Cutting losses: wanting your needs.

Months. It’s been months since I’ve been on here. I don’t know how I’ve kept myself from blogging this whole semester. I love blogging. I love expressing myself. Where on earth have I been?

Long story short – I’ve been busy. I’ve been making time for things that don’t deserve my time and denying time to the things that should occupy my time. Full-load of classes, student government, glee club, work… Yikes. Now there are only two weeks left of the semester and things are only going to pick up.

It would be pointless for me to try to catch you up on the past three months of my life, even though that’s what my intentions were a couple weeks ago when I said I would write a blog but never did. Details are somewhat irrelevant, but I’ll give you a bit to understand.

A couple weeks ago, my every intention was to write a tribute blog to Kelsey, one of my best friends who went into the MTC that Wednesday, and then it was like the sky shattered sending whatever it could hurl down on me into my life.

Self-inflicted? Probably. Mistakes? Undoubtedly. Difficult? Absolutely.

Loss. Loss seemed to be the theme. Loss of opportunities. Loss of relationships. Loss of success. (No I haven’t gone off an emo-spiral – stick with me here.) And loss doesn’t just sting when it comes into your life. It leaves holes inside you. It leaves you empty and numb. It confuses. It distorts. It steals. Before you know it, you’ve become a stranger to the world and a stranger to yourself.

That week I had been left behind, rejected, and forgotten. Loneliness seemed to be unfamiliar for so long, but greeted me with open arms. To deal, I tried to reach out, but ended up reaching in which left me with nothing but impenetrable walls to guard my façade. Yet, life hadn’t lost its taste. And although I was feeling all of those things, I more than anything just wanted to understand.

So what?

I’ve found in my life that fighting and running away from painful things usually just sets those things loose, only to come back in the future to meet me again – usually in a more powerful, painful manner. So I thought about whatever discomfort I was feeling and I came to this question: does loss even really exist? (Maybe I’ll declare philosophy as my major if all else fails.)

It’s all about how you look it at. Loss of opportunities or just a minor detour to a better goal? Loss of relationships or just an end to a relationship that was already over before it started? Loss of feeling or a chance to appreciate forgotten blessings? Perspective makes a big difference.

Now what?

After thinking about it all on my walk home on this cloudy spring day, I thought about a story that I heard the other day about some ladies in the Philippines and often what my mom tells me. It’s all about needs versus wants. The story talks about how an American woman was impressed with the Filipino women because during this particular conversation, they were talking about how life could be better if they had certain things but how these certain things weren’t necessary – they were just wants.

Often times we are so set on the things we want and we feel like we need our wants. Whether they be job opportunities, friendships with certain people, or wishes for dreams to come true, we have a picture-perfect future ahead of us that we want, but sometimes not necessarily what we need or what is needed of us. 

This is when loss comes – when we lose what we want. I often times feel this when I want what I can't have, don't have, or have kept myself from having. And then the worst part is we fight. We manipulate. We gamble. We dig and we dig and we dig thinking that the fastest way to light is getting through the world, when in reality we could just climb out easily to find it. Each of us has a future and if we would just learn to want our needs instead and have faith to take chances accordingly, the pain of loss can be eliminated all together.