It’s a vulnerable thing, to want help. Needing help is vulnerable but usually the necessity out weighs the concerns. Being in a place where help would be positive, where help would make things better, but where it isn’t actually, drastically needed, calls on us to interconnect. It calls on us to be in that awkward in between place or neither this nor that. We may be capable of doing what it takes, but it will leave us without resources for anything else. It will leave us unbalanced and possibly worse off. Yet we can’t flash the badge of “out of options” either. It’s an uncomfortable place to be.
Yet it’s one of the richest, most rewarding places. Often people don’t realize that there are resources all around them. They don’t see the people who want to create connection, who want to share and participate in their lives, who want to relate, but they can’t because the person is too busy getting things done, doing it all themselves, competently achieving at a high rate of speed. With all the doing they can’t see the community all around them which would love to be included, would like to lend a hand.
We fear being vulnerable because it seems to make us less than, show that we’re weak, that we can’t handle it, or that we’ve done something wrong. But vulnerability is necessary for connection. Without it we have no empathy, no means to understand the experience of others, not shared experience. Without allowing help we have no means of slowing down so we can be. And being is always better when it’s shared.