When Needs Require Permission
“Did you stop looking for approval because you got it, or because you got tired of looking for it from people who couldn’t give it?”
Quote: Abraham Hicks
A conversation with Q – character in The Nowhere Chronicles Trilogy
I did not grow up believing my needs were wrong. That belief came later.
At first, I simply learned that my needs did not count unless someone else agreed they did. If there was agreement, there was air. If there wasn’t, there was endurance.
That is a very different lesson from shame. Shame says you are wrong. This lesson says you may be right, but it doesn’t matter. And that distinction changes everything.
I am sitting quietly in Tranquillity Base when Q appears. Q does not enter the room. Q is already there, present in the way silence is present when it is listening rather than waiting.
“You look tired,” Q says.
“I am,” I reply. “Not in my body so much as in my permission.”
Q smiles, with that usual knowing that Q exudes. “Tell me, what are you tired of asking for?”
“There is a belief that forms before words, that runs beneath language. It does not announce itself. It arranges the world quietly, efficiently, like furniture placed before a child is tall enough to see over it. The belief is this: My needs do not qualify as real unless others agree. It does not feel like a belief when it is learned. It feels like reality. Reality is what happens when you speak, and no one responds. Reality is what happens when you are told you are overreacting. Reality is what happens when you are different, and the difference is treated as a disruption rather than information.”
I am quiet for a while, letting those sentences have space within.
I continue. “For some of us, this belief is reinforced not once, but repeatedly, across childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Each time the lesson is confirmed, the nervous system tightens its logic: Endure rather than interrupt. Accommodate rather than insist. Survive by staying agreeable. The belief is not moral. It is adaptive.”
Q watches me closely as this thought unfolds. “This belief kept you connected.”
“Yes,” I reply. “But it also cost me myself. Misbehaviour was an early philosophy I developed as a child. I was often described as misbehaving. Looking back now, I see something else. I see a child experimenting with the edges of existence. A child asking questions without words: If I do this, am I still welcome? If I say this, do I disappear? If I am fully myself, does anyone stay? Misbehaviour was not rebellion. It was an enquiry. But enquiry requires a response. When the response is inconsistent or punitive, the enquiry does not stop. It simply moves underground. That is where beliefs are formed: in the underground, in the subconscious, not as thoughts, but as rules.”
Q nods. “A rule is not something you argue with. It is something you obey.”
“And what happens when you stop obeying?” I ask.
“Then it becomes visible,” Q replies.
“Very early in my life, I saw something very clearly: everyone is 100%. Not equal in role or circumstance, but equal in being. No one is more real than anyone else. No one is entitled to diminish another in order to feel whole. It was a beautiful insight, but it was also dangerous. Because to see everyone as 100% in a world built on hierarchy is to refuse domination, even when domination is used against you. So, instead of asserting power, I learned to absorb impact. Instead of interrupting, I learned to endure. Instead of risking disconnection, I learned to disappear selectively.”
Q sits with this for a long moment. “You mistook endurance for virtue,” Q says softly.
“Yes,” I reply. “And disappearance for peace. … For a trans woman, when identity itself requires agreement, this belief does not stay theoretical. It is enacted publicly. My needs—to be named, recognised, respected—are often treated as optional, debatable, conditional. On social media, in institutions, in everyday interactions, the message is subtle but relentless: We will acknowledge you if we agree you are real. We will listen if your existence does not inconvenience us. We will validate your needs once they pass our tests. And each time this happens, the old belief flares—not as thought, but as heat. Anger rises. Not violent, not cruel—but compressed. Dense with decades of swallowed insistence.”
“What does the anger want?” Q asks.
“Not revenge,” I say. … “Recognition.”
“And if recognition doesn’t come?”
“Then the anger has nowhere to go. … For years, I believed the task was to not react. To be calm, measured, and reasonable. But calm cannot be imposed on a system that believes its existence is conditional. Asking such a system to relax is like asking a held breath to let go while still underwater. The problem is not reaction. The problem is identification. When the reaction arises, and I believe this is me, I am trapped inside the rule again. When I can observe it without correcting or suppressing it, it loosens. Observation does not argue with the belief. It exposes it.”
Q leans forward. “Observation is not distance. It is companionship.”
“For a time, I described my experience with one word: disempowerment. It is not the root, however. It described the outcome. But disempowerment is not the cause. It is the consequence of something quieter and much earlier, before conscious thought develops. Disempowerment happens after the belief has done its work. The belief is simpler, and more devastating: My needs require permission. Once that belief is operating, power is always provisional, granted, revocable. And anger, when it appears, is not dysfunction. It is a stored agency seeking completion.”
Q speaks again. “You do not need to become more empowered. You need to stop asking for permission to exist.”
“In writing my Trilogy, it changed how I see my parents. It restored complexity, humanity, and context. Forgiveness then became possible. But forgiveness does not retroactively meet unmet needs; it is an unfinished listening. My father is gone. My mother lives with dementia. The conversations that might have repaired something are no longer available. So, the psyche does something wise. It brings the work forward. It says: If you cannot be heard there, you must be heard here. Not by them. But by yourself.”
I looked down at my shoes to see if they had an answer, or more clarity. They didn’t.
“And is that enough?” I ask Q.
Q considers before speaking. “It is necessary. Whether it is enough depends on whether you believe your own listening counts.”
“The belief ‘my needs do not qualify unless others agree’ cannot be argued out of existence. It was not reasoned into being, so it must be disconfirmed—gently, repeatedly, in lived moments. Each time I notice a need and do not immediately minimise it, something shifts. Each time I interrupt internally rather than endure automatically, the rule weakens. Each time I stay present without disappearing, a different future becomes imaginable.”
Q stands now, preparing to leave—or perhaps simply to dissolve back into me.
“One last thing,” Q says. “You do not need to convince others that your needs are real. You need to stop convincing yourself that they are not. This way of seeing does not make life easier. It makes it truer. And truth, once seen, does not go away. It waits—patiently—for us to stop asking whether we are allowed to have it.”
Written by Coran, in conversation with Q, and co-written with an AI companion, as witness and mirror.
A section pulled from Book 3: Discovering My True Self
“Your experiences thus far have prepared you to feel the fear and do it anyway. You have to surrender to your biggest fears. You already have enough wisdom to know that facing what terrifies you is the only route to loving yourself.”
“How did you know I’m struggling with loving myself?”
“I am you,” she said, looking at me with a winsome smile and waiting for me to catch up.
“Doh!” That really was a ‘slap hand on forehead’ moment.
“Everyone struggles with loving themselves,” she continued, “it’s one of the pressures guiding our evolution. And your presence is also knocking over a few barriers for me too.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, we don’t often get a chance to listen to another version of ourselves, and their interpretations of their journey while they’re in the middle of it. It’s kinda raw and immediate. Memories don’t often give the whole story, where little nuances are forgotten that give a different picture.”
“By us meeting, does that mean you’re affecting my future, and I’m affecting your past?”
“Not really. We’re not setting up paradoxes, riddles to be solved, or changing things that have already happened. We can though, reinterpret events to understand them differently.”
“By reinterpret, do you mean we have an opportunity to learn forgiveness and understand why we had a particular experience?”
“That’s the essence. How you reach that state is so much more challenging as it means searching for, and digging up old worn-out beliefs that still control the way you think and feel. It’s not easy as it requires a spiritual scalpel to cut away all that dogma and doctrine gathered over decades by the opinion and judgement of parents and society.”
“Sounds punishing.”
“Its bark is worse than its bite. The trick is to decide which beliefs are supporting you and which aren’t. And that’s where self-love comes in handy.”
“So, in order to find self-love, you already need self-love? Isn’t that a circular argument?”
“It’s a spiral actually, a spiral of liberation.”
“Sounds interesting. I was thinking more about ‘the chicken and the egg’ metaphor.”
“No chicken metaphors. Just a choice. You simply choose to take the first step to shift your consciousness. There’s no greater expression of self-love than taking the first step to awaken what’s been hidden for a very long time.”
“Why a spiral?”
“With a circle, it means you always come back to the same point. You simply repeat the same experiences again and again and don’t learn anything. You don’t evolve. A spiral means you follow a circular path, but on the second and subsequent loops, you arrive at a slightly different place each time, and since you are in a different place, you’ve transformed. It’s an important distinction.”
“I think Einstein once said that ‘doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different outcome, is the definition of insanity’. A spiral sounds much better. At least it means I’m liberating myself from repeating patterns. I’ve had enough of those. … Time for a change.”
“Are you worried about facing the gender dysphoria?”
“It feels like a huge barrier to knock over. It’s got so many tentacles intertwining with other beliefs and opinions, that to separate out which is gender, and which isn’t, will be difficult.”
“Then don’t. See yourself whole, rather than disparate parts. You’re trying to make sense of something that isn’t broken. Many people made you think you’re broken, and that idea has flourished. You can only hear the clarion call of negativity, instead of the positive voice of your soul.”
“And my soul is saying what?”
“To listen. When the mind is silent, you can hear the echoes of all our conversations. Those echoes are trying to communicate an understanding which isn’t possible in any other way. When you listen, and hear the nuances, you are guided towards a freedom from ideas that hamper that freedom.”