t look like the ones around me. Occasionally passers-by ask me what I’m doing, but a pedantic explanation makes their eyes glaze over quickly, so I usually assure them in time this will be a hedge, this will be a new bed, and this area will be filled with native wildflowers. Maybe they will see the beauty and make different choices on their own properties. I hope for that. Maybe then they’ll be more interested in rewilding, complexity, diversity, and quorums. Maybe.

I wish I could get my human neighbors to expand their definition of neighborhood to include all the life in these few square blocks of a small city in central Maine on the Kennebec River, the life that was here before the streets and structures existed. The green neighborhood, the animal neighborhood, the natives.

In the meantime, this is what I can do. This makes me happy. It feels like the right thing. In the dead end of winter, when the seed catalogues come, I’ll jump online and see if I can find native chicory, so lovely mingled with Queen Anne’s lace, which I already have; wild white daisies; buttercups; more harebells and fireweed; bluets for a low wet spot; pink and orange milkweed for the butterflies; native bergamot; purple vetch; bird’s foot trefoil …

Questions:

What are the names of “weeds” in your area? What roles do they play in your biome?
What would it take for you to redefine a “weed” as a wanted plant?
How do you feel about neighbors (if you have any) who allow “weeds” to grow on their property? Has it been a source of tension or conflict?
How much money do your spend on your garden/yard? Do you feel pressured by the eyes of your neighbors?

Healthy Self, Healthy Community

by Jenny Rose | Aug 3, 2024 | Connection & Community, Emotional Intelligence

I received some second-hand feedback regarding my last post that’s had me thinking further about this idea of taking one’s own breath away.

We exist as individuals, and we also exist in relationship to others, and not only with our own species. In fact, as I reread the last statement, I realize it doesn’t quite reflect reality. We think of ourselves as discrete, separate individuals. “I.” “Me.” Yet it would be more accurate to say “we” and “us,” for we are each a world of microorganisms, internally and externally. Without all these bacteria, fungi, and other tiny organisms we couldn’t live. They facilitate everything from our digestion to our skin and mucous membrane health.

Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash

The point remains; however, we are each a part of ever-enlarging communities, from micro to macro. Oxford Online Dictionary defines ‘community’ as a group living in the same place or having specific characteristic(s) in common. A second definition is a “feeling of fellowship” with others because of common values, goals, and beliefs.

Community, in other words, is a fundamental human experience and shapes us in myriad ways. We are a social species; we need one another. I’ve been fighting with that reality all my life.

I believe much of our journey in life is about managing the continuum between narcissism (grandiose sense of self-importance, lack of empathy for others, need for excessive admiration, belief that one is deserving of special treatment) and echoism (a fear-driven compulsion to prioritize others’ needs).

That unwieldy balance necessarily takes place within the inescapable context of community.

It’s complicated.

We all know communities vary. Most of us acknowledge being part of several communities. Often our identities are inextricably bound with community membership, in the case of religion or family, for example. These bonds are very strong.

As I think about and participate in communities, I think about health. Am I healthy enough to function effectively and appropriately in my community? Is my community a healthy place for me?

Community is both a mirror and a crucible. Communities formed as social bubbles and echo chambers can be deeply comforting and validating. Everyone is like us. Everyone believes what we believe. We experience no discomfort or friction. We’re assured of our rightness, our clarity, our moral ground. We know the Truth. We never have to reconsider, find out we’re wrong, grow, learn new things, or change. We stand on solid ground and look into mirrors reflecting us exactly as we want to be seen.

Communities formed as crucibles, such as work, volunteer groups or neighborhood groups, are not so comfortable. In these communities we will experience conflict and friction. Everyone does not share our values and beliefs. Because everyone is not the same, we get glimpses of parts of ourselves we’d rather not see or have seen by others. We can’t hide our flaws and weaknesses, mistakes and missteps. We receive various kinds of feedback. We feel defensive, exposed, ashamed.

Photo by Cristian Newman on Unsplash

Crucibles are cradles for alchemy and change. They trigger our old traumas and shames without notice. They bring us face to face with ourselves and relentlessly demonstrate the effect of our behavior on others.

I observe that people who primarily interact in mirror communities are often black and white in their thinking. You’re for us or against us. You’re Us or you’re Them.

This kind of thinking strikes me as silly and unintelligent. The older I get, the more shades of grey I discover. Accepting shades of grey, however, is a lot more interpersonal and personal work than black or white labels. Shades of grey mean we have to think carefully about what we value and believe and why. We might have to defend our views. We might ask or be asked uncomfortable questions. Others might become annoyed, offended, or hurt by our position. People might try to make us small and silent, or fit us into a box so they can feel more comfortable with us.

We might let them.

I have often let them. And that’s about my own health. Healthy crucible communities empower rather than disempower; empowerment brings responsibility. A responsibility to be the healthiest and most whole person I can be. A responsibility to practice tolerance and respect towards myself and everyone around me. That means I’m responsible for my boundaries, my integrity, and my resilience.

The health of individuals in the community directly correlates to the health of the community itself; I don’t want to be the limiting factor in any community I’m a part of.

Striving for increased health and wholeness is a practice rather than a destination. Some days I feel like a shattered mess that can never be mended or healed. Other days I feel like a good-enough person, or maybe even a little better than that. I care about the people around me. My challenge is to care about myself equally, to hold my needs as important as those of others, to attend to my own well-being before becoming absorbed in caring for others. I don’t believe this makes me a narcissist, but it does move me away from echoism. People who view my behavior as narcissistic have perhaps benefited from those who, like me, have poured themselves out into others with no thought or responsibility for themselves.

Image by Bob Dmyt from Pixabay

I am fortunate to have a true healthy community; the first I’ve ever participated in with any degree of authenticity and vulnerability. My greatest fears have been realized, more than once. I am seen a great deal more clearly than I wish to be. I am cared about, a very uncomfortable state of affairs. When I make mistakes or my judgment is poor, everyone sees, everyone knows, and it feels disastrous. I am frequently uncomfortable because some of my belief systems and lifestyle choices are different from those around me.

The same is true for everyone in my community. We see each other, and we make room for each other with affection, humor, and occasional irritation that only underlines our caring.

I’m not embedded in a mirror, but in a crucible, and I wouldn’t choose differently. As uncomfortable (terrifying) and messy and even humiliating as it sometimes is, my interaction in my community is making me a better person in every possible way; I see myself in a community context in ways I never would alone or in a mirror community. My community expands my humility, forces me to become more resilient, pushes my boundaries, and teaches me that what really matters is friendship and respect, not lifestyle choices and differing belief systems.

Every day I take things I’ve learned in my community and turn them over, sometimes cry over them, figure out how to grow and change and be more effective. I do it for me … and for them. I do it because it’s a challenge, it’s fascinating, it’s growthful, and I don’t want to be part of a mirror community. I like diversity, as uncomfortable as it can be. Diversity makes me bigger and wiser.

The phrase “the public eye” is so amorphous as to be useless. I’m not concerned with what the stranger on the street thinks of me, if indeed they spare a thought for me at all. But I do care what my community thinks of me, because I know I’m valued for myself, imperfect and weird as I am. I trust them enough to allow them to help me grow. I don’t feel pressured to be like any one of them; rather the pressure is to be the best version of myself possible, which is exactly what I want for them.

The best versions of myself take my own breath away now and then, the root of my last post.

Healthy community is absolutely essential for all of us, in my view. So is the ability to self-reflect and accept ourselves with love and grace. I want to respond to those around me with tolerance and respect, and I learn to do that best as I practice tolerance and respect with myself. As I see myself more clearly and kindly, I see others more clearly and kindly. As I foster my own growth and change, I can better foster the growth and change of those around me.

Healthy communities depend on healthy individuals, or at least communities committed to health need individuals committed to their own health. That’s what works. Neither echoism nor narcissism build health or growth of any kind for anyone.

Questions:

Name three communities you feel a part of. Is each one more of a mirror or a crucible?
Which of your communities feels most healthy? Least healthy?
What do you find hardest about being in community?

The Art of Disagreement

by Jenny Rose | Oct 1, 2022 | Connection & Community, Emotional Intelligence

What happens when we disagree?

Not if we disagree, but when. Because we will always disagree eventually. Always.

Photo by roya ann miller on Unsplash

Is that bad?

It depends who you ask!

Disagreement, or lack of consensus, is going to happen whenever two or more of us are interacting. Why, then, has it become so risky, this perfectly normal opportunity to show our work or learn another point of view? Why are we so insecure we can’t tolerate the slightest disagreement? Are our egos so fragile we can’t stand to be wrong or rethink a position? Does our fear of moral condemnation outweigh our ability to consider ideas and information (facts) clearly and critically and speak honestly about our conclusions?

When did differing opinions become a matter of hate and violence, and speaking our truth start leading to such brutal consequences?

Do we no longer understand how to agree to disagree?

Will authoritarianism ever lead to true agreement, or is the best we can hope for a sullen silence and mandated obedience?

(Don’t forget the French revolution.)

Certainly, it appears more and more people value power over truth, rigidity over resilience, and mindless agreement over genuine collaboration and teamwork.

If we must be in agreement all the time, there’s no hope of true cooperation and we each remain locked in our own narrow impoverished bubble, interacting only with those whose bubbles look exactly like ours. Except I don’t know of anyone who has exactly the same bubble as another. But then we’re experts at constructing believable facades.

Insisting on 100% agreement all the time guarantees cultural collapse. We can’t do it. We’re not made that way. It’s a social dead end for humanity. We cannot thrive or even survive without a healthy complex social system among our own kind as well as with countless other forms of life.

The friction of disagreement, of difference, is essential. It keeps us flexible and demands we exercise our learning and listening skills as well as use our imagination and empathy. Disagreement is a sign of respect and caring, both for ourselves and our point of view and experience, and for others. If we care enough to disagree openly and peacefully, we’re signaling our willingness to make an authentic commitment and contribution. We’re not sitting back accepting brainwashing passively, but actively participating and engaged, examining, exploring, and asking questions about whatever is in our attention.

At least some of us are.

Others demand an environment of complete agreement with no questions asked. Heavy social penalties occur if someone steps out of line. There is no negotiation, no cooperation, no discussion, no new information or showing of work. You will agree and obey. Or else.

Photo by James Pond on Unsplash

Fortunately, we humans have a wide rebellious streak, some more than others. Certain people are never going to sit down and shut up. Certain people do not worship the status quo, especially if it doesn’t serve the majority. These folks disagree, and they say so. They provide information (facts) to back up their point of view. They ask inconvenient and uncomfortable questions. They shine the clear light of critical thinking on issues and ideology.

They don’t drink the Kool-Aid.

Disagreement does not need to be a call to arms. It’s not hate. It’s not disrespect or intolerance. It’s not prejudice or bigotry. It doesn’t mean we have to cut perfectly healthy relationships out of our lives. Disagreement is a chance for connection and an expanded empathy. It’s an opportunity to learn. Disagreement is a sign of diversity, and a diverse system is a healthy one.

A system in which disagreement is forbidden cannot thrive, adapt, and grow. It’s brittle and stunted, just like the scared, shriveled human beings controlling it.

Want peace? Want tolerance, justice, and respect? Learn, demonstrate, teach, and support the kind and gentle art of disagreement.

Photo by Brigitte Tohm on Unsplash

Meditations From the Garden

by Jenny Rose | Jun 11, 2020 | Connection & Community, Emotional Intelligence, Holistic Management

I tried hard this week to come up with a way to write about racism and hate in general, but I just couldn’t get a creative, thoughtful grasp on it. No wonder. Hatred is not creative, unless in a negative sense. How many ways can I hurt or murder someone because of my judgement about their worth? Not the kind of creativity I’m interested in.

I’ve been sitting out on the front porch in the sun, relishing the breeze, watching the thumb-sized bumblebees plunder the lupine and the hummingbirds zoom around the feeder after a couple of hours of mulching, weeding, watering, trimming and planting. I haven’t been reading or writing, just drinking a large glass of mint and lemon iced tea and feeling happy, absorbing the peace and beauty of this day, enjoying the wind chimes and the sun on my skin.

Alongside the driveway we have a lupine bed. It wasn’t planned. It started, years ago, with one plant that now has become countless plants. There’s also echinacea, several kinds of wildflowers, and this year we put in pink poppies, two cleomes, lilies, sunflowers, and a starflower.

As it wasn’t a formally planned bed, the first clump of lupine went into a hole in the ground and grasses and other native growth mingle with the flowers. I’m building a border out of dead wood from our downed trees. The flowers have self-seeded and the bed sprawls, in no particular shape, most of it with undefined boundaries.

Yesterday, my partner and I were looking closely at the lupine, which is in full bloom.

I have learned, since I came to Maine, about holistic gardening and land management, and I’ve understood effective gardening is not creating a concentration camp for plants. Nature is a gardener, and a bed like ours, organic, dynamic and without any kind of fertilizer, pesticide or other chemicals, demonstrates the diversity necessary for the health of the whole system.

As we looked closely, we found a cluster of juvenile Japanese beetles on a low, sheltered leaf, and another cluster of tiny ticks. Obviously, the bed is a good nursery. A variety of bees were present. We saw a lacewing, an excellent predator, and aphids. Yellow jackets zoomed around, along with dragonflies (another welcome predator). Immature grasshoppers were plentiful, and spiders. Several kinds of butterflies floated above the flowers.

We didn’t see slugs, ants, praying mantises, caterpillars, earwigs or ladybugs, but they’re probably all present, along with mice, shrews and perhaps a mole.

The lupine and some of the grasses are now quite tall and thick. Other, later-blooming plants like echinacea are coming along, but not as high yet. As the lupine fade and lose height, the echinacea will come into its own. The bed is filled with wild low-growing plants, too, like clover, basil, grasses, dandelions, chamomile and violets. With any luck, there’s a grass snake or two under all that growth, and maybe a toad or a lizard in the cool, damp shade.

Milkweed grows there. When it blooms it will feed the endangered Monarch butterflies.

We don’t water the lupine bed, aside from giving the new seedlings a little drink when it hasn’t rained in a few days. We don’t cultivate, weed, or really mess with it in any way. The logs I’m using for a border are to help my partner when he’s mowing and keep the self-sowing lupine in check. Now and then we use our sharp little hand scythe to keep the tall grasses from overshadowing the seedlings.

Mostly, though, we just enjoy it. It’s perfect. It doesn’t need much help from us. I’m very aware the life we are able to see, both plant and animal, is dwarfed by the life in the soil, which is full of bacteria and other microorganisms, including viruses. The bed is at the foot of a tall maple stub that was more than 200 years old when it fell a couple of years ago. I would not, for any amount of money, rototill or otherwise disturb the soil, the roots of the dead tree or the layers and layers of leaves and other vegetable matter.

I will never rototill again. The best way to build soil is to build soil with layers of organic matter, all kinds of organic matter from all kinds of animals and plants. Rototilling disrupts microorganisms, mycelium and roots binding the soil together.

Diversity is balance. Diversity invites symbiosis, “a mutually beneficial relationship between different people or groups.” (Oxford online Dictionary) A diverse garden is a healthy garden in which predator and prey are balanced. Diversity includes a variety of colors and textures, growing patterns and flowering times, nutritional needs and abilities. Diversity means what we deliberately plant is just as important as native plants, otherwise known as weeds. Diversity supports the food web and the web of life.

What a concept, right? What lovely, elegant wisdom. I could never, in a million years, come up with such a complex, thriving garden as one lupine plant has created over several years at the base of a dead maple tree.

A healthy garden is filled with life and death; natural cycles and seasons; growth, blossom and decay that seeds and feeds the next cycle.

What a garden is not filled with is hatred, politics or pretence. There are no riots. There is no outrage. If one population gets out of control, either the host plant dies or the predators increase until balance is once again achieved. This life-death cycle is not personal. Viruses, insects, trees and dandelions don’t hate. They’re too busy living and reproducing or, in the case of viruses, replicating and looking for hosts.

A garden is honest, true to itself.

Dirt under my fingernails. Mosquito and black fly bites. Grubby knees. Wonder. Peace. Gratitude. Reverence for diversity. I’m in the garden.

Whose Need?

by Jenny Rose | Dec 12, 2019 | Authenticity, Emotional Intelligence, Needs

I stumbled across a parenting advice column in the online publication Slate recently. It caught my eye because the columnist responds to the parent’s question with another question: Whose needs are we talking about here, yours (the parent’s) or the child’s?

The columnist describes this question as one of the best pieces of parenting advice she ever received. I’ll go further and say it’s one the best pieces of relationship advice I’ve come across.

I’m a parent, a sister and a daughter. All are difficult roles I feel I’ve failed to play adequately, although I consistently ignored my own needs in favor of what I understood as my family’s needs and expectations.

Ironically, I recognize now my greatest failure by far in life has been a failure to honor myself and my own needs. Whether or not we can please others in any consistent way is debatable, but I discover accepting responsibility for pleasing myself, though it feels odd and unaccustomed, fills me with joy and gratitude. My wants and needs are simple and few, and honoring them has been enormously healing.

This new behavior is also a source of anguish beyond words.

The anguish arises from a conflict many of us face at one time or another — a conflict of values. I value connection and being of service to others, which involves compassion, respect, tolerance and unconditional love. I also, for the first time, value myself. I’m stunned at the destruction that occurs when these values collide with the values of others.

Is it necessary to choose between meeting our own needs and meeting the needs of others? I suspect part of the answer to that question lies in the specific needs themselves and how we view them as a culture. Perhaps it’s just my bad luck that I’m a misfit. My need to not be tied to social media and a cellphone, for example, is just as important to me as the needs of others to be firmly embedded in social media and keep their cellphones in hand, but my need is not culturally supported. Fair enough. The fact that I’m slightly out of step from most other people in my culture is not a newsflash, nor is it something that requires fixing or changing. I view diversity and deviance from the social norm as strengths, not weaknesses.

As I’ve begun to stand up for my own needs, I’ve been told I’m cowardly, selfish, destructive and hurtful to those I love best, disappointing, stubborn and inadequate. I’ll own stubborn. I don’t take responsibility for being disappointing; it’s not my job to meet the expectations of others. As for the rest of those characterizations, they’re so far off the mark of who I am that I can’t take them seriously, although they cut me to the heart.

I don’t view managing needs as an exercise in all or nothing. I can usually come up with several ways to meet my own needs and support others in theirs. More often than not, however, I’m forced into an all-or-nothing framework, which feels like manipulation or intimidation, or both. That’s why the accusation of cowardice makes me shake my head. Refusing to give in to such tactics is not the act of a coward.

Why do we tolerate and support behavior that demands others be responsible for meeting our needs, but attack those who take responsibility for meeting their own? Talk about a sick society!

The hardest thing about being unsupported in meeting one’s needs is the lack of recourse. Trying to explain to those who aren’t interested or are committed to misunderstanding or taking our choices personally is a waste of time and energy. Our only power lies in the choice between bowing to external pressure and abandoning ourselves or living with authenticity and integrity and accepting the consequences. I know what my choice is, but sometimes I don’t know how to survive the pain of it.

I wonder how many people are in exactly this spot; how many people move through their days and nights trying desperately to manage a balance between their own needs and everyone else’s, or agonizing over the tension between caring for others and caring for themselves when needs are not in harmony.

As human beings, we lead complex emotional lives. Needs are not the only variable. Boundaries can be very difficult to negotiate. We’re frequently unaware of how important reciprocity is in our various relationships. Ideals such as unconditional love and always being present for someone, no matter what, are lovely in theory, but do we owe unconditional love and support to those who don’t give it to us? Is it our job, in any role, to consistently put the other’s needs first in order to prove our love or justify being alive, or an employee, or a family member?

As a woman, I can’t think about needs without considering emotional labor. In any given relationship, who is doing the emotional labor of listening, practicing authenticity, organizing, scheduling, thinking ahead, staying in touch, practicing absolute loyalty, providing unconditional love or other kinds of support and nurture, managing feelings, and balancing needs? If that work is not shared or reciprocal, relationships wither and die, or the one burdened with the emotional labor does. There it is again — that choice, that terrible choice. Do we take action to save ourselves, even from our most beloved, in such a case, or do we ignore our needs and keep going until there’s nothing left of us because we are women who love?

Needs are not wrong, or a matter of shame. We all have them; we have a perfect right to get them well and truly met AND our needs are as important and not more important than the needs of others. We’re not all honest about our needs, however, especially needs to control and maintain power over others. Too often, we assume others have the same needs we do. Those of us who want to live and let live and assume others are after the same outcome are frequent targets for personality-disordered people looking for prey, power, fuel or other benefits.

Whose need is this? Answered honestly, the question opens a door to better parenting and better relationships in general. The question is an invitation to intimacy, respect, power-with, problem solving, tolerance and unconditional love. It also shines the bright and sometimes terrible light of clarity on our agendas for others and theirs for us, and the true quality and health of our relationships. If we can’t or won’t identify, respect and support our own needs along with the needs of others, we’ll surely extinguish ourselves as a species.