On The Need To Let People In

For someone who’s obviously open about many things, due to the content you can view on this blog, I’ve never been good at accepting help or letting people in. Perhaps I saw it as further admittance of weakness and wanted to save what little face I had left. Perhaps I didn’t think I was deserving of help. Perhaps I was sceptical of what help could be offered and didn’t want to end up going back to square one with memories of better times burning a hole in my stomach. Perhaps I just didn’t know how to react, having gone through life relying on myself, dragging myself through whatever mess I ended up involved in. Whatever the reasons, that reluctance is something that’s held me back, something that has held many people back from getting help, making bad situations that bit more unmanageable. I dragged myself through a lot of shit, on my own, and while I’m still here I wonder if things would have gotten better a while ago if I hadn’t kept things secret from my mam, if I’d listened to my friends earlier when they told me to get help.

As humans, we’re social creatures by nature. Our ability to form communities, to look out for one another is what enabled us to survive for thousands of years thus far. As a society we’ve come a long way in terms of recognising mental health difficulties and addressing them in a manner that doesn’t involve exorcisms or blanket applications of lobotomies. Yet there still remains this stigma towards asking for help, or even accepting it when it’s offered. The narrative of the hero overcoming impossible odds on their own is one handed down from childhood in the form of fiction, perpetuated in the teaching of history where figures such as Mandela and Gandhi are presented as acting in a vacuum, despite the long legacy of popular action and the mass movements they lead and were supported by. We hear the stories of the entrepreneurs, the revolutionaries, but not of the people who set them on that path, the people who provide the very support they needed.  We hear from our elders the struggles they dragged themselves through, yet it’s often without them taking stock of how this may have affected them. It’s an especially prevalent problem among men, which ties back to an earlier piece I wrote on the nature of toxic masculinity. Men don’t ask for help, we don’t visit the doctor, we end up with scarily high rates of suicide, substance abuse, we're slowly killing ourselves by being silent.

Relying on other people to fix you is not something I would advocate at all or indeed something that is within the realm of realistic expectations. Not only is it unfeasible to rely on other people the whole time, it’s not fair to expect people who are most likely dealing with their own issues to be able to completely resolve yours. It’s draining on them, especially when they will probably not have the skillset to handle mental illness in a clinical manner. However, if someone is reaching out to you offering to make things slightly easier in the short term, I’d honestly recommend accepting it. Not only is it gonna be helpful for you, it’ll also ease their mind slightly that there’s something small they can do. If it’s letting you know you can talk to them, walking with you somewhere so you’re not going in alone, or just knowing you may need space and offering the olive branch for when you wish to step back, accepting their help isn’t a sign of weakness at all.

It pains me greatly that it’s the year 2016 and I still have to type “accepting help isn’t a sign of weakness” but that’s the state of affairs we’re still in. People are still afraid to reach out for help, or accept it when it’s offered for a variety of reasons. I don’t want to use this as a platform to shove my views on people, this is just a space for me to practice writing, putting stuff out that hopefully connects with people, or is even something to read on the bus or in a particularly dull lecture. However if there’s one message I stand behind and fully encourage people to take on board it’s look after yourselves and each other. If someone you know is in a bad way, reach out to them. If someone’s reaching out to you because you’re in a bad way, let them in. It might be scary opening up to someone, and you don’t have to open up fully to anyone, but accepting help can help stop a potentially bad situation from spiralling into something properly horrible. The world can be a nightmare at times, but we have each other, who knows how far along we'd be as a species if we just displayed a bit more empathy.