From the Hermit’s Porch is a weekly reflection on the texture of real life — offered freely to anyone who feels at home in its musings. You can subscribe if you’d like these notes to meet you each week in your inbox.
I. The Shame Around Needing Anything
I wonder about our reluctance to say what we need out loud, as if we are ashamed of it. And perhaps we are. Modern culture is so fiercely focused on worth tied to utility and self-containment that it squashes any hint of vulnerability as ‘neediness.’ As a result, we feel an obligation to be constantly available, doing, or going, even when our bodies are begging us to be alone, resting, or still. We ignore the quiet red flags of stress, operating as if being ‘on’ all the time is sustainable, entirely unaware of the biological toll we are extracting from ourselves. And we do it because being judged is a form of alienation.
II. Easily Overextended
The simple, and perhaps inconvenient, truth is that our desire for connection is easily extorted. Disconnection means insecurity, loss of protection. Service to others, reciprocation are pillars of connection, baked in by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. For an ancestral tribe, cooperating was a matter of survival. And it has served us well – at least until the world became fast, urgent, complex, and began leveraging that cooperative instinct against us, knocking our deeper, biological needs for rhythm, simplicity, and relationship off the top of the priority list.
In this world we replaced rhythm with urgency, replaced nature’s simplicity with technological complexity, replaced relationships with networks. All of that substitution has come with a cost that we tend to ignore until there’s a real problem with our wellbeing. We set our own needs aside. We try to go silent—even when those needs refuse to stay locked away—because, if we speak up, we’re visible, vulnerable, judged, misunderstood – and perhaps worst of all, ignored. To the brain, it’s better to suppress and keep the threat away than take the risk of saying something.
III. Locking Our Needs Away Has Consequences
When these needs are never talked about, let alone met, our guard goes down. Compounding stress bars the way to the rational side of our brain. This lets the world take advantage, inundating our attention with images and messages telling us we are flawed, vulnerable and, therefore, unsafe. No wonder we crave connection and ignore our own needs; without a rational anchor we feel small, broken, undefended – alone.
But our needs don’t tolerate us ignoring them for long. They seem happy enough to stand aside for a little while, but at some point, they’re unable to stay quiet. This is when they start to become inconveniently loud. When that happens, we might secretly squirrel ourselves away, turn the phone to silent, and hide from the world just so we can have a few minutes to ourselves. We mistake this retreat for rest. In reality, it’s just hiding—a short-term tactical fix that might make us feel safe temporarily, but does nothing to heal us or meet our deeper needs.
Our deeper needs go beyond food and safety. We have higher-order needs like self-esteem and self-actualization, but we can’t access our capacity for addressing those needs as long as we’re consumed by threat and fear. The modern world keeps many of us perpetually stuck at the level of safety – worrying about our status and where we belong in the matrix of human interactions. When we’re stuck there, trapped in a survival loop, we lose access to our higher-order functions required to self-regulate. We lose the ability to elevate what we feel to a rational level where we can objectively examine what’s inside the emotion, what’s driving the reaction, what’s truly being experienced.
IV. Why Regulating Is Hard
The pace and complexity of the world – the incessant urgency and grabbing of attention at every turn – keeps us permanently bracing in survival mode. The body and mind simply cannot regulate under these conditions. The world of our ancestors, where our biology evolved, was certainly dangerous, but it was structurally stable; threats were acute and episodic, not chronic. True regulation is only possible when we recreate those stable baseline conditions that allow our hyper-focused attention to finally broaden:
Rhythm – because our nervous system evolved to find safety in predictability of the natural ebb and flow of daylight and seasons.
Simplicity – because clearing away modern noise reduces cognitive load, providing the mental whitespace required to look past immediate fear.
Relationship – because true human connection supports co-regulation, sending a biological signal to the nervous system that it is safe to drop its guard.
These necessary conditions run counter to what the modern world is and what it continues to become. Yet, without them, the body keeps bracing. And a braced body cannot regulate. And an unregulated body cannot access the deeper needs that make a life feel like ours.
V. The Threshold to Authorship
Most self-help advice treats regulation as a tactical technique—a temporary breathing exercise to get you through a stressful day. In reality, regulation is a threshold, a necessary gateway to meaning-making and true self-authorship.
When our nervous system is stuck bracing against a complex and urgent world, our brain is trapped in a reactive loop. We cannot author our own lives when we are merely surviving them; we can only react to the scripts handed to us by a world that capitalizes on our fear of alienation. True self-authorship requires us to step out of that reactive survival mode and into a state of regulated safety. Only when the body drops its brace can the mind begin the deep, quiet work of meaning-making—interpreting our experiences not as threats to endure, but as a life to actively shape.
VI. Permission To Speak Our Needs
We cannot leap from survival-driven silence to self-expression in a single act of will. We can, however, begin by examining the beliefs that keep us small, and then we offer ourselves the permissions required to write our own rules:
- I am allowed to have this need.
- I am allowed to take up space.
- I am allowed to disappoint someone.
- I am allowed to be inconvenient.
- I am allowed to be human.
Speaking our needs out loud isn’t a trick we ‘just do.’ It is a capacity we grow into as we actively reclaim the rhythm, simplicity, and relationship that make us human. When we drop the brace and speak from a place of regulated clarity, we stop letting our desire for connection be extorted. We move past the fear of alienation and step into the true authorship of our lives—not just as isolated survivors of a chaotic world, but as people finally whole enough to truly belong.
As always, and until next time, take what’s useful; leave the rest on the porch.