Why help may set you free

Why is asking for help so hard and so foreign for so many of us?

A few weeks ago, we hit the midyear point. I’ve never done a midyear evaluation, but inspired by Nancy Reddy’s sparse, yet profound 3 questions for the center of the year, I sat down to take stock of things. While they’re intended to be for writers, they pretty much work for everyone, no?

·       What are you proud of this year?

·       What risks have you taken? How have you challenged yourself?

·       What help do you need, and who can you ask?

I tackled the first two questions with little hesitation, but that last one had me shook. And I realized something…

I don’t ever think to ask for help. Gulp…do you?

What was so powerful about Reddy’s questions is not the suggestion but rather the assumption that we all need and deserve help. Not just in a crisis. Not just when we become overwhelmed. Not just when we need it.

Just because we’re human.

As I lingered on that midyear reflection question, I also struggled because I couldn’t even think of what to ask for. I was tempted to put down my pen. But that lack of imagination when it comes to help doesn’t mean I don’t need it, but rather that I need to ask for it all the more.

Asking for help is a discipline. A discipline at which I need practice.

I think part of the challenge is that when you do things on your own in America and it’s hard, our culture rewards it. We’re not just celebrated for doing things well, we’re celebrated for our bravery for overcoming things solo: heroism is an individual act and bravery is bolstered by one’s very own willpower. We admire that, we extol it. And it’s what generates pride, too.

But pride is a slippery virtue, if a virtue at all: too much of it and we become stingy, convinced that we deserve what others don’t, all at the insistence of our own power. Without it, others will say we let ourselves go, that we lack ambition, self-respect, what it takes to make it.

At a wise friend’s insistence and despite the discomfort, I’ve started asking myself Reddy’s question on the weekly: “What help do you need, and who can you ask?”

This past week with my husband out of town as I cared for my teenage niece and my disabled child, I probably would have put my head down and assumed that was the solution to carrying the load. But midweek when my sister texted me and asked me if she could come for the evening on Friday, I was thrilled. I knew she’d offer so much help as the one who knows my daughter and her needs next best to my husband and me.

Yet, empowered by my new discipline, I suddenly thought of another question to ask:

“Could you bring your sewing machine?” I texted.

There was a Velcro strap I’d been meaning to repair by hand on Lucia’s torso brace, but it kept falling down my to-do list. I hadn’t had my arms free much all week and it would be difficult to sew by hand, so I kept putting it off.

“Sure,” she texted back.  And Saturday morning she set up her sewing machine at the dining room table and sewed the Velcro in maybe two minutes. Done. Not only done, quickly, easily, and painlessly. I was grateful, but it was pretty easy for her, and I think she was happy to do it, even.

My sister sewing Lucia’s torso brace in the dining room as Lucia looks on, seated in her wheelchair.

Why was that so hard, I thought?

But maybe it’s not just me.

I keep looking around and seeing people my own age, the sandwich generation, full of caregiving responsibilities, saddled with work, mortgages, and expenses, pressures impinging upon us, and as we drill away at our own futures, we wonder why we feel so trapped, exhausted, and spent. As it turns out, you cannot free yourself.

But is pride really what we are in search of, and is any of the toil even worth it? When you do things with others, it doesn’t really even make sense to feel proud, but somehow that yearning for self-reliance and pride all falls away when it is replaced by gratitude, doesn’t it? At the end of the day, would you rather be proud or grateful?

The weirdest part about gratitude, that rather trumps pride, in my opinion, is that it can actually set you free. Asking for help is not just powerful because you get the help that you need, but because you begin to reject the expectation that you should be doing this all alone. And it turns out, when other people want and get to do things for you, it doesn’t feel like a burden to them. That’s the transformative thing about help: it’s freakishly liberating. We participate in each other’s freedom by letting one another in.

It’s only human that the things that you’re working for can start to own you, and the people that you’re taking care of can start to feel like a burden. But it’s also the most basic, human thing in the world to ask for help or to give it.

So “what help do you need, and who can you ask?”

I’m starting small, because my help muscles are still weak, but it already feels so, so good.