I’m getting better at asking for what I need, but my default setting for many years was to refuse help. I spent many decades perfecting the art of rejecting help.
For example, there’s the infamous time I refused to let my sister-in-law open a door for me. I haven’t just been bad at accepting help, I’ve been downright obnoxious about it. I told myself I was being independent and strong, but now I think that was bullshit. I thought that asking for help—or even receiving help I hadn’t asked for—was a sign of weakness, but now I realize that what I was doing when I refused help was hiding my vulnerability.
The idea that asking for help is a weakness is actually backwards. Not asking for help, for me, is the weaker option: it allows me to keep my vulnerability hidden. Once I made that mind trick visible to myself, it became easier to ask for help. Now I can challenge myself to be brave enough to ask for help.
I’ve recently had a few friends beautifully demonstrate how to ask for help. One friend is receiving chemo treatments for cancer and losing her hair. She posted her Amazon wish list of wigs to Facebook, making it incredibly easy for anyone who wanted to help to order her exactly the wigs she wanted. Another friend had a significant birthday coming up and wanted to get lots of old-fashioned birthday cards, so she posted messages to a few different online groups she’s part of, making her wish for birthday cards explicit.
Guess what? The one friend got exactly the wigs she hoped for and the other got a mother lode of birthday cards. And those of us who sent wigs and cards got to feel like we were awesome friends who knew just exactly what to send. As I’ve said before, letting others help is actually giving them something.
Asking for what you want or need is tricky—that’s why it takes courage. You might ask for help and be told no. I still vividly remember a time in the past when I asked a loved one to help me with something and they told me they were offended that I would ask. Although I now think that they were the one who was out of line—they could have simply said, “I’m sorry I can’t help” instead of shaming me—I do still hear a voice in my head sometimes when I ask for help, saying, “Oh, you’re doing it again, Elizabeth—this could go badly.”
But if I were to tally up the times my requests for help were greeted happily against the times they weren’t, I know which team would win: Team Ask-for-Help by a landslide.
I see a lot of anger among grieving people that others don’t know what they need—there is anger because people invite them out too often or not enough, call too often or not enough, talk about their dead loved one too much or not enough. The common refrain is, “They should know that I want [more/fewer] [invitations/calls/stories].” The idea that good friends should just know what we need when we are grieving is seductive and fed by the serendipity of someone every once in a while getting it just right.
For example, a few days ago a friend messaged me and another friend to share Halloween memories of my husband. Halloween was his favorite holiday and they had both spent many Halloweens with him. We had fun reminding each other of some of his more outrageous costumes (like a four-foot extension he made for himself that made it look like he was ten feet tall and had four arms, two of which clenched beers in their hands). I didn’t even realize until we started messaging the stories to each other how badly I wanted to share those stories.
But the fact that someone can occasionally know what I need doesn’t mean that everyone should know what I need on a regular basis. As I’ve said before, much of the time, I don’t even know what I need. So it’s important for me to remember that nobody is a mind reader.
It’s absolutely lovely when someone guesses correctly, but that’s all they’re doing: guessing. Every grieving person is a little different, so what one grieving person wants may be quite different from what another wants. I often hear about things that other widows found comforting when their partner died and I think, “I am so glad nobody did that when Tom died!”
Accepting that no one is a mind reader has been helpful for me way beyond getting support in my grieving. My relationships with colleagues, friends, and family members have improved as I’ve stopped assuming that what I want is evident and that if I’m not getting it it’s because they’ve made a decision not to give me what I want.
But it takes a little courage to realize I didn’t make my needs known rather than everyone around me is a jerk.