Helped
“We don’t build trust by offering help. We build trust by asking for it.”
– Simon Sinek
I am not very good at asking for help. I grew up watching my Chinese elders get into near-physical altercations over who would cover the check, which always seemed like consideration taken to a mystifyingly hostile extreme. Still, the messaging was clear: you should feel bad about how much you are inconveniencing other people. If you accept the generosity of others, you will owe them something; better to handle it on your own and not be in their debt.
The rest of my formative years either required or outright celebrated self-sufficiency. The point of nearly everything I did was to get good enough at it that I wouldn’t need to ask for help, and until then, to pretend I didn’t need it anyway—fake it ‘til you make it at its finest. I remember being plunked down as a terrified new resident into the region’s only eye emergency room and being asked to cover whatever might walk in through the door despite barely knowing how to operate a slit lamp machine. Technically, a senior resident was available for consultation, but they made it clear that I had better not wake them up unless someone’s eyeball was falling out onto their cheek (which actually did happen once). I would frantically flip through the pages of textbooks in the middle of the night, hoping whatever diagnosis I came up with wouldn’t embarrass me too much when the patient followed up in clinic later with someone who actually knew what they were looking at.
To this day, asking for help feels like an admission of failure. The assumption is that I should be able to do life on my own, all the more so in a place like Silicon Valley that is brimming with wealthy, intelligent and capable world-changers. People here are high functioning, with the means to easily outsource whatever they can’t do themselves. Any help they ask for is sure not to overly inconvenience and be mutually beneficial.
We weren’t all that different until seven months ago, when I was suddenly expected to be instantly available for unpredictable durations of time for a growing number of medical visits. Treatments left me physically incapacitated for weeks at a time, and all of it came with emotions and feelings that couldn’t just be dispensed with. I had to ask for help—for rides and carpools, groceries and meals, spiritual counseling and prayer. I could see no way of paying anyone back for any of it. It felt—and at times still feels—egregious, far beyond what you’d expect anyone to do. For far longer than you’d expect anyone to do it.
What I’ve learned is that receiving help is something we have to allow ourselves to do—to admit that you need help, and allow yourself to receive it without qualifications or excuses, is an act of great vulnerability. I remember, in the period just after the diagnosis, people would say, “I’ll pray for you” and I would think, I used to say that myself without a second thought. But the reality is that I have felt unable to pray for weeks. You are doing something that is completely beyond my own ability to do right now, and that is no small thing.
It is scary and sobering to admit your limits. To acknowledge the at-times crippling effect of your grief or despair. It feels like putting yourself out there in ways that are foreign and awkward, that you have no context or muscle memory for. It is easier to hole down and soldier through, to utilize help only as a last resort.
But as I’ve allowed myself to not only ask for help, but receive it as openly and freely given, without judgment or obligation, I’ve discovered that it is like allowing myself to be loved. I imagine the hands that are picking up food from the grocery store and washing and chopping and cooking and packing and bringing it for us to eat, and I feel like it is love I can smell and see and taste and be filled by. I imagine someone preparing the gifts that have found their way to our door, and I feel like it is love I can touch. I imagine friends speaking my name in prayer, and I feel like it is love that says what I cannot. I feel like I have a connection now with all those people that I did not have before.
And more: I feel like it is God’s love for me made real. There is arguably only one place in Scripture where God says, “I love you” (Isaiah 43), but there is nary a book or chapter that passes without some demonstration of that love. Love in fruit on the tree and bread from the sky; love in cakes on the stone and dew on the ground. Love to see and smell and be filled by, for God must know that we are people who need a love we can touch. Love in the form of Jesus who came to walk the earth, though he does so no longer. “Christ has no body now but yours,” writes Teresa of Avila. “No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassion on this world. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.” How can we know a love we cannot see? And how can we be loved without being brave enough to receive it?
Many years ago, I had a friend whose young son was unexpectedly diagnosed with leukemia. I didn’t know what to say or do, and when a meal train went out I felt so relieved to have a way to be with them in it, and warmed to be counted in the circle of folks they asked. Remembering that, I tell myself now: ask for help, even if you’re not sure you need it, even if you can’t ever pay people back for it. Let people in. Allow them the privilege of being with you in this thing. Give them the gift of your trust. Learn to receive.
