I love being helpful. I hate asking for help.

Letters from The In-Between, No. 22

It is early morning, the coffee is hot for once; the kitchen is dark except for the light over the stove, and the house will not wake for another hour.

Helping is the most natural thing in the world to me. It’s like breathing. Sitting across from someone while they find the thing they already know, holding the silence until the real sentence arrives, holding space for them while they get there.

And yet, I have been in this country for thirty years and I have asked for help maybe a handful of times. I could name them. I would not need both hands.

The rule was in my own handwriting

The autumn I went back to corporate, I wrote every night for two weeks. Not the gentle kind of writing. The kind where the page is the only place I am allowed to tell the truth without flinching. The same word kept surfacing and I kept circling it. Failure.

Somewhere in the third week I got underneath it and found a set of rules I had never agreed to live by. One of them was heavier than the rest. A real reinvention is something you do alone, running on empty, asking nobody for help.

I know exactly who wrote that one. I did. The thirty-year-old who left the corporate life for the first time wrote it, and I have been taking orders from her ever since.

Nobody imposed this on me. I drafted it, I filed it under humility, and I ran an entire adult life on it without once checking whether it still described anything.

What it costs on the other side

In July a colleague wrote me a note about my work, the job and the writing both. He had been watching, apparently. He wrote down what he saw: the learning every day, the writing, the fact that I finish things.

I read it and I thought, that is generous of him. Generous is the file it went into. He handed me a sentence about myself that I could not have written, and rather than keep it, I credited it to his kindness and moved on to the next item on the list.

So here is what I actually think is going on, and it is less flattering than the version where I am simply a generous person.

Being the one who helps keeps me on the safe side of the ledger. If I am always giving, nobody ever finds out what I need, and I never have to say I cannot do this alone to a person who will then know that about me. I have been calling that generosity for years. It has also been a very good place to stand where nothing could be asked of me.

Two words on the mirror

Here is what moved it, and it took almost nothing.

That same July I wrote the name of one person I trusted on a Post-it and stuck it to the bathroom mirror. Not as a plan. Just as an acknowledgment that I was not going to do this alone.

Then two more notes went up next to it, one word on each. Flourish. Thrive.

I put those there because I wanted them back. It took me a while to notice what I had actually arranged on that mirror. Survive is a word you can do alone, and I have thirty years of evidence that I am good at it. Neither of the words I chose is a solo word. Nobody flourishes by themselves in a room.

The name was already up there beside them. I had stuck the ask and the reason for it in the same reflection as my own face, every morning, and it was a long time before I read the three notes as one sentence.

I am not going to tell you I am cured of this. I will tell you that the asking has started to come out of my mouth, occasionally, in real time, and that it does not feel like weakness anymore. It feels like the price of the two words.

You probably do both of these too

If you are the person everyone calls, you know the first half of that title without me explaining it. Ask yourself when you last made the call in the other direction.

This is where Future Scripting turns around and looks the other way. I teach you to write the future in present tense and in detail, because your nervous system believes what you write in detail. I wrote the version where I do it alone for thirty years, out loud, at dinner parties, in the answer I give when someone asks how I got here. Of course it is the one I believe. I had never once written down the version where I ask, so it had nothing to go on.

So write that one. Think of the thing you are carrying right now that is too heavy for one person, and write the sentence where you hand part of it to someone by name. Present tense. Who you ask, what you say, what your voice does on the first word.

Then put the name where you will see it next to your own face.

Write it first. Live it second.

With love and courage from the in-between,

Magdalena

P.S. What are the two words you would put on your mirror? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

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