Self-abandonment

When you grew up learning that your needs were inconvenient, dangerous, or simply irrelevant, you stopped tracking them. You learned to want what other people wanted. To be okay when you were not okay. To say yes when every part of you wanted to say no. To give until there was nothing left and then give more. This is not generosity. It is the erasure of a self that learned early that taking up space was not safe. Rebuilding a sense of your own needs, your own limits, your own right to exist in your own life, is real work.

Wanting things was unaffordable once, so the wanting apparatus went quiet, and now the question of what you need draws a blank. The blank is not emptiness. It is disuse. Needs come back online when they start being met, even in small ways, and a room that asks how you are and waits for the answer is a decent training ground.