Ever have one of those days, weeks or years? You actually needed something and then no one was there to help? If you're like me, you have plenty of people in your life who love you, maybe even admire and respect you, but you don't really like needing them. It's not comfortable, awkward at best, when they offer their help to you. It doesn't feel like help, it feels like pity. It seems weak to accept; there's pride and dignity and independence to think about. So, you soldier on, laughing off the offers, maybe a little tempted at times to accept but then even more resolute in your mission to go it alone.OK, so maybe this isn't about you, maybe it's really about me. Did you catch on to that already?
I'm a builder. I've built emotional islands for myself in multiple states, through at least three decades and a dozen life stages. There were friends at work who got a little too close and people from college classes that seemed a bit too interested in my personal life. The ladies at church who asked probing questions and the extended family who seemed to want to know things that I didn't want to share. There's even been repeat business in this phenomenon for me; the people I grew up with and went to school with but still viewed suspiciously until I moved apart from them (both figuratively and literally). I'd put them away, shelved until twenty years later when they ended up back in my life. I think these were the first of the building blocks to fall for me. Specifically, there were several who despite my best efforts to keep distant pecked away at my defenses until tiny cracks started to split wider and finally some light peeked through. Also significantly, there was the child, my child, who in his own pre-adolescent struggles to self-define and understand the confusing array of personalities around him, made me look anew at myself.
Naturally, a part of this becomes not only "Who am I?" but "Who was I?" and even more simply "Why?". Does it matter? Maybe. Maybe it matters because the things we do, the ways in which we act and the people we are don't have to be the same forever. Just like the people I shut out over the years and didn't allow to help me, some of me is gone now, too. Some of it, though, just needed that sliver of light to get through. Parts of myself long hidden, people who cared long pushed aside, now visible and growing next to new sprouts of myself.
That's where I am today. I had a brief moment of need, one of the many that we face in our everyday lives, and my first self-pitying, bottom-lip-stuck-out thought was there was no one there to help me. But that's not true and I don't think it ever will be. Pride, stubborness, resilience, fortitude, tenacity... however you term it, can get you far (and for me, it has). Eventually, though, you have to admit that vulnerabilities keep coming back and having these vulnerabilities isn't a weakness. Being vulnerable, the flaws themselves, are the very things that make others love us. You just have to let them. I just have to let them.
