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Home / Thoughts / Sean's Thoughts / Need for attention?

Need for attention?

Written by Sean on Wednesday, January 1, 1997

A lot has happened in the last few weeks. Mainly some insights were gained for me, about myself. I think I am finally starting to understand a little more about my feelings and why I feel the way I feel. Of course, one could say it doesn’t really matter to understand where it all comes from, and I have held that position, and perhaps still hold it. But I can assure you that having a beginning of an understanding has given me some peace of mind and quietened a lot of turmoil within.

There seemed to have been a little voice, hovering on the verge of my consciousness that always was ready to whisper something in my ears. But like a bothering mosquito, buzzing in my ear, I was always chasing it away. For some reason I wasn’t ready or willing to listen to what my inner voice wanted to tell me. It was just after all something I had always known and refused to see. Something that seemed so simple it couldn’t be. What the voice told me when I finally gave a distracted ear to it was: ATTENTION. One simple word, but I finally acknowledged it… I took that word and thought a few more questions: “Why do I want attention”, “What kind of attention do I feel a need for?”, “Is there a way for me to get that desired attention other than using my wheelchair, or becoming paraplegic?” I left it at that, without really thinking much about it for a few days.

Then, I heard the buzzing of that voice again. Only this time I listened to it directly, feeling there would be something more to learn. It told me why I where this way to alleviate my attention need came from. As a child, I felt that my parents weren’t giving me the kind of attention I wanted. We were living in Sénégal at the time and there were a lot of people with disabilities. I guess that the attention my parents were giving the disabled people was more desirable in my child’s eyes than the way I felt I was treated. And so it is that I thought that if I were disabled I would finally get the craved attention from my parents.

All the rest, all the desires I have now, the want for braces, the desire to use the chair, the urge to become disabled, all that stems from then. I have build justifications for my desire to become disabled as I grew up. Of course, this could be only part of it all, I don’t know for sure. But it feels right. It is like I finally found a truth, and since then, I feel a lot more comfortable with it all.

I don’t think I am going to stop using my chair because of this epiphany, but I know that when I cannot use it, it is much less anguish. It is now more of a fun thing to do, rather than a compulsion driving me. Understanding part of it made me master over it. :-)

Do you have any feelings that are close to that? I am curious to see if other people might have arrived to a similar conclusion.