Knowing why you want something is as important as the actual ‘wanting’ — if not more! So, Why Do You Want What You Want?
Some time ago, I came across a fascinating documentary: by the way, I have a penchant for them. Anyway, it was a medical documentary about short-statured men taking part in a complicated surgery to ‘add a few more centimetres to their height.’ The surgery involved breaking their bones at the thigh and knee region and putting in implants that allowed new flesh and sinews to grew along with it until it joined the point that had been severed. It looked like an excruciatingly painful and expensive surgery, and just watching it from the comfort of my sitting room couch made my brain reel and the fine hairs on my arms stand erect.
Knowing why you want something is as important as the actual ‘wanting’ — if not more!
The height-augmentation procedure was not only painful but a lengthy one. The irony was that after the wound had healed, the height gain was just a few inches. Nonetheless, all who participated in the jaw-droppingly painful surgery, not to mention its slow and equally painful convalescence, swore that the few inches gained was worth all the agony. It’s the only way to achieve my dreams, to be happy, almost all of them said.
Still on stories from the big screen, when asked once if her dream had always been to be an actress and if yes, why. Viola Davies, the mega-talented Hollywood actress (and star of the widely popular television series, How to get away with murder), responded, “Because I wanted to be seen.”
And I, Sarah Udoh-Grossfurthner, got her…totally. ‘I wanted to be seen.’ A simple but powerful statement. Packed with so much unsaid. But saying all that needed to be said nonetheless.
I got her. ‘I wanted to be seen.’ On a subconscious level, that was probably one of the most vital reasons I was desperate to have a good education. I wanted to be seen. My uncle’s wife was not mean to every child. When friends of hers and my uncle visited with their children, she’d lavished love on them and expressed that love with gentleness, smiles and care. Exactly the way she treated her children. Why was her treatment of me different? I could only surmise that she could not ‘see’ me. And I assumed this was because my parents were not of the same educational standing as the parents of those children or as she and my uncle were. Therefore, I was not worthy of being treated with kindness and dignity like those children. And so I wanted to be educated so that no one would ever again not see me — or the children I would have in the future. Even before I was matured enough to understand many life lessons and the full impact of dreams, that was one I understood fully and in its entirely: no one would ever not see my children.
That was probably what was running through the minds of the men augmenting their height, as well: no one was ‘seeing’ them. After all, put in other words, want to be happy’ could be a synonym for ‘want to feel validated.’ And what is ‘wanting to feel validated’ if not wanting to be seen, acknowledged as existing, or having the right to exist: to be considered human — with the exact needs and privilege to have aspirations, to dream dreams and be allowed to hope that those dreams would, perhaps, one day, come to pass?
