Signs somebody needs you.
BY SARAH SHEARER
Sarah is a recent graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, where she studied nonfiction writing and French. She loves finding stories within people and bringing them to life — when she’s not watering her basil plant or making kombucha in her kitchen.
It was last fall when I learned about nautical signal flags for the first time. I sat in a stranger’s living room and felt the stitches between my fingers, running the yellow-black hand-sewn square across the palms of my hands.
“I am on fire,” she said. “That’s what this one means.”
In the absence of any other working technology, seafarers could wave any one of the 40 flags in their nautical canon to alert passings ships of their distress, need or warning. No matter what it meant, really, the actual communication was simple and to-the-point: I have a need, and I will wave these three flags that communicate that need to you.
“I Desire to communicate.”
“I Require a Tug.”
“Your help signal was understood.”
Some of you see flags like this all the time. Others, we’ve got our flags in the air. And if we’re not careful, we begin to sound like two different kinds of people: the needed, and the needers.
Maybe you can remember the last time someone needed you. Maybe your fingers are still thawing from the cold because you forgot to grab your gloves in a rush out the door to go save your little brother’s life.
Maybe you only have pennies and nickels left in your wallet because you’ve been adding quarter after quarter to the parking meter outside your best friend’s apartment, unable to leave her side for some reason neither of you can say out loud.
I know some of you are writing these kinds of stories because I’ve often been on the receiving end. I can remember the songs doled out to me like healing balm from friends and the “special” coffee orders I reserved for turbulent spaces just in front of a hard decision. I cannot remember the last time I faced a hard thing without some kind of chocolate in my coffee or a friend sitting on the other side of the steam rolling up from my mug.
It’s never really been an issue for me to want help — we’re talking anything from my high school computer class to saying out loud “I’m moving to France after college” for the first time. I know some of you are nodding your heads too. I think it’s good, knowing you can’t go it alone. I think it can be one of the strongest things about us. But sometimes, deep down, what I think I need the most is to know that someone needs me, too.
For a while, I followed the lie that I wasn’t needed. It was a naturally born conclusion, one I discovered one day when I looked up and saw my life-path segmented into blank blocks waiting to be filled by someone else. I continued walking, waiting for friends, family, or even strangers to magically fly into the spaces, to “need” me.
I didn’t know it, but what I was really saying to myself was, “if I don’t have friends calling on me in the middle of the night, then am I really close with anyone?” If you’re walking a path like this too, allow me to step right into it right now with a big “danger” sign — It’ll be red and reflective and probably have a graphic of a stick figure falling off a cliff on it because that is what will happen to you if you keep going.
In reality, to “need” has a wide definition. It is not a narrow path lined with frantic phone calls, emergency visits or pots of soup. To be needed is to live in a wide place. You are needed by the person who sees your determination and decides not to give up either. You’re needed by your mother who smiles every time she hears your voice over the phone from miles and miles away. It doesn’t have to look like a signal flag waving in front of your face. Sometimes the biggest needs you fill in life are quiet or even invisible.
In fact, sometimes being needed isn’t about waving the flag at all — that would mean the need is visible. Sometimes stepping into someone’s blank space is less about being seen and more about seeing it in the first place. I am praying that this truth will sink into you just like I am praying it will sink into me. Because to be needed for my sake, that feels a lot like food for my own ego. But to be needed for your sake — you, loved one, you, broken-hearted, you, sending up prayers wanting them to boomerang back with a heartbeat, open hands and quarters to spare — that says “I see you.”
Here’s what I think the secret might be — you can be someone’s boomerang prayer. You do not have to wait for the call. Maybe you don’t belong to a circle of friends, or you’re still searching for a community you can call home and feel it in your bones. In the transitions, in the spaces where you don’t feel “known enough” to be trusted with the deep stuff, you can rest assured that you are needed there.
And to take it further — you’re probably more needed than you realize. Humans are made for other humans. You were created by a Creator God, who created a lot of other ones like you. And while we’re here it’s one of our biggest jobs to take care of each other. You’re probably giving more of yourself than you’d ever realize. When you pay for the coffee behind you. When your roommate unexpectedly cleans the living room. These are the flags that go unwaved. But here you are, and you’ve got a hand. Stretch it out, friend.