We Need to Talk about Asking for Help

A gentle nudge to ask for the love you deserve. You don't owe this movement your misery!

First, some GREAT QUEER NEWS!! Yesterday, the US Senate had a vote on a federal trans sports ban, and while we really weren't sure which way it was going to go, especially given certain democratic senators who have broken rank in the past on trans issues, I am ecstatic to share that the bill failed to pass the Senate and has died on the floor. More reporting from Erin in the Morning here.

Lately, I've started putting out a "Friday Roundup" of actions y'all can take to help make the world a little better. (pithy title of said roundup is still being workshopped, and I’m taking ideas).

Last week's roundup included a really wonderful letter writing project from the Pinta Pride Project, and I included 2 links: one for folks to write letters to LGBTQ folks who wanted them, and one for folks to sign up to receive letters.

As the author of this here production, I get a bit more data on how many people click on each link I share, and I was really interested in what I found.

There were 60 folks who clicked on the link to sign up to send letters, and only 24 who clicked the link to receive.

More than DOUBLE the number of people signed up to give support as they have to receive it. At first I was surprised to hear that. Then I wasn't. Whether or not you clicked on either link, whether or not this exact situation applies to you, I figured this was a good opportunity to talk about our muddied relationship to asking for help.

Whatever it is they say about people in glass houses...I should probably go first.

Do I ask for help?

I transitioned as a teenager a decade ago, and it was challenging for the people around me. It wasn't that they weren't loving or supportive. I'm really fortunate that I had a relatively warm reaction to my coming out. But I knew it was a lot. The intense waves of my anxiety, depression, and dysphoria. Trying to learn and remember a new name and pronouns, having to consider safety of vacations and bathrooms. Complicated conversations about the top surgery I was desperate for. It was a tremendous amount of effort I was asking of all the people around me, family, friends, partners, teachers, etc.

I came to have this feeling that my transness and asking people to accomodate my identity was instantly using up all the good will available to me. I worried that asking for anything else, giving any feedback, or presenting with additional needs would be the straw to their proverbial camel; the reason they would say "you need too much. That's enough. Now I'm not doing any of it."

Few people in my life ever actually treated me this way, to be clear. No one ever explicitly told me that there was a limit on what I could ask for, or told me my transition was a burden.

But I was a scared kid in a hostile world, backed into a corner and desperate for any drop of support I could get. I was not interested in testing the boundaries of how far that support could go and risk losing what I already had. So I became an indoor cat, developed a version of myself that maximized convenience to those around me and took care of any of my own needs privately--if at all.

As I got more involved in advocacy and the world got scarier, that stopped working. Maybe it never really had worked. I needed to learn how to lean on the people around me. This was uncomfortable and took time, and will always be a journey that I'm on, but has been critical to my ability to survive as an advocate now.

There you have it. I know I share a lot of personal stuff on here, but this is some seriously vulnerable sh*t. I am here, cracking my chest open and pointing at the scars, because being able to identify my core wounds and find healing and peace there was required for me to learn how to start asking for help.

I want you to take some time to look inward at your own wounds. Who taught you that you were too much? When did you learn that to ask for help is to fail? What are you carrying with you? Whose voice do you hear when you start to think about asking for support?

The Gift of Asking for Help

People love when I write about actions in this newsletter. Finally, they breathe, something to do about this mess. We've heard SO MUCH data throughout our lives about how impactful doing good for others is for our mental health and wellbeing.

We view the world as split into those who are struggling and those who are helping, and if we don't have something to do to be in the "helping" bucket, that makes us "strugglers". Except that isn't how it works. Not really. None of us are infinite vortexes of need, nor are we infinite wellsprings of support. Or perhaps we're all both. Sure, there might be times of our lives where we have extra love to give, or times where we are needing more support, but this is not a permanent label. It's a season.

Every once in a while, my wife and I will get a text from a close friend that they're struggling and wondering if they can come over so they can be less alone. We'll race to tidy up our apartment, start warming some tea, and plan out what we think our friend might need today. Though it's never fun to know our friends are having a bad day, we get excited at the idea of loving someone with our full chests, taking time to surround them in exactly what they need.

I love being asked for help. I love being asked to edit a resume, or go grocery shopping together, or spend some extra time on the phone. I love going to and fro from the airport. I LOVE cooking an elaborate, multi-course meal with a related soundtrack for the people I love. I hope you can read in my tone here that there is not an ounce of sarcasm in these words. Someone asking me for help--giving me something concrete I can do to support them and make them feel loved--is a genuine gift to me.

So who do I think I am denying that gift to others? Denying my loved ones the opportunity to make me feel loved, the chance to show they care?

And if I never, ever ask for help, it's only a matter of time before my loved ones take the cue from me that our relationship is unbalanced--that I am stronger than them or have less complicated needs. Perhaps the flow of favors or requests will dry up. If we never ask for help from people around us, we send the message that "we aren't that kind of friends". Our friends assume that we do have needs, we just have other people we trust more for that sort of thing. Even if that's not true, they're more likely to go inward as well.

In so, so many ways, asking for support, or companionship, or company, or a ride to the train station, is a gift.

But someone else needs it more than me!

Whether it's asking for help in an interpersonal relationship, applying for a transition coverage microgrant, taking a cool shirt from a gender affirming clothing closet, or signing up to receive letters from allies, there's a lot of big feelings that come up here.

As much as we hear that we shouldn't fall into the "somebody has it worse than me/needs these resources more than me" trap, we do.

Except that if we follow that logic to its natural conclusion, we cannot accept resources until everyone else has gotten their piece first--until we are the singular human being suffering most on the planet.

Let's avoid getting to that point, shall we?

As long as you are a member of the group the resource is meant for, you are a member of the group the resource is meant for. Don't come up with a second, secret set of rules about who it's for. No one asked you to do that.

When I started to spend more time sitting with the concept of privilege and grappling with my own privilege, I took a very un-nuanced approach. I have privilege, therefore someone with less privilege deserves these resources more than me and it would be inappropriate for me to engage.

Except that there isn't some kind of universal suffering metric, and no one is asking me to up the hours on my suffering timesheet before I get help. That isn't what deconstructing your privilege means.

Once I started to have deeper conversations with myself and with others about how my privilege is a superpower I can use to expand access to resources for others with less or different privileges, and moved away from the idea that my privilege canceled out areas where I struggled or needed help, I started to find more peace in asking for help and engaging with community resources.

If you are someone with an identity built around being someone who gives support/is very strong and resilient and independent, first off go to therapy, but secondly, consider that receiving resources will make you better at being helpful.

Have you seen the world? I promise, we all need it.

Your challenge for this week is to think of something that would be nice for you. It doesn't have to be a desperate, life-altering need. It can be something that would make you smile, or that would help you make a dream come true.

Then ask for it, and observe if anything bad happens. Worst case scenario? The answer is no, and you ask someone else.

Love is an infinite resource, and you don't owe this movement your misery. To give you a rare dose of tough love for those who hear that best: You are not braver or stronger because you martyr yourself, and I know I will not be standing up to clap for the ways you isolate or hurt yourself while others are eager to support you. There is no medal for fighting this fight on hard mode. Trying to fight this alone isn't heroism, it's lunacy. I am the advocate I am because I ask for help, not in spite of that fact.

I know these are strong words, but I hope they make you feel how deeply and genuinely I want us to be able to lift each other up, care for each other, feed each other, and support each other. I want a movement built of beautiful interdependence.

That's all for now!

With love and support as always,

Ben