When Help Is a Four-Letter Word

I’ve gotten into the habit of locking the door and drawing the curtains whenever I get home. In the recesses of my house, cut off from the world, I’ve begun to consider the vastly complex issue of a deceptively simple word – “help.” I never realized it before, but as a society, we attach so many intense labels to the word help. The truly astounding part is that which label we choose to use depends on the context of the word – if the help is being given or received. In general, if we think of help in terms of being given, it is almost sanctified. It is a virtue to aspire to, a holy, spiritual quality of someone good and pure and admirable. If we think of help in terms of it being received, that picture changes. We associate the word with a sense of pity instead; needing help is something almost shameful, an issue that we distance ourselves from with images of homeless vets in soup kitchens or barefoot children in Africa. But on either end of the word, the labels attached to help are toxic and untrue. We’ll always fall when we put ourselves on pedestals of self-righteousness and, if we attach judgment to receiving help, we’ll also, however unconsciously, attach judgment to giving it. Help needs to come from a place of empathy, not pity.

We need to be able to acknowledge our own dark places, our own imperfections, and allow others to see them - we need to be able to receive help in order to give it. This is the journey that I’m on now. When you don’t want to think of yourself as the receiver, it’s so easy to shut yourself off from everyone else trying to help – hit silent when the phone rings, neglect your inbox, put in your headphones when someone’s knocking at the door.  But I have started to realize that when I close my door to others, when I don’t let them in, I can’t get out either. That closed door is not a one-way barrier to help. One of the most important things I’m learning here is how to keep my door open, to ask for help, however small, without shaming myself for getting it or telling myself that next time I’ll be able to get through it alone. Because I’m not alone. We’re not alone. No one is meant to make it through this world by themselves. Not reaching out to your family, your friends, your community, or health care professionals doesn’t make you strong, doesn’t make you tough, and certainly doesn’t make you better. In fact, it almost makes you stupid, and it does make it harder for you to reach out to others in an effective manner. I tried to make my life about helping without even realizing that I shrank from applying that word to myself as a receiver – and I don’t think I’m the only one. In these two years of Peace Corps, I never thought one of the most important things I’d learn in trying to help was how to ask for it and accept it while still feeling strong, still feeling enough, still being who I wanted to be. In order to truly be able to help, I now know that I have to learn how to be helped.

We must relabel “help” as normal, not something that is only required in extreme situations of poverty, natural disaster, or disease but rather something that everyone is able to give and get constantly. In fact, we can’t get through life without doing both. When we lock our door to others trying to get in, when we refuse to receive help, it traps us as well, making it so much more difficult when we want to give help to see who is on the other side and what they really need. It makes us vulnerable to keep that door open, to allow people to see inside, but it also frees us to help and be helped. If we want to really, truly help, we have to stop letting help define us, in one way or the other, and instead stand in our open doorways, exposed but present.

"If we’re going to find our way back to each other, vulnerability is going to be that path. And I know it’s seductive to stand outside the arena and think, I’m going to go in there and kick some ass when I’m bulletproof and when I’m perfect. And that is seductive. But the truth is that never happens. And even if you got as perfect as you could and as bulletproof as you could possibly muster when you got in there, that’s not what we want to see. We want you to go in. We want to be with you and across from you. And we just want, for ourselves and the people we care about and the people we work with, to dare greatly."

- Brené Brown

TED Talk: The Power of Vulnerability by Brené Brown