You know who is brave, those who reach out for help when they need it. Anyone who asks for help because they are struggling with anything. If they’re mentally inundated with anxious thoughts and they reach out to a therapist, anyone who is unable to do their tasks and asks a friend for help, a mother who asks for relief from a partner or a family member, the employee who is going to collapse from exhaustion and reaches out to a colleague. Anyone who asks for help is brave.
Asking for help is a sign of courage and a healthy attitude towards taking care of yourself. If you don’t ask for help when you need it, ask yourself why? Do you feel ashamed? Do you feel unworthy? Do you feel like a burden? Do you feel weak or vulnerable?
Whatever the underlying reason is, I bet you often then not it comes down to you not loving yourself enough to know when you need support in taking care of yourself. I bet you that you wouldn’t abandon your friends and family the way you abandon yourself.
I don’t have the best trajectory of asking for help, but I didn’t realise this. In fact, I didn’t even know it was important to ask for help. Asking for help is such a foreign concept to someone who is a caretaker of everyone else. I not only didn’t ask others for help, I also didn’t help myself. I mean I took care of myself enough to not collapse, but I’ve never helped myself enough to thrive. This is because I haven’t traditionally placed enough value on myself. I’ve always placed more value on other people’s worthiness and need to be taken care of. This is a result of my personality, culture, gender and upbringing.
But in all honesty, I look around me at friends and family who haven’t asked for help when they needed it and it’s always resulted in a detrimental outcome. I don’t want to become so proud or feel ashamed for asking for help. I also don’t want to abandon myself anymore, because no one can help you if you’re not helping yourself first. For me asking for help is associated with pride more than anything else. It’s also the result of distrusting others with the ability to do good towards me. To be able to keep me safe, this is because I’ve been disappointed, taken advantage of and lied to a lot. So in addition to being proud, I’ve also become guarded. I didn’t even realise this until a friend of mine pointed out recently. In a conversation we had together,I mentioned to her that I don’t like talking about my issues with others anymore, just want to deal with them myself, that I prefer going into my own shell to then solve my own problems. Later she mentioned to me that I have noticed you’ve gotten guarded, that you don’t want to ask for help. So I was just going to show up, call you and give you the offer to help just in case you needed it. In that moment I realised, that she cared, in that moment I realised how much I had come to believe that no one cares. But that’s a lie from all the disappointment that has developed in the past by people who are frankly no longer in my life.
I try to ask my partner for help when I think I can’t handle something, I try to help myself by paying more attention to how I am showing up to a difficult situation, I try to seek help from friends I trust and know will be patient with me. I’ve tried to slowly let go of the pride and the disappointment so that I can become brave too.
Please, don’t deny yourself the opportunity to be helped. Don’t put your pride before your joy. Don’t feel ashamed for being human and needing support. These beliefs and narratives have been handed to us from various sources that are no longer useful or relevant. Asking for help makes you brave, it makes you self-compassionate.
Love yourself.
Love Always,
M
Souloom™ 