Needs

2010-07-04T18:26:00.000-07:00

There is a difference between wants and needs and we are often reminded of that. The difference between a happy and miserable soul is the perspective of ones wants and needs.

If you can be satisfied, even grateful for having your needs and not a thing more, you'll be happy. You will be able to see every additional thing as a blessing. You can move forward with an open mind, vulnerable heart, and get shot down just to end up standing up straight and moving forward with an optimistic smile on your face.

Or you can be a person who only sees wants. Desires are not always a need. What you need to do is first sort out what the difference is for you. That is another thing: everyone has different needs. If you fail to do so, if you cannot look past desires and be happy with having what you have, then you will be miserable.

I wish, I pray, and I will continue to strive and be a better person. All of this is coming out because of my troubled mind. For the past couple of years I have been striving to be a more wholesome, simple individual with an open mind and vulnerable heart. This past year has tempted me to hate myself. I felt like I failed but it is not that. What I failed at is understanding another part of life: sometimes you are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes things cannot be explained not because you are not trying, but because of miscommunications that are one sided. Sometimes the chemistry runs out.

This past year I've lost my best friends in college, but I've gained golden perspective of who I am. I've gained confidence in who I am. I am not so desperate for mediocre friendships, instead I am thirsty for gold: a friendship that will satisfy my needs.

My needs are simple. Love me. Love me as I love myself, and love me as I cannot love myself. Let us have a two-way friendship where we laugh together, share intimate details, and fight to move on. Let us communicate our problems openly, let us talk about issues seriously. Let us see miscommunications for what they are: inevitable parts of a friendship that we all must endure. Let us handle it maturely, let us hurt openly, let us reunite whole-heartedly.

Is it so hard to realize that I love you, despite how much you hurt me? That a hug could have resolved all of these issues? That admitting you, too, did not know what had happened?

I need love.

I also need faith. I do not know where I stand with God anymore. I do not know how much I believe in Him, or more, I believe in Him but I cannot see it as clearly as before.

I am constantly surrounded by people who are blinded by wants, and thus blinded by disappointment. These individuals see life to be weighed on how many desires they obtain, but then they forget that desires are forever growing and never ending. You will always have more; you will always end up with less.

I need forgiveness. Open doors to your heart so I can do what I ask of you: love you in ways you love yourself and in ways you cannot. I want to be there for you, but you don't see resolving issues as a need. You see it as a problem.

How can a heart endure watching family and friends turn their faces away from friendship and look instead to superficiality and material desires? It's heart-wrenching.

It makes me feel a depth of sadness, of hopelessness, that I never experienced before.

It makes me cry.

I Don't Do Secrets

2010-03-18T20:58:00.001-07:00

Finding it hard to keep writing on this blog, hard to keep intimacy with friends back home, hard to be honest or fully open with anyone because for the first time in my life I have a secret.

A secret that intertwines with almost all of my emotional and learning experiences in the past few months…I think 7 months to be exact, going on 8.

The secret is that I’ve fallen madly in love with an handsome, 20-year old Indian musician who has the kindest heart and most beautiful family of anyone I’ve ever met in my life.

Hard for me to write blogposts when I can’t talk about how falling in love with him has made me realize that happiness really is the most important thing in the world and that if you have happiness, material comforts are completely trivial. That he has become so close to me that I don’t feel he is in my heart, but that he is intertwined, weaved into the skin of my being. That from the moment I met him, he gently glided into my being…that while before in my journal I would consciously restrict the amount of space I dedicated to crushes, romance, and love…since I met him my process and my relationship with him was so intertwined that while I thought I was writing about my own learning, I looked back to realize that all of it was about him.

I can’t write about how he was raised in a small one-room home with 14 people, his family and his uncle’s. Or about how joint families like this rarely work in India. About how they had money problems growing up. About how his mom was a sweeper to make extra money while her kids were at school…and about how she now goes to bed, after working in the home ALL DAY, with back pain that she got from sweeping over the years. I cant write about how many sweepers, or cleaners, members of my family have had. I can’t write about how the only reason that his joint family stayed together is because his dad’s goal is to always make other people happy, so he would get pushed over on purpose for the sake of keeping the family together. I cant write about how my dearest used gravel or salt and his finger to brush his teeth when they didnt have a toothbrush and paste. And most importantly, i cant write about how recently his joint family split. They bought two houses in Delhi. So now his uncle’s family lives in one, and his family in the other…but when his younger cousin got sick because she wasnt eating properly, his dad got angry. “Why is no one taking care of Pooja properly?!?! That’s it, we are moving back in together”. It hasnt happened yet, but the family is so happy together that they WANT to move back into their one-room home again. A move that’s impossible to understand for the western mind.

I've never done secrets before. I've never had anything dangerous enough to hide.

First time for everything, this is my new, personal, private blog...enjoy.

the-world8upside-down

Needs

I Don't Do Secrets