Help
Asking for help with specific needs is objectively difficult for many of us, especially hyper-independent control freaks like me.
Last night I had a dream that took me to a lot of different places. One scene was super realistic. Someone close to me had been telling some stories to other people about times in the past when I had been drinking to the point of silly consequences, as many of us do in our college years. I haven’t been a drinker for many years at this point, in both my dream and real life, and these stories being told bothered me, even though they were amusing to both the teller and the listeners.
My dream self said to my loved one, “I need you to stop telling those stories.” They seemed confused by my request. I explained that it made me uncomfortable because it wasn’t who I was anymore, and those stories give an inaccurate representation of me to people I may not know very well. In the dream, I felt like I didn’t even expect the person to stop saying those things because what I said to end the conversation was something like, “You don’t have to do anything. I just had to ask.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about asking for help. Especially over the last few weeks as I was feeling energetically depleted again for longer than I wanted to. Which is never. I never want to feel this way. Of course, healing means that often, my body needs to allocate its resources in ways I don’t always agree with because I like being creative and productive and stuff.
I’ve been thinking about it because for every one time I ask for something I need, there are probably ten other things that I need but don’t ever actually ask for.
I’m working on this.
I went back to therapy this week. I haven’t seen my therapist since the end of last year. When I showed up in her office, she told me she was happy to see me. Does that mean I’m winning at therapy? Or the opposite? Don’t answer that. It’s a rhetorical question.
I’ve identified something that points to why I have trouble asking for help. Maybe it’s why so many of us have learned to stop asking for help and now have to re-learn how.
Someone in my real, waking life had previously taken me aside and offered a specific way to support me if I ever needed it. They told me that all I had to do was ask, and it would be taken care of. Recently, I needed that specific type of support. Desperately. So I asked.
And when I asked for help from the person who had directly offered this exact kind of support, I heard a slight sigh and glimpsed a certain look in the split second before they responded with the assistance I requested.
Maybe a sigh isn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Maybe the look was something I wasn’t supposed to even notice. But if you’ve ever asked for help from that beyond-desperate place of not knowing what you’re going to do without it, and you heard that sigh and saw that look right before the person responds, you know what it feels like.
It feels like you’re a burden.
It feels like a “no” even when they say “yes.”
It feels like they’re upholding an obligation, not offering a hand from a place of love or generosity.
This instance isn’t the first time I’ve experienced that flinch. And I’m sure it won’t be the last.
This time, though, I noticed it. I sat with the data, the story and the feelings that the interaction left me with in the context of all the work I’ve been doing to get better at asking for help when I need it.
We’re told that we’re all in this together. We’re told that it’s important to ask for the help you need before you need it (I’ve still got a long way to go on that one). We’re told that it’s honoring to the self to ask for and accept help.
And still, we don’t.
We hesitate.
Why?
This is why.
Because before we got the help, we got the sigh.
We got the look.
We asked. We did it right. We tried to be proactive and ask.
We were specific.
We didn’t think we were worthy of support for all the other reasons we all know and are trying to work through, and we asked anyway.
We didn’t think we deserved it, and we asked anyway.
And when we asked, we heard the sigh. We saw the look — the “deer in the headlights” look of someone unprepared to be asked. Someone who offered help thinking we’d never really need it. Someone who probably also needed to ask for some help of their own a long time ago, too.
What do we do with this information?
Keep asking?
Stop asking?
Ask differently?
I don’t know the right answer here. I just know what I noticed. In the other person. In myself.
And despite how terrible it feels in that moment, I’m willing to keep asking.
Because I’m in my INTER-dependent era as part of my healing journey. I’ve got to let the hyper-independence go.
Trying to hold everything together on my own got me cancer. And I’m over it.
But do me a favor, will you? If you offer support, mean it. Follow through with enthusiasm. And try not to flinch. Because people like me are usually only asking because we have already tried not asking and it didn’t work.
If you’re interested in supporting my healing, you can donate through the GoFundMe below or visit saradeacon.com/support for other options.