Your Desire is More Important Than Their Need
If other people’s needs conflict with your desires, follow your desires. Others deserve to have their needs met by someone who desires to meet them, you deserve to act from desire and not coercion.
The idea of serving-greater-need (the idea that the one with the biggest problem is the one who deserves the resources) is a race to the bottom. It incentivizes need, which, in the case of relationship, is depletion. Self-neglect becomes the route to connection, and therefore the posture you assume in the relationship.
Self-neglect leads to starvation. Starvation is the realm of greed, entitlement, and impatience.
In truth, when your whim is more important than anyone else’s need,* you transcend into a fully nourished state. Then, in a fascinating twist, you’ll find from a nourished state that your desire is most often aligned with creating more connection, that service to others is often your deepest desire, when you are nurtured and nourished.
The crazy paradox is — you can’t experience that your service to others is pure generosity unless you prioritize your own desires over others’ needs.
If you are meeting others’ needs rather than pursuing your desires, you will lose the thread of your desire and not notice its presence or absence in your actions. You may find yourself suddenly in the posture of the martyr in the middle of what you thought was the path of your desire.
When you know that your desire is all that moves you, you can experience pure generosity of spirit in your acts of service to others. You know your service is always in alignment with your desire.
Anyone who demands something else from you is at war with your agency and prosperity and therefore their own.
(*This is written to you, not to anyone else. I’m writing to you, the one who respects others and their boundaries. Fulfilling your whims would never and could never come at the cost of anyone else’s safety, emotional or physical. You are one who prioritizes your desires honestly and with integrity.)
