Between Worlds: What Wanted Felt Like

For a long time I confused being wanted with being chosen, and I don’t think I understood how different those two things were until I had lived the distance between them enough times to finally feel it.

Wanting to belong is one thing when you are young and standing at the edge of a circle that keeps rearranging itself just slightly out of your reach. It is another thing entirely when you are an adult and someone turns toward you with their attention and their warmth and the particular way a person can make you feel like you are the most interesting thing in the room. That feeling has a way of filling spaces that have been empty long enough that you stopped noticing the emptiness until something moved into it.

I was not careless with myself because I didn’t know better. I usually knew better. I could see the shape of a situation fairly clearly even when I was inside it. What I could not always do was choose the discomfort of walking away over the familiarity of staying somewhere I had already learned the rhythm of. Staying was what I knew how to do. I had been doing it my whole life in one form or another, adjusting to the room, making myself useful, making myself easy, making myself small enough that my presence didn’t cost anyone anything they weren’t willing to give.

So when someone offered me a portion of themselves I took it and told myself it was enough. And in the moment it sometimes genuinely felt that way. Not because I had low standards or no self-awareness, but because a portion of something felt infinitely better than the whole of nothing, and I had spent enough of my life feeling like nothing to know the difference.

What I didn’t understand then, or maybe what I understood and couldn’t act on yet, was that accepting less than I deserved was not just a decision about that person or that situation. It was a confirmation of something I had been carrying since I was the tall thin girl who didn’t quite fit, since I was the child who learned to be easy to keep around, since I was the girl who moved between spaces and picked up each one’s rhythm so quickly that nobody ever had to ask twice. Somewhere underneath all of that capability and all of that composure was someone who had simply never fully believed she was worth the whole thing.

I am still working on that. But at least now I know that’s what I’m working on.