What is Help? What does it really mean? What does it signify? A small 4 letter word with a heavy weightage or something even more than that?
Helping someone who is in need of help, mentally, physically, or emotionally is without a doubt a great thing one can do. People don’t appreciate it enough and it wouldn’t be wrong to say that they often take it for granted. But what’s even more difficult to do is ‘Asking for Help’. I have come to realize that saying the words ‘I NEED HELP’ is one of the most difficult things one has to do.
Asking for help often comes with a feeling of weakness, vulnerability, and sometimes with a feeling of guilt of unnecessarily putting up the burden of your problems onto others, thinking that our problems are insignificant which is often not the case. We underestimate our problems; we compare them with others and we invalidate our feelings and disregard them. We tend to overthink the how’s, when’s, and what’s of the whole situation, leading us to keep our mouth shut eventually.
Saying the words ‘I NEED HELP’ to our loved ones or someone we can confide in shouldn’t come with a feeling of guilt. It shouldn’t hurt our feelings; shouldn’t make us feel any less about ourselves. In fact, the bravest thing anyone can do is confronting their feelings, realizing what’s wrong, and be ready to ask for help.
I always wonder why are we afraid to ask for help? Why do we feel that asking for help will make us weak? Why do we hide away our feelings in a dark closet? It’s a conundrum I often find myself facing and I don’t have an answer to it. What I know is that someday, this closet will be full of so many heavy emotions that it will break down into smaller pieces, and then, no one will be able to help, nothing will be left to help.
I rarely ask for help and I find myself struggling every time I want to ask for it. I feel weak at that very moment and console myself by saying ‘Maybe next time’ but the next time never comes. We are influenced by the notion of being strong, being tough and we can do this so much that we put ourselves to this horrible sense of misery all the time.
I hope that we can normalize ‘I NEED HELP’ so that people like you and me can gather the courage to accept the fact that yes, we are made of flesh and bones, we have emotions of joy and sorrow, that we can find ourselves in difficult paths, more often than not, that there comes a time in life when we might need help, and it is okay to ask for it. That there is no shame, burden, or vulnerability in saying that yes ‘I NEED HELP’.