avatarJenny Lane

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Photo by Author Jenny Lane

Allowing Others the Gift of Helping You

Joy loops and putting away persistent pride

It used to be so flipping challenging for me to ask anyone for help. I’d rather walk deliberately through the fire barefoot, and put the wet rags on my feet myself. Hissing all along the way.

Seriously, even asking a tall person to grab rice for me from a tippy top shelf at the store. I’d rather climb the shelves like a mountain goat than ask for help. You get the idea, I despised asking for help.

But I love, love, love giving help so much! Go figure, eh. It’s one of my greatest joys. So in a sense, it is not always selfless service in helping others, because it gives me the warm fuzzies every single time.

Mind you, I give help, without any expectation to get any help back. Just the action of making someone else’s life a little bit lighter, that’s my joy. Many have done this for me, even when I was pushing, with full strength to not receive it.

I reach out my hand to offer help, if I have the space and grace to do so in that moment. I am the first to be there.

This is when I realized something, though. Getting onto an exit one day for the highway, I had a revelation. In not asking for help, or flat out denying it, as to not burden someone else, I was actively denying the possibility of someone giving me their gift of helping, and maybe getting joy too.

Oh, crap.

Sure, maybe they may not get the same kind of joy I do in helping.

But what if they do?

And I’m over here going, “I can do this myself, go away, so you can do whatever you need to do for you. I got this.”

Yet, fuck, what if it was a gift they were offering? And I’m shoving away potential joy, in my feeling lighter and them feeling lighter, in making the world lighter?

Whoops.

Even the thought of denying joy makes me feel the not so good.

If someone gave me a present, they had wrapped up with love, and I actually knocked it out of their hands — I’m actively rejecting the time they put into that. Anyone would agree, that’d be a dick move.

So, why look at help being offered to me as anything other than that actual gift wrapped up with love?

I know some people offer help to get helped.

But you are under no obligation, not beholden to me when I help you, ever. And how do you know this? Because I’m not over here reminding you of that time in 2004, when I went out of my way to pick you up at the airport. There’s no help debt spreadsheet with me. Spreadsheets make my brain hurt anyway, too many boxes.

Because, for real though, I did get something from helping you already — joy. The joy of doing something for you, and the joy of knowing your life was perhaps smoother today. This is me doing what I can, when I can do it, because I love you. I care about you human being and I want to see you thrive in any way I possibly can.

It’s a joy loop for me.

Why the fuck not start a joy loop?

If you want to entrap me because you are offering help with strings, well, I’m going to know if your help is not a gift, but chains. Simply, in how you remind me of that help you did, constantly. I will know in the patterns of your actions.

If you decide to try to make me feel like I owe you something because you helped me, that’s on you. I’ll ask for help in other people who actually care about me. If you offer me help, I will show you my immense gratitude for your kindness, but in no way am I bound to you in that help.

Nor are you, when I help you.

This is how I work.

My help is not an indebted contract. You need not reciprocal act. I received joy in that service. And there really is nothing like seeing people in joy, just enjoying life with peace of mind.

If it’s selfish to do something for someone because it’s a joy to see you in joy, then call me selfish.

Allow others the gift of letting yourself be helped.

You see, I came to this thought in pondering about how it makes me happy to see other people happy. Then I got to the idea, if I’m not working on my own happiness, then maybe your personal happiness is being affected. And there they are, not feeling as happy because they’re tending to my happy out here low.

Just like if I am stubbornly refusing help, am I creating a heavier burden on myself for others later?

And if I’m not working on my happy, even me just being happy at others being happy, am I distracting others in their tending to my happy? (Hope you can follow this, a bit complicated even in my own brain to explain.) If I’m going out of my way making other people happy, and not even nurturing my own joy, then are other people doing the same thing?

Are we all out here depleting ourselves, when we can choose our personal joys? When we do, then we have enough to give and offer help. We may be doing the same action! When we can just feel joy because we are working on our own happy. Then we can make people happy-er.

It’s like a layered cake, you’re giving me happy because you’re already happy and I feel it, is the frosting on my already awesome cake.

We chose our joy, then our joy just spills over!

And sometimes, really finding joy, finding peace, finding ways to untangle life, we do need help with. More minds on the solution.

So why was I going out of my way to do everything on my own? When there are certainly people who love me who can help. And have the space to help without any expectation I return it. Which means asking for help in the first place! First step.

Because it is scary, because people can say no. And you also have to learn yourself how to say, “No, I can’t help you right now.” Whether that’s because you have way too much on your own plate, or are working on your own joy, or even because it’s rainy.

No is a complete sentence.

No, full stop.

And you have to learn to say no, or take your time, when you really don’t have the space, or energy to give. That’s self care. That’s self love. That’s saying, I know my energy. I know myself because I am aware and tending to my mind, body and spirit. And right now, I am unable to help. And you’ve got to be okay with someone else saying, “No, I can’t help right now” too. That’s okay!

I’m not expecting anything from anyone I love. I only have expectations for myself. There will be someone who can help at some point, and really you have no idea who has the space or not, unless you ask.

As the Dutch say, “Nee heb je, ja kun je krijgen.” Translation: No, have you, yes can you receive. You already have a no without asking, in asking you can receive a yes.

So why not ask for help? What are you afraid of?

For me the fear came from whom I was asking help.

When I asked for help it meant strings, it meant bondage, it meant debt. Asking for help from spiders who really enjoyed me being in the web.

It meant asking for help now without any place to turn, because I am at my lowest. Later, I’ll have to give far more back to these types of people. I was asking the wrong people for help. People I thought “loved” me. But I was more a useful thing for them, than a human being.

I was a means to an end.

There is great news though on the help front though! There are professional people who ::gasp:: it is their job is to help! And they went to school for years for just that very reason! Find them. Listen up though, our loved ones are not professional therapists, nor should we expect anyone to be at our beck and call when we need them.

They help when they can, just like we help when we can.

Took me a long time to get to the point of being okay to ask for help. I could go to a professional and say, please help me, because that’s their job. But asking for help, without thinking: what will I have to give you later in return for this?

That was foreign to me.

Purely indebted was the feeling I had asking for help from people from my past. And the reality is just because others did so, doesn’t mean everyone does.

Besides with a lot of life’s tangles, I did it myself. I got through a lot of shit by myself, before even asking for help. Damn, stubbornness can be a major major major weakness. Like pride, oooooowee can that be a wrench in the gears of life. I was so prideful. I was slapping the gifts of help away from people who genuinely cared, and were doing what they could to help. People not asking for anything in return.

We do need each other in this life.

Having that revelation, seeing it as denying another the gift they are trying to give me in helping — that changed it for me.

I am not burdenless. I do need help. Who the fuck doesn’t?

Is there anyone out there who is burdenless? If so, please send me a direct message and teach me your ways.

We are all carrying some heavy stuff.

Why not carry something for you, if I have a hand free?

Why not offer some act of kindness, small or large, whatever I can do, if I have the energy to do so?

Why not?

I can be independent, and also be cognizant that I cannot exist without the help of others. It’s impossible. Without the help of the all before me, who have created this world and the all who continue to do so, now. There’s so much greatness, for all of us, in asking for help.

Asking for help also doesn’t mean I’m not capable. It just means, right now, I really just need the help. Please help me make life easier. Asking for help is courageous and wise. Because there is always the chance they’ll say no, right? And that’s okay too, don’t ever expect a yes, or a no.

Just have the courage to ask. Put the pride away, and know we are completely interconnected to one another. When you rise, we all rise.

We need help.

Thinking otherwise is stubborn and prideful. Especially, when you really need it and everyone is bending over backwards to help and you keep chucking the gift across the room. We love you, and some of us, all we want to do is see you healthy and happy, have peace and be free of some pain, and that’s it.

And you know what, when you are out there asking for help, well, you were brave enough to ask, and that’s amazing.

So many people allow their fears to block their thriving. Or feel the need to subject themselves to some low-key (or high-key) punishment for whatever guilt, or shame they are going through.

Do you not think you too are deserving of help?

Especially if you are one to receive joy in helping others. So, it’s totally fine for you to help others, but no one else is allowed to? Make that make sense.

If you’re brave enough to offer your life time in making theirs a little easier, right the fuck on, awesome human being. Because people will reject your help too. And that feels kinda icky. Being the person holding the well-loved wrapped gift of help and having someone else smack it out of your hand. But that’s okay, no one is expected to take your help either.

Get out of your own way, and let people help when they are being brave enough to offer, or brave enough to receive.

Sometimes people really need to do things on their own, fall down 800 times first. Being unnecessarily stick-in-the-mud stubborn in order to protect your pride and identity of being ‘the strong one’ who can handle it all alone — that’s how we burn out and implode.

You cannot do this thing we call life alone.

Stop pretending you can.

You can be the strong one and still ask and accept help, duh. In fact, it’s the strong ones that do absolutely need to ask for help. Because everyone is out there going, oh she is strong, she’s got this. Really, we can only be strong for so long.

Even holding a feather in your hand gets real heavy after holding out for hours and hours.

So, let help in. Especially if you are a helper.

Allow yourself permission to be helped, to ask for help.

Yes, I know you’re a pinnacle of strength, but once in a while let me show you how I love. I love in service. I love in gifts of my time. It’s how I know how to love, as a verb. That’s who I am. And if you love me, you know that’s how I tick.

I be love however I can.

Helping another is a gift many of us love to give, freely without attachment and brings us great joy. Not being able to do so also can diminish our possibility of growth in helping, as well as yours in asking for help.

Service to all of humanity is in helping another grow. Allow the help in, please. For all of us. Let other people feel the joy in doing so. Maybe you may just feel that joy too.

Dear helper, remember that feeling you get in helping others, if you are standing there saying, no I’m okay I can do it on my own, slapping gifts out of people’s hands who do really only want to see you thrive.

You are also worthy, and so deserving of receiving love and help and compassion and kindness.

Don’t you dare let anyone tell you otherwise.

We have to learn how to accept the gift of helping one another.

Because without it, none of us would be here today.

With radical love,

Jenny Lane

~namaste~

Art and photo by Author Jenny Lane "it's all about Love making someone else's existence just a little easier nothing else matters I know this now. " - Terrance McKenna
Wellness
Mental Health
Peace
Relationships
Love
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