In Between Self-Sacrifice and Selfishness

For a time we were consumed in giving, determined to deny any aspect of self not devoted to someone other than ourselves, but that diminished our dignity as well as our gifts since the self we were sharing had but little value.  There followed a consuming desire to move into ourselves, to dig into our souls for what few nuggets we might find and we turned society to our fulfillment-demanding, in some sense, that it repay us for our gift, unsought though it might have been.  But that too was incomplete since it magnified our individuality to gargantuan proportion overriding any sense of shared being.