resisting help hurts us

To hear Brandi read this week’s essay, click here: https://youtu.be/lgYZast0P1M

My son is obsessed with nutella. A recent discovery of his, he now consumes more servings a day than any reasonable person would advise. Because he is fiercely independent, I rarely touch the nasty yet delicious goo. If you have had the pleasure of cleaning a nutella-covered knife, you know that you can’t do so without imagining your arteries or gut fully coated in that viscous brown goodness. Thankfully, since my son likes to do everything for himself, I don’t often face a nutella flavored brush with mortality.

This morning I had some extra time and decided to make each of my kids their favorite kind of toast: cinnamon, pb and honey, jelly, and nutella. Each child grabbed their slice with a thank you, but number 2 just looked at it, picked up a yogurt, and left the kitchen.

Rude? Sorta. Unexpected? No. He regularly rejects my acts of kindness. Before I go any further, I should confess he and I share a soul and an outlook and a lotta instincts. He is neither a jerk nor a control freak. He just doesn’t know how to receive love. I suspect he doesn’t like the feeling of being indebted to others. He finds tenderness too much, and sometimes a connection of gratitude just requires more than he has to give.

Clearly, I’m projecting. Being his mom—and spending 25 years beside his big-hearted, always loving, dad—has revealed my own discomfort with abundant help and easy love. The truth is, I find grace humiliating a lot of the time.

That’s a sentence worth grieving after you sit with it a spell.

When someone offers to help me, sometimes my “Yes, thanks!” comes easily. In the past I nearly always felt a bit annoyed though. Did I seem inadequate, or like I couldn’t handle myself? If I said yes would I have to slow down my pace to make room for another set of hands? At my core, I want to work for everything I get. I want to deliver, impress, amaze. Other times I refuse help because I know I’m barely hanging on and I can’t be efficient and nice at the same time. It’s easier to appear so self sufficient that people don’t offer. This leads to isolation, to lonely power, and to assumptions of obsessive control. This, to be clear, is a horrible way to live.

 43 years has taught me that it is also impossible. I need help constantly, and I fall short all the time. I depend on the kindness and generosity and forgiveness of strangers and of my housemates every single day. I cannot live without grace, from my Maker or from others. But there I go, stubbornly pretending like I don’t want or need it, rejecting the kindness of another.

As fall deepens, I sense that a lot of us are teetering on this very edge: Desperate for kindness, and annoyed by the nonstop awareness of our need. We reject companionship and kindness precisely because we need it so much. If we admit our need, if we confess how overwhelmed we are, will everything come crashing down?

When you blindly follow independent instincts, you reinforce the myth that everything depends on you alone. If you feel overwhelmed this week, I hope you can hear my voice louder than the voices in your head: YOUR EFFORT IS NOT THE KEY TO THE UNIVERSE. Inertia and gravity work without you, and time will keep going whether or not you do all the things on your own.

Can we recognize, or even celebrate the fact that we don’t have it all together? That, in our beautiful communities, sometimes a friend steps in just when you need a boost? Say yes to the offers of others, even if it makes you confront your limits or slow your roll.

My son rejected his favorite breakfast because he didn’t want to deal with recognizing he needed me. I reject help because I’m stubborn and feel a little lost when I depend on others. It challenges the narrative I like about me: I deliver.

I don’t all the time though. Whether it is Covid or teaching or binaries or blatant inequity or public grieving, my capacities feel diminished. Languishing comes to mind. We are, aren’t we? Not quite depressed, not quite shut down, but we certainly feel isolated, awkward, and worn out from the everyday effort of showing up for our lives.

If you resonate with my stubborn rejection of generous help, I invite you to join me in acknowledging that you weren’t made for and are not capable of living independently. You need help, and so do I. When we refuse the nutella toast that comes our way, we make everything harder, and find ourselves increasingly isolated in the process.

Wading through this life of languishing requires us to unlearn bad habits and to take actions contrary to our instincts. When someone asks how you are, tell the truth. If you are not well, or if you have no idea how you are, say so. If someone extends a kindness to you, accept it. It does not diminish you to receive the gift of another. If you suddenly discover a limit you did not know you had, share it with a trusted friend and ask for help in learning to honor that limit. If you feel the drive that pushes you to go it alone when you don’t have to, name that drive destructive, and accept any help offered to you. These actions will help us Expand Our Us as we discover new ways to carry and be carried, learning how to share our Beloved Community.