Our Greatest Need: What Is It?

The Confusion about Need in a Girl on Long Island

In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, Class Chairman Ellen Reiss writes:

Aesthetic Realism show[s] there is a criterion for need: for what we can respect ourselves for needing and what we cannot. We can be proud of any need that is in behalf of our greatest need: to like the world. We are ashamed of, and weakened by, any need that is a substitute for that largest need, or impedes our fulfilling it.

Growing up in Massapequa, I felt I needed to be outdoors, and I loved learning about the different kinds of flowers and trees that grew near our home. In the summer I looked forward to seeing the yellow buttercups that grew in the midst of green grass in our backyard, and I remember so vividly the fragrance of the lush purple lilac bushes in spring.

We lived near the Great South Bay where I would watch the sail boats and smell the fresh sea air in the warmth of the sun. I also liked swimming in the ocean and being tossed about by the strong waves.

But as I got older, I used the very things I liked so much—the sun and beach—as a means to impress people. As a lifeguard, I made sure everyone at Tobay Beach noticed my athletic ability and my blonde hair and dark tan, which I worked very hard on for hours. I felt I absolutely needed to have a tan in the summer or I would die. But I was so concentrated on myself, I felt more and more nervous and empty.

I was the only child for four years and then over the next years something big happened. My mother gave birth to five sons, and I was no longer an only, pampered child. I was excited when my first two brothers came, but when the third and then the twins came I felt "this is too much." Often, I helped my mother take care of them, and as time went on I used my position as the oldest, to discipline them, and liked the fact that they seemed to need me. But I didn't feel I needed them. In an Aesthetic Realism lesson Mr. Siegel explained to a person: "the ego wants people to need us without limit but we want to put limits on our need of others. Out of this comes much misery." This was true of me.

At the same time, I felt I had to compete with my brothers for my father's attention by playing sports, fixing things around the house, doing heavy work like chopping the wood. This was to become a way of life with me—competing with men and not wanting to need them.

Like many families today, my parents worried about money and there were many fights. I didn't want to think about what my father felt having to work such long hours to support his large family. In an Aesthetic Realism consultation years later, my consultants asked me so kindly: "Do you think you changed confusion and discontent with the world into the triumph of being able to manage it?" I had. And whenever I felt angry with my family I would run to my room and slam the door, or go out on my bicycle and ride for hours by myself, trying to get rid of everyone. Increasingly I felt I should depend only on myself. In his great lecture, "Mind and Emptiness," Mr. Siegel explains so compassionately:

Unconsciously, we are all trying to be Mr. and Mrs. Zero, Mr. And Mrs. Hurrah for Nothing which is Me.There is a refusal to feel that we need anything.

I was trying to be Miss Zero and it made me feel very empty inside. In high school, I started getting rid of things that once had meant so much to me—I quit the swimming team and other sports, dropped out of the chorus and stopped playing the flute in the band. More and more I did not want to need anything, and this took a dramatic form. I began eating large amounts of food then disgorging what I ate, or I would starve myself for weeks, eating very little. I had bulimia and anorexia which for ten years I was to suffer from. Years later my consultants asked: "Do you think full and empty are very big things in your life?" I said, "Yes," and they continued:

Do you think sometimes you can feel very empty and want to fill yourself and then you can just want to empty yourself? Do you think there's a state of emptiness that you enjoy, having yourself to yourself?"

Meryl Nietsch. Yes. I think that's true.

Eating disorders are, my consultants explained, "a very dramatic and organized example of saying, 'I don't need the world.'"

Aesthetic Realism explains the cause and solution to eating disorders, and because of this they ended permanently in me. In The Right Of #1310, Ellen Reiss explains:

[I]t is the contemptuous desire not to need the world that has made people not want to need that terrific representative of the world which is food. Anorexia nervosa won't be understood until the desire for contempt is understood. [A]norexia would not occur without a person's unconsciously wanting the victory of showing she does not need the world; she is gloriously sufficient unto herself; the less she needs, the more she is her own superior self, and pure.

I know with my own thriving, healthy life that when Aesthetic Realism is known and studied, anorexia and bulimia will not be causing the deaths of so many women and crippling the lives of millions of others who suffer from them today.

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