To Matter...

I have always had a very deep longing. It has shaped how I interacted with people, the choices I made, what I decided to become, how I reacted to anything in life. I have wanted to matter. I have longed to know what it is to be valuable and I have sought it: in thousands of unhealthy methods I have sought to be noticed, to be seen, to be needed...all so that I would matter.

Give me attention, I ask. But it is not attention I seek, it is to know that I am important to you. That I matter to you.

And that is the extravert in me, the person who deep down believed my value must be people-based and not based on accomplishments. Because people matter. People are valuable.

Over Spring Break, someone showed me I mattered to her. In the midst of a world that was already fallen, it spiraled further. That love touched the ache deep in my heart, love from one who might be a little too high on the list of people I want to matter to, love that came offered freely even though in my mind I was messing up. Or it was just because of the pain. It could not have been me.

I believed the need to matter was wrong after so many fallen habits that sprung out of that longing... from keeping long hair to overdependence, from writing because it was unique and no one else had tried it to jealousy, the need to “matter” has practically guided my life. The fear that someday I would wake up and discover that the world would be better without me. And then the day I believed it.

After it hurt people for too long, I crushed the need. I can be accepted by my friends, but it is selfish of me to need to matter. I wrote blogposts and heard no response. I realized there are thousands of books and I said to myself that I write not because it matters, but because I love it.

 But when I tried to crush the longing, I tried to crush myself. Unlike my sister and Emily Dickenson, the idea of being nobody sickens me.. I do not need to stand out at the crowded party anymore, but I do need to know that if I leave it makes a difference to someone in the room. I do need to know that without my story someone’s imagination would be a little bit less rich. I want to be as influential to someone as Gail Carson Levine and Laura Ingles Wilder were to my life. I do need to know that as I withdraw to my room to disappear, or I leave you alone because it is best, that I will still matter to you, that my value won’t simply disappear.

It is not necessarily that you see me, I have been seen by too many people. It is that I matter to you. That me gone would make a difference. That me here makes a difference. This is a longing of my heart. A longing I have tried to suppress. A longing that refuses to be silent.