Reaching Out for Help When Everything Tells You to Pull Back

Why should I ask? Why should anyone answer?

I am coming to this first post still recovering from a pretty bad trigger. My son spoke to me in a way that called to mind many less fortunate interactions with men over the years. I felt criticized and judged as less than, simply for doing things differently than he would have.

I wanted to shut down. To run away and hide. To be a rock, as Evelyn Wang and her daughter Joy do in the movie Everything, Everywhere All at Once. Not in the stable, bedrock sense of the word, but in the gray, noninteractive sense.

I tried, too. Just days after asking for help to rebuild the fence around my house, I tried to get out of a planning meeting. “Is this still on the books for tonight because I'm really feeling the social ineptitude today and I'm kinda afraid I will feel challenged to verbalize / articulate,” I wrote. “Like social connection is good, but my headspace is not. Please either tell me I have to be there so I can finally get this done, or plan to reschedule... oh hell we should probably just keep it and I'll try not to misspeak.”

The meeting coordinator messaged back, offering to reschedule when I felt more settled. Maybe that was all the reassurance I needed, because after I took some time to think about it, I replied: “No let's keep it. I really want to get this done… plus I can't imagine new job stuff will make the social stuff any better.”

Boxed in to asking for help

I’ve written before about my natural inclination to exile myself, isolate when I feel I’ve overstepped the bounds of appropriate social conduct.

Messing up still feels dangerous to me, no matter how often I remind myself that it’s okay to mess up and not have all the answers. I still feel as if every misstep is a step closer to permanent excommunication from whatever community I seek.

This time, though, I don’t have the luxury of putting myself in time-out. I have a perimeter fence that’s needed rebuilding for several years, but got put off along with so much else in the wake of divorce.

I reached out for help to this group, which is affiliated with my labor union, figuring it was kind of a long shot for people to come and help me from an hour or more outside my region.

People were willing enough, in that way they are when they want to make a good impression, but I wasn’t convinced they weren’t just saying they were willing to help.

That was, until they started asking about materials. One guy made a Google Doc listing out the materials we had and those we still needed. Another suggested a meeting date and time. I felt all the warmth of community.

And then my son spoke to me like he expected better of me, shattering my ability to feel like I belonged – anywhere.

Why am I like this?

I think it’s pretty clear I have an insecure attachment style. It’s maybe equal parts anxious and avoidant, taking turns in their dominance.

It should be no surprise that my parents had high expectations of me. Society generally accepts that good parents do have high standards; the better to improve our lives beyond what they were able to achieve for themselves.

Let’s just say some parents overdo it.

Their kids learn to try to earn love, but the goalposts keep shifting, and the efforts we make are never quite good enough. We can cling to the little bit of love we do get, or else avoid what we believe will be certain rejection.

More to the point is what all this means for my social life. To people who hardly know me, I’m sure I appear mercurial and perhaps even unstable.

Then again, perhaps that’s only because I overshare to communities I think of as “safe” when we don’t all know each other well enough yet to determine that: whether they are safe for me, whether I am safe for them.

After all, I’ve already been caught in this community using an inadvertent racial slur and misgendering a nonbinary member. I’m sure in some eyes, I kinda suck.

So why should anyone ever help me?

Because that’s what good people do. And just because our world suffers from a paucity of good people, doesn’t mean I should stop trying to find them.

Then again, as I’ve also written, I’ve encountered plenty of people who only act “good” in order to extract something from me: a sense of self-esteem, perhaps (yay! I helped!) or money (hey, times are tough for everyone) or sex (because what’s sexier than a woman in need?).

Of course, there’s only one way to tell the difference between one type of person and the other: to engage with them, and notice what they do and how they do it.

That means taking chances on others, even when everything in me tells me I’ll only get hurt again.

I do know, though, after a long period of healing, that I’m worth the effort. I deserve help because everyone deserves help. Maybe no one is special, not really, but that’s what creates the need for us to stick together.

This blog / newsletter is my attempt to write through these issues. I can’t make promises that I’ll find answers, but I can at least document my thoughts and ideas as I heal and learn.

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