The Ache: Needed but not Wanted

“Each one of us is born into the world looking for someone who is looking for us.” —Dan Allender

When you read those words, did you “hear” them, or “feel them?” Did something inside of you scream, “That one!”

Those words carry so much. So much weight, and so much truth.

Needed but not wanted.

It’s an energy. An energy that shapes us. An energy that once was our path to feeling like we mattered in the world.

But now it’s an energy that keeps us busy, but never filled.

And it had an honest beginning, really.

We were little. Growing up in families with parents who really tried to show us love. And life was just… busy.

And somewhere along the way, we became seen but not known. It felt like we mattered when all of our chores were done, our rooms were picked up, and we played nice with sister.

I wonder if it’s because the ones we longed for to really know us… what if they never had the chance to deeply know themselves? To experience the deep “being wanted”?

Out of all the deepest needs we as humans carry in this fragile life, it seems that the deepest, the one underlying all other needs, is the search for meaning—and to mean something to someone.

To be wanted.

But in the space between the desperate need to be deeply known, to belong—to be wanted—-within that space there lies an ache.

Vacuous, haunting, and devastating.

Who am I?

Do I matter?

The ache—it would swallow us whole if left to its own devices.

So we fill the ache, in a very understandable way with the next best thing—

Being needed.

We over-perform. We show up over and over. We attract “fixer uppers.” And we care. But the caring itself becomes is exhausting. Yet another “thing” depleting us.

Then, devastatingly, the day comes that we feel the same pain searing through our souls. That hollow ache—the need to be chosen, not for our functions but for our souls—it’s been pushed to the back. Until one painful day it screams out in agony and slices like a knife through our soul.

I wish I had a one liner to say “and here’s how you fix that!”

I don’t. That would be the cheat code for humanity and I could retire.

But in its place, I offer this:

What would it feel like, instead of running from the ache, what would it feel like to turn towards it?

What would it feel like to pull up a chair to the table and invite the ache to sit down?

Ask it when it began. Get to know the stories where it started carrying the pain.

Ask the ache what it would like you to know.

You might be surprised…the wisdom and love you would find held within the voice of the ache.