By Lisa Manterfield
“Ancora imparo. [I am still learning.]”
― Michelangelo, at age 87 in 1562
I am still learning. And thank goodness, too. If all I had to go on for the rest of my life was all I know now, I think I’d be in a lot of trouble down the road. That’s the beauty of age, experience, and wisdom, I suppose. It takes life experience to gain knowledge, and life experience only comes with checking off the years.
A couple of years ago, I learned an important lesson that I wish I’d learned much sooner. I learned to ask for help.
Near the end of last year, I was working through where I wanted to take this site, while trying to keep my freelance writing jobs going, and thinking about the novel I’m supposed to be writing. I was trying to write blog posts, maintain the website, fix tech issues, run a workshop, and keep a marriage ticking along. Finally, I threw up my hands and said what equated to, “I can’t do this all by myself, so I’m not going to do any of it.” I really was ready to throw in the towel.
Fortunately I have a wise group of peers and an amazing mentor who talked me through my angst and convinced me to ask for help. I found an assistant to help with the blog and found a web designer to take care of the site properly. Their help freed me up to do the work I really wanted to do, which is writing posts and developing this community. What’s more, the other work got done quicker and better than if I’d struggled along as usual trying to figure it all out for myself.
The experience gave me pause and caused me to look back at my past and take a close look at myself. Turns out I have never been a person who asks for help. It’s not so much pride that stops me from asking, but more a sense of toughness. “I can do this on my own. I don’t need help.” Now I’m writing it here, it sounds an awful lot like stubbornness, but there you go.
I was also tough (or stubborn) when I was going through the grinder of infertility and later, when I was trying to figure out how to ever make peace with my situation. I never asked for help, even though I needed it. In part I believed it was pointless to ask for help because no one else could really understand what I was going through. I also didn’t want to upset people I knew and cared about, and I didn’t want to put myself in the position of comforting them.
In hindsight, I wish I’d asked for help. I wish I’d taking the chance of confiding in a friend. I wish I’d thought to look for a support group or hired the professional help of a therapist. I would have arrived at my place on peace a lot sooner than I did. But hindsight is 20/20 as they say, and I hadn’t yet learned the value of asking for help.
How about you? Have you asked for help? If so, where have you found it?
I so understand about not asking for help. I am that person as well. I think the biggest reason I don’t, is I don’t want people to see that I’m not perfect. I know it would come as a great shock to everyone…. Hahaha! I’m not one for letting people in…. I generally keep my wall up, it just always seemed safer to me, and never allowed people in and force me to answer tough questions. Recently however, I did let my wall down with my one sister. My husband is ill and I just lost my job. Life was too much! I live 3,000 miles from any family and feel it might be time to move closer to family as sometimes I really could use help with my husband. So, I sat on the phone sobbing to my sister, the flood gates opened. I told her I thought I needed to be by her and she was thrilled. I’ve cried with her a number of times and she has thanked me for allowing her in. I told her I never wanted her to see what a nut case I really was. She laughed and said “Candy… I’ve known it for years”. We both laughed. I have to say it is actually kind of nice to having her support. If she doesn’t hear from me, she is calling to check in and see how I’m doing… It feels nice.
Asking for help is really important. It was a key for me to get through my losses and infertility … though as I look back, I only asked for help once or twice. It was so unusual for me that I felt it was a huge step!
These days, I’m not good at asking for help. I think I’m scared I might not like the responses. Also, in developing ideas and work ideas, I try to be self-sufficient, which is in fact a recipe for disaster. I know that. So maybe that’s the first step!
I’m so glad you asked for help. Sounds to me like you didn’t as much ask for help as learn to delegate. I think there’s a slight difference there. But I’m glad you did it!
I’m another one that will battle along thinking I’ll manage it all myself eventually. Although when I was working, I knew my limitations (usually external factors), and if I had to escalate then I had no qualms about asking for help.
With anything relating to me personally – that’s another whole kettle of fish. Being shy, stubborn, self-reliant, and independent, makes it much easier for those walls to go up, and maybe dupe myself into believing I could/should be able to cope by myself. Thinking I could throw the ordeal of infertility into a box and ignore it, I’m realising now, years later, doesn’t work.
Your last paragraph has me looking back and thinking the same.
By nature I tend to consider, ponder, and stew over most decisions, maybe more than I should. Dealing with infertility though, maybe the passing of time has given me the leeway I needed until I was ready to face the emotional side of it, even years later (hehe, same old habits, in your own time girl).
Does visiting these sites count as asking for help?
I’ve only recently found them (better late than never right?); I’m a new visitor to several of them and have been amazed and humbled at the stories and interactions between bloggers and readers. It’s certainly helping me along with processing my feelings (and that it’s okay to still have the occasional up and down days; that I’m not alone with trigger situations) while I try to figure out the next direction I would like to take with my life.
Not really about help (though I’m not so good with this either) but about health. Experiencing a breakdown and clinical depression this year made me realize that it’s allright to be ill. It’s not easy; society wants us to be able to work and look after ourselves as soon as possible, be it our bosses or our insensitive family. I’ve known myself to be impatient with people who suffered some sort of health problem which made them slower, or complicated, or hard to be with.
Well I can only hope that going through hard times myself has tought me patience with them. But what I know for sure is, that it has tought me to look after my own body and mental well-being. Not in the sense of finding brilliant solutions to my problems (because that always just lead me into puttin pressure on myself) but in taking one more step towards accepting my weekness, my need for professional help be it for my back or my soul, the need to put real recreation (in the sense of recovery) first, not being everywhere where it’s “cool” or “important” or “trendy” to be, the need to exercise both my muscles and my soul.
I agree Elena, this is a good point. Society doesn’t tolerate illness very well at all. It is extremely important to accept that sickness is a normal part of life, there is no quick fix! We need to take time to recover, to ask for (and accept) help at times. If we are struggling we need to be kind to ourselves. This healing time is most important.