Daisy asks for what she needs without apology. She is hungry, she tells me. She is lonely, she tells me. She is frightened, she tells me. I have been trying to learn this for forty-eight years.
Daisy has never once apologised for needing something. She has never prefaced a request with I’m sorry to bother you, or I know this is a lot to ask, or don’t worry about it, I’m fine. She is hungry, and she tells me. She is lonely, and she tells me. She is frightened by the thunder, and she tells me by climbing directly onto my chest, all four paws and no ceremony, pressing herself into the space over my heart as though it were the most reasonable thing in the world to do.
Which, I am beginning to understand, it is.
I have been trying to learn this for forty-eight years. I am not good at it yet.
“She is frightened by the thunder and she tells me by climbing directly onto my chest.”
Somewhere very early, before I had language for any of it, before I could have told you it was happening, I learned the opposite lesson. I learned that needing was dangerous. That to want something out loud was to hand someone the precise instrument of your own disappointment. That the safest version of me was the one who asked for nothing, cost no one anything, took up the least possible room. I did not learn this the way you learn a fact from a book. I absorbed it the way you absorb the temperature of a room, and I carried it so long, and so quietly, that I mistook it for myself.
And so I became fluent in a particular kind of vanishing. Not the dramatic kind. Nothing anyone would ever have noticed. Just the slow, daily surrender of preferences, of opinions, of hunger: a thousand small nothings that added up, over the years, to a woman who could sit at a full table and feel entirely alone. I gave and gave. I called it generosity. I called it being easy to love. It was neither. It was fear, wearing better clothes.
Daisy taught me otherwise, and she taught me the way she teaches everything: without meaning to and without a single word. She does it simply by being a creature who has never once suspected that her needs might be a burden.
Staying whole, I have come to believe, is largely a practice of asking for what you need. It’s not performing wellness, or curating the appearance of coping, or the exhausting, full-time labour of seeming fine. It’s actually saying the words: I am not okay. I need something. Here is what it is.
This is terrifying. I want to be honest about that, because we sometimes talk about vulnerability as though naming it is the same as finding it easy, and it’s not. The first time I said I need help and meant it, really meant it, my whole body braced for the withdrawal I had spent a lifetime expecting: the pause, the cooling, and the quiet proof that I had, at last, asked for too much.
It didn’t come.
I am still learning. I learn it in small, unglamorous increments like a message I make myself send instead of delete, a “no” I let stand without seventeen qualifications trailing behind it, or a “yes, actually, I would love that,” offered before I’ve finished calculating what it might cost the person offering. Each one feels, in the moment, faintly outrageous. Each one gets very slightly easier.
Some days the thunder still comes. And now, when it does, I try to do what Daisy does. I go to someone I trust and I ask, without apologising for it first. I’m frightened. I need you for a minute.
It always helps.
That is the thing she has never once doubted, and the thing I am, at forty-eight, only beginning to believe: that needing someone is not the thing that drives them away. More often than not, it is the very thing that lets them close.