Today I’m thinking about how hard it can be to ask for or accept help. My ego and pride rapidly want to assure everyone I’m just fine. I’m descended from scrappy immigrants who avoided dying in a famine and made the American dream happen for themselves. I’ve Always Got This, even when I don’t. Because that vulnerability of being seen as needy makes me nauseous.
While listening to Glennon Doyle’s podcast, We Can Do Hard Things, in an episode titled When You’re Tired of Holding Up the Sky, I was reminded of just this again. When Glennon asks her Sister Amanda, What’s the one emotion that’s hardest to receive from others? And her response was ‘softness, pity, or concern or acknowledgement that she may need help’, I said OOOOooosssshhhh.

Now if a person said, ‘I can see you have a lot going on, is there anything I can do to help?’ And I said, I’ll let you know. Thanks, that would be easier. But to be called out and see how they are pitying me in their eyes. And realize that I am apparently pitiable and didn’t know it? Like the time I was 15 years old, and my family told me I had a cute lisp. I didn’t know I had a lisp. Might as well have had a hair lip for how mortified I was.
The best way to control the outcome is not to risk! Duh! There is no risk if I don’t ask to be published, for people to read what I’ve written, share, give me feedback, or otherwise acknowledge my creative work favorably. I avoid the silence of no comments left and your rejection for the act of asking. Available patient adults may have been missing in my childhood.
However, we artists cannot succeed in a vacuum. The reason we make art is to get others to feel something. If not just for yourself, you do it for the response and for the impact. And so, a true artist has integrity about their work and honors the people who appreciate it. These also may be a community of people who know exactly how it feels to be in this awkward place and would love to give you what they want too. Support.

In the end, we have to make it Okay somehow to ask for support. Ask for anyone to do anything for us because we ask too much of ourselves. We over-functioners, accountability holders, and control freaks are not harmful, we truly want our contributions to the world to be quality. And we need to let the door open just enough to accept the hand offering us kindness and support or we will never grow. This is a choice.
Also, FYI. I am now also publishing on the Substack platform. I adore the interaction and hope to build a community of like-minded souls there as I’ve done here. Find me at Shalagh’s Substack and subscribe. This is what i said about myself on my Byline. “I write personal and vulnerable truths about how I feel as an anxious creative and midlife mother with hope that my stories give others permission to make their own life changing shifts. Find my blog at www.Shalavee.com.” Because Shalavee will always be the big sister blog.
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