The Importance Of Accepting Help

Lean When You Need To Lean

If you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be?

“I would say to my younger self that I must learn to accept help.

Many people, including myself, struggle to ask for help for fear of feeling like a burden, but it wasn't only that for me. I suffered from panic attacks my whole life, the first one I can remember as early as four. The problem with feeling so deeply is that anytime I did find the courage to say something about it, every wrong word in someone's reaction stuck with me, colouring an entire decade of associating vulnerability with salty knives and open wounds.

Learning to accept help also means giving people the grace to make mistakes—allowing them to learn how to help me.

Recently, someone told me that we are all toddlers flailing around with pudgy little arms that accidentally hit our friends and knock them down sometimes. But when we knock them over, we help them up and get on with our day. When a toddler throws a tantrum about what colour bow to choose, we look at them bemused and say, 'It doesn't matter that much, but I can see it matters to them. They'll figure it out.' That is how we should treat people in crisis, he suggested, be kind and quick to forgive, but their crises don't have to swallow you, just as a toddler's wouldn't. Give people permission to treat you like a toddler, he said.

I would tell myself to stop trying to suck it up and be an adult. Be a toddler. Listen to your body. And sometimes people are going to hit you when you're already on the ground, and that will sting, but they're a kid learning about the world too, so be generous with them.

To accept help, you first have to feel everything an overwhelming amount—it's terrifying—but there's nothing as satisfying as being knocked down and helped up so many times that you know just how to help somebody else up off their skinned knees.”

-

Clare Ashcraft