What Do We Crave?

So I was sitting here thinking about a bunch of random stuff...Last night with her, our/my D/s struggles, the conversation I had with kiddo while we made banana bread tonight, random things I need and crave...And I got to thinking, what do we crave?

We boil our human cravings down to specific needs, desires, and emotions, because that's how we meet them, right? If you can't choose a specific need or desire, you can't really fill or address it.

Specifics are important. They provide us with definition which leads to the fulfillment we seek. Without specifics, such fulfillment can be elusive, and our pursuit of it merely confusing to ourselves and the people in our lives.

But what if, just what if, sometimes we are too specific and become so fixated on the exact thing we think we need and the way we think we have to get it, that we are unable achieve it simply because our view of what it is has become too narrow?
For instance, kiddo craves acceptance and confidence, but rightly enough, he's afraid that the confidence he has reached for in his pursuit of acceptance just kinda makes him act like an asshole. So how does he achieve his goals and circumvent the asshole bit (putting aside that there's a huge difference between cocky and confident, but he's eleven and we're both working our way through it all lol)?
Maybe, just maybe, he doesn't really need either of those things. Maybe he just needs to learn belief in himself and acceptance of who he is at his core. Maybe he just needs to learn to trust that feeling in himself when he does the right thing, regardless of what others say and think about it.

I have been called confident over and over. I'm not. I know I'm not. But oddly enough, I am accepted for my acceptance of self and my irritating inner drive to do what I believe is inherently right. I used to crave acceptance from others before I realized that what I really needed was acceptance from myself which allowed me to sleep at night.

Before I get too sucked into the details...
So many of these needs and desires we have as human beings come down to much more vast and basic things. And sometimes, when we allow ourselves to let go of our narrow and specific ideas of what those things are, we gain the ability actually achieve and experience them.

I need to submit. It is who I am. When I get sucked into the details of how exactly that submission should take form, I become unable to achieve it. When kiddo needs to believe in himself and translates that as having the acceptance of others, it becomes an elusive goal because it is then no longer based on a broader acceptance of himself and an unfailing ability to choose what he knows is right, but based upon how he wants people to react to that which he seeks within himself.

We all experience so many cravings and needs. Many of them are valid. But perhaps, just perhaps, sometimes, we get so sucked into the specifics of what we think they are and how we believe they must be achieved, that we miss the broader overall need that our cravings are rooted in. We therefor deny ourselves the ability to meet them because our focus has become to narrow.
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What we crave, what we need, what we desire, is perhaps not always found in the specifics we are fixated upon, but in the broader realities which contain those specifics. And oftentimes we lose what we are reaching for simply because we are unable to broaden our definition enough to realize that we can have what we seek if we merely let go of our attachment to how it comes.