What Can I Do?

Aka: “Be Kind To Each Other”

This past week I had to ask for help. It has been a particularly hard week for health. Pain levels have been high and fatigue was through the floorboards. I needed help!

Chronic illnesses meant that I wasn’t coping physically. I was managing to feed myself but that was about it. I managed one shower in seven days, and after that one I need a rest. You’d never think a shower could be so exhausting, until you lived with chronic ill-health.

My mental health was down too. They tend to go hand in hand.

Just my ability to make sense of what was happening around me. I was confused. I needed to hear things twice before I had any hope of knowing what was being said, what it meant and how it affected me. Brain fog was a factor but it was more than that. It felt like my brain was giving up on me. Much like my body.

But this isn’t a “feel-sad-for-me” post. It’s more of a “look-into-my-world-for-a-moment”.

I needed help this past week, but really I had no idea of what help I needed. I just knew that this time I couldn’t just do it myself, as I’m used to, but needed to reach out to someone. Simply to reach out to one other person and say “Help”. Do you know how hard it is to do?

When you live with chronic and debilitating illness, you are often in the situation where things are getting progressively worse. What you could do a year ago is no longer possible. Even what you could do last week can be a monumental challenge to achieve this week.

I needed help this week, and I did actually ask. I summoned up every ounce of bravery and strength and I asked for help. I did it! I did it!

But unless you live with chronic illness, you perhaps won’t understand the achievement. Because we’ve all have to ask for help at some time in our lives, but I’m finding more and more times I need help. That is mostly down to my health. I can’t do it for myself anymore.

There are people in my world who perhaps think the only reason I would ask for help is that I’m too lazy to do it myself. [That says more about you than me.]

Others know me well enough to know that asking for help is anything but easy for me. I always used to be Ms-Super-Independent. I could do it for myself and I would, even if it was a really dumb thing to try to do it myself. Those others know it takes strength, bravery and trust. I have to trust that you will hear me. That you won’t write me off as exaggerating or god-forbid, lazy, and will listen (and respond) to what I need.

I always look at the help-line numbers that the media throw out at us after a particularly sensitive topic like abuse, or suicide, or violence. I know it makes the media companies feel better. The help-line phone numbers they broadcast almost justify the often graphic hurt they have just portrayed or reported on. Social media is often much the same.

The thing is that so many of us would never ring a help-line. Never, ever would we pick up a phone, speak to a total stranger, and hope that just maybe they can help. Yes, there are others who would do this, and would perhaps prefer to ask a stranger but personally I see the numbers on the screen as just a gap until the next post/programme and although sometimes wish I could use them but really know that it is completely beyond me. It’s too hard.

Most times I need to ask, it is beyond me. I am reaching the end of my tether. Whether it is getting a lid off a jar (increasingly difficult) or something more serious and even life-threatening. Sometimes it is just too hard and what I need is someone with enough compassion to say “what can I do?

I was fortunate to have a most loving and compassionate father. He wasn’t perfect by any means but he would listen. He wouldn’t wait for me to ask for help, nor would he jump in with advice (not usually, anyway… I did say he wasn’t perfect). When I finished what I needed to say, he often would say to me,“What can I do?”

Rather than guess what I needed, he opened the way for me to get his help, by taking the ball from me and asking what I needed. What I needed him to help me do with my ball.

I, so often, needed Dad’s help but many times it was too hard for me to ask. There were a million reasons why it was too hard. He knew that but, in his kindness, he opened up the conversation by offering me his help.

This week, I wished my Dad was still alive (this is a wish I have pretty much every week) because there are not many people in my life who seem able to see that maybe I need something but it’s too hard for me to ask.

[There’s also not many that I trust with my vulnerability and helplessness, but perhaps that is a different topic.]

Our world is full of “Call me if you need anything” or “Let me know [if you need anything]”. “Ring me [if you need anything]” or of course, “Text me [if you need anything]”. We (mostly without thinking), expect the other person to initiate their own getting help. We expect them to ask us for help.

But it’s not that easy.

Just sometimes I need you to say, “what can I do?”.

And sometimes I need to do the same.

In New Zealand, where I live, we currently have a Prime Minister (Jacinda Ardern) who often instructs us to “be kind to each other”. It is regularly repeated, especially when she’s throwing us back into lockdown or lowering alert levels, or even telling us of a community-transmitted Covid case (thankfully, that is big news here. For now, it’s not happening often). Imagine. World leaders asking us to be kind. Completely unheard of but so wise.

I think of that when I go down this track of both needing, or maybe offering help. “What can I do?” is being kind. Sitting back and waiting for me to ask. Knowing that it’s going to be beyond hard for me, and that probably I will never ask, so will never get the help I need… is not kind. It’s actually cruel.

It’s not kindness. It’s not compassion. And it’s not what we humans have the capacity to do. Be kind this week. Ask someone, “what can I do?” Give it a go. I know the person will appreciate you doing this.

As for me, I did ask for help this time. It took almost everything I had but I trusted this person and they heard. There was no “what can I do?” in so many words, but the compassion I received went some way to restoring my faith in people to be there. To be there when I needed them to be.   

“Write what disturbs you,
What you fear,
What you have not been willing to speak about.
Be willing to be split open.”

Natalie Goldberg

Thanks for reading!

Cate