This post is an essay that was sent in from a We Should Get Together newsletter subscriber that we'll call “E”. Their kindness is a true demonstration of creative giving. Their generosity and empathy are inspiring examples of the many ways that we can show up for our friends and help them out in a time of need. I hope it inspires you to offer support to your friends, and to ask for help if you’re in a time of need.

On Helping and Being Helped

I know a lot of people who have trouble asking for or accepting help. I often have trouble with it, too. Not wanting to overburden other people, not sure if I deserve to be helped.

Sometime around when the pandemic began, a friend of mine was having a rough time, and there wasn’t really a lot I was able to do to concretely help, even as distant social support. They have a lot of trouble with talking on the phone, and I was having eyestrain issues and was feeling nervous that texting might make it worse.

Eventually, I had an idea, and messaged them asking if it would be nice if I just recorded myself reading stories to them and sent the recordings to them. They liked the idea.

I ended up sending them a short Signal audio message each week, with a few pages of one or another story from a couple of queer zines I’d funded on Kickstarter and then never got around to reading myself.

Sometime after I started doing this, I was talking to a new friend, and they asked me what creative stuff I did with my free time. I ended up talking about reading to my friend. I don’t know if it was “creative” exactly, but of all the things I was doing with my time, it was the thing that I felt the nicest about.

With a few breaks when I was feeling particularly overwhelmed, I ended up doing those weekly readings for about a year. At some point, a bunch of other life stuff happened, and doing the readings went from feeling nice to feeling like more than I could do at the time, and I messaged the friend and said I needed to stop, at least for a bit.

It’s easy to think of asking for help as burdening others. And it can be sometimes. But it’s been really helpful for me to remember that it’s often the opposite of that. Sending those readings to this friend made me feel really good at a time when I was having a lot of trouble feeling good.

I don’t want to burden people, and sometimes that keeps me from asking for help. But I do want people to be able to feel the way I felt about sending those audio messages. And I try to remember that sometimes asking for help, and letting people help me, is giving people a way to feel that way. It’s giving them a way to be doing at least one thing — helping someone — that feels really good.

And here’s a thing, too: when what you need isn’t matched up well with what someone else can give, you don’t have the same chance to feel good and feel connected that you have when you know that you can help someone or that someone can help you.

This isn’t to say that ways to help and be helped are scarce — there are a lot of ways to help people, and sometimes when they’re not obvious, a little creativity will get you to a way to help that wasn’t obvious at first. It’s just to say, when things line up right and I know someone can help me with something, sometimes it helps me to think about it like it’s something to jump on.

Sunsets can be beautiful, but the weather isn’t always good for them. So a lot of times when it’s particularly good, people tell each other to go look so they don’t miss the chance to see a really good one. Telling someone they can help you can be like telling them there’s a really good sunset outside. It’s not all the time that you get to give someone a chance to help you, and it’s not all the time that they get to have a chance to help someone, so when those Really Good Sunset chances to help are on the horizon, tell people. They won’t want to miss them.

I hope this helps 💜❤️
E

💜 Thanks, E, for your kindness, and for offering your story to the We Should Get Together community. I hope your friends give you the same kindness that you so thoughtfully offer them. And I hope you get to see some really great sunsets soon. 🌅

❤️ And thank you, gentle reader, for visiting this blog post and reflecting on ways to help your friends too. As you leave this post, take a moment to think about who you're grateful for in your life who might be going through a tough time. Reach out and offer your friends your help and support. You never know the difference it might make in their life as well as your own.

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