Asking For Help is Not a Weakness

This month’s mantra was “Asking For Help is Not a Weakness”. I think I picked this mantra because I need to be reminded that I don’t have to handle everything on my own. Perhaps it has something to do with being a child of immigrants, who learned to navigate the world more independently since I saw my own parents struggling to navigate this new home themselves. It could have something to do with the fact that I had been a very quiet child, who did not speak till 4 years of age, but who learned to play by myself and was an acute observer of the world around me, particularly watching and learning from people’s actions rather than their words. 

Whatever the reasons that are part DNA and my unique upbringing, I have found asking for help something I must steel myself to do. Even with my husband, who has been my partner for nearly 30 years, I find myself mentally working up the whatever you want to call it to ask him for help. Since asking for help is a challenge in it of itself, even with the smallest of tasks, when I am in real need of help, the ask is sometimes as difficult as whatever life’s challenge is in front of me. 

Knowing this about myself, I, with the help of my therapist, have been working on getting over myself and learning to ask for help when necessary. Let me say that it has been small steps, which is only complicated by my dislike of talking on the phone, another “thing” I am learning to overcome. Yes, my close friends know how terrible I am about calls, making them and returning them, so much so that a few have reminded me that the normal thing to do is to call back if someone has called you. 

In spite of all of my own quirks about phone calls and asking for help, last August when I found myself in bed for days on end as the depression I thought I had learned to manage so brilliantly told me otherwise, I responded to a text message from a friend, who had intuited that something was not right. In the past, I would have responded to her concern by blithely telling her that all was well when clearly all was an all-out crisis. 

This time I found myself sending an SOS by telling her that I had been in bed and unable to function. Being the good friend and caring person that she is, she called. Instead of my past practice of ignoring the call and letting it go to voicemail, which would then make me feel guilty and then add more pressure about eventually returning the call now looming in front of me, (you can see what a terrible, utterly useless cycle this was and has been), I picked up the phone. 

That one act and the gentle guidance my friend offered helped me navigate the abyss of the relapse and all that the relapse made me feel, which was that I  had again somehow failed. Intellectually I know this to be ridiculous since I am trying to manage an illness, but somehow intellectualism gets shoved to the side when your illness is mental health and you are constantly trying to navigate what ALL of that means to you and to the world.  

Since last August, I have tried asking for help more often. It is baby steps, but they are steps indeed. I can’t say asking for help won’t always feel like something huge, but I know that I can do it and should do it when necessary.