At some point everyone reaches a point where they need help. None of us know everything there is to know or have every perspective to know what options may be available to us.

The most common reason why people struggle with asking for help is fear. Fear of rejection or someone saying no. Perhaps they are worried about being perceived by others as weak for asking for help. For example, in a professional setting a person may shy away from asking for help because they are worried about their team seeing them as a fraud or unqualified for their position.

While asking for help is being vulnerable, it is also a strength. One, if you know you need help you have self-awareness, which many people don’t have. Two, it also takes courage to put yourself out there, where someone may say no. And if they do, that’s okay. That just tells you not to continue to ask that particular person and focus your attention on asking others who may be able to say yes.

If you are like me, you struggle with asking others for help. For me, I feel like I am imposing on others or asking for too much. And when help is offered to me, it is hard for me to take it because I feel like I am inconveniencing the person.

But the truth is, never asking for help is a lonely place. You don’t have to bear everything in life alone. Even if it’s just reaching out to someone who can sit beside you when you are feeling down or are going through something difficult, it can help.

Do you struggle with asking for help when you need it? If so, when others ask you for help, how quickly are you willing to give it? I’m willing to wager that you are quick to help someone if you can. Don’t you deserve the same kindness, too?

Nothing worth having comes easy. And nothing worth having is without struggle and obstacles.

When Travis Barker of Blink 182 was a teenager, his mom passed away. All Travis wanted to do was be a drummer and his mother was his biggest cheerleader. She really believed in his ability to become a drummer and encouraged him up until the day she passed away.

His dad, naturally, wanted his son to have a backup plan, in the event that drumming didn’t work out. Most parents would want this for their kids, but his “pops” as he calls him, was adamant. But Travis didn’t want a backup plan. He saw that has a hinderance to his ability to make it as a musician. He knew that where he wanted to go was difficult, but that if he had the safety of a backup plan, he wouldn’t be as committed as he needed to be to achieve it.

His pops told him that if he didn’t have a backup plan, then he couldn’t live at the house. So, Travis left. And through many years of blood, sweat and tears, he became successful, and is still incredibly relevant as a musician today.

You have to be willing to do the work, even when you don’t want to. You have to be willing to take risks and chances, knowing that they might end in failure, but at least you gained some experience in how not to do something.

We are so quick to judge what others do based on their actions and what we do based on our intentions. Have you noticed that? I am certainly guilty of this.

But the truth is, regardless of our intentions, if we hurt someone, we don’t get to tell them that we didn’t. We shouldn’t invalidate their experience, even if we don’t like it. Our job as a friend, partner, parent, sibling or whatever – is to honor their feeling and experience and apologize. 

I can’t tell you how many times I have told someone that they hurt me, and their response was super defensive, making me feel like I was crazy to feel that way and me sitting there afterwards questioning the validity of my own feelings. Was I being fair? Am I an unreasonable person? Yeah, those days were definitely before my Jedi training.

These conversations that we had often ended in a huge fight. At the time, my partner just couldn’t be in the wrong or be the bad guy. And that was how he saw himself. I didn’t see him as wrong or bad, I just wanted to tell him how he hurt my feelings so it wouldn’t continue in the future and that he would know me. He had a hard time accepting any kind of criticism or even perceived criticism because he was so externally focused on how people saw him. He had a very fragile ego, and it was difficult for him to hear, “hey I felt hurt when X happened” in any other way other than, “I am abandoning you.”

It was agonizing for both of us to say the least. I didn’t feel seen or heard and he felt attacked and that he did everything wrong. And I often found myself saying, “when I tell you I feel hurt, why can’t your response be, oh my God, I am so sorry! I never meant to hurt you!”. All I was looking for was an acknowledgement and an apology and I would be over it in less than 5 minutes.

For some of us, it is really hard to not be on the defensive when someone says you hurt their feelings. Why is that? I think it really comes down to how we see what is happening and how we see ourselves. If we see the statement of someone saying that you hurt their feelings as an attack, because we never meant that, we really need to slow things down. Let’s be honest, it is a neutral statement. Maybe you didn’t mean it, maybe it wasn’t your intention to hurt the person, but you did. And it doesn’t make you a horrible person – it makes you human. And their feeling is just as valid as yours.

We are always going to inadvertently hurt the people we love. And them telling us? That is a gift. Some people hold onto their hurt and anger and eventually blow up. Or they never say anything, and it eats away at them.  

Them telling us is a data point that gives us an opportunity to fix communication and/or how we handle things. It is an asset because it improves the quality of the relationship in the long run.

Try to see someone sharing feeling hurt with you (even if they are upset) as an asset to your relationship. Remember, it is you and your partner against the problems you have, not the two of you against each other.

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of The Ring, Frodo tells Gandalf that he wishes the ring hadn’t come to him during his lifetime. Gandalf replies that he does, too, and so do all who live to see such times. But then he reminds Frodo that, “all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

It is inevitable that all of us will encounter troubling times. And it’s human nature to fixate on the hopelessness of the situation. But at some point, you must rise. It’s okay to fall into the water, but if you stay there forever, you will eventually drown.

The absolute worst thing you can do in these situations is nothing. You have the power to choose how you respond to the situation. All you have to decide is what you are going to do about it.

Remember, we are all perishable items. Our time here is limited and it is up to us to decide what we do with the time we have here. If you think you’re too old or it’s too late to make your move and unleash your potential, remember that there’s still time to change the road you’re on.

Often times, you think you know who would help you, never leave you or put you in difficult times. But the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. You don’t really know until it happens.

Sometimes the people we expect will be there, aren’t and the people we never thought would step up for us, do.

Who has helped you in difficult times?

Who has shown up for you in ways you never expected?

When I was in my early 20s, I worked for a temp agency and a receptionist assignment was available close to where I was staying at the time. I was broke and was so grateful to have this opportunity. The first day of it, we had a huge ice storm. The roads were a mess, but I made it to the job. Most people called out because it was so bad outside and the office manager at the company was surprised, I even made it in.

Over the next few weeks, I worked my ass off, hoping to stay there longer. The office manager called me into her office one day and asked me if I wanted to work there permanently. She said they didn’t have a job open, but, she liked my work ethic and wanted me there. So, she created a position for me. This was a big deal for them because since I came from an agency, that had to pay them a finder’s fee.

She really invested in me and my success. When she realized that I was spending 90 minutes every morning before work driving my boyfriend at the time to his job and back before coming to the office, she asked me what he did. It turns out he had been applying to jobs in our area, and one of the companies was one that her son owned. She made sure he looked at his resume and gave him a fair shot at the job.  

She made sure I had an outside health insurance plan before the one at the company kicked in. She really went over and beyond to help me when she owed me nothing.

Remember who was there for you during these times, and vow to become someone else’s light when they are going through darkness. Pay it forward when you can.

Who left you in difficult times?

Who left you when you needed them the most?

There have been times when I have been deserted when I needed emotional support from family and friends. I’ve always been one to internalize my own struggles and not really talk about them with others. But when there has been a medical crisis or injury, where I couldn’t just hide it, there were people who I thought would be there who didn’t show up in any real, meaningful way.

It sucks, but it is also clarity. I would rather know who is really there for me based on their actions, than think I know based on what they say or how I think I know them.

Who put you in difficult times?

Who has created difficult times for you?

I’ve taken an honest, long, hard look at who have put me in difficult positions and who I knew might do so and chose them or the situation anyway.

The truth is my difficult times were blessings for me. They were lessons that I needed to learn, even though it was so hard at the time. Those difficult times shined a light on patterns I needed to break so I could evolve and grow as a person and become a better version of myself.

Have you shown appreciation for the people who stepped up and helped you in difficult situations? Have you acknowledged those that may have hurt you by not showing up for you? What lessons have you learned from those who created difficult times for you?

The king of horror himself, Stephen King, said these words. As a culture, we are fascinated by horror movies and books. Some of us are obsessed with true crime. I have my theory about that one. I think there is a biological/psychological reason why we are so interested in crime. If we know what to look for and what we can learn from these situations that resulted in horrific crimes, we won’t get fooled and end up being a victim, too. It’s a psychological buffer we create to help us feel safe. After all, most crime victims know their attackers well. But does it really make us safe?

Being that this is a mindset blog, I think of this quote a little differently. When we look at our past, we all have baggage and scars from previous relationships and even our family of origin. Sometimes our past hurts and fears can transfer into new relationships because we fear the same thing happening again. 

Say you were cheated on in a previous relationship and you were devastated. If you haven’t healed from it, is it likely that you might become more suspicious of your current partner, even if he or she isn’t doing anything? Maybe they put their phone down really quick when you walked into the room and your ex did that when he was cheating. So you start to wonder if your current partner is doing that.

If you don’t heal what hurt you, you will bleed on people who didn’t cut you. 

Have you fully healed from past trauma?

Some people who are unhappy with who they are, have the propensity to project their negativity and self-loathing onto other people. Healthy, happy people don’t go around tearing down other people.

In my sophomore year of high school, I began to branch out and become friends with other people then my regular group of friends. Some of the girls that I was friends with at the time were becoming classic mean girls, and I hated that. They started picking on other people and played pranks, and many times it was incredibly cruel.

I was never a mean girl or bully, and I didn’t like who these girls were becoming. I would try stop some of their shenanigans and stick up for their targets, but it never really worked. The more I stood up for the people they were bullying, the more divided I became with them.

Given how things were going, it was natural that we would grow apart, and I began to make friends with other people and felt happier. I even changed some of my classes around, which created some distance between them and I. And let’s just say that these girls, didn’t care for it at all. I soon became their target and was constantly bullied and picked on for the most mundane things.  

I literally dreaded going to school every day. And I didn’t want to tell my family that my “best friends” were making every day at school a living hell for me. Looking back at this situation, I know what caused the whole issue.

The ringleader of the mean girl clique, who I will call S, had feelings for me beyond friendship. I had suspected that she was into girls, but back then it wasn’t talked about as openly as it is now. And I wasn’t into that, but I didn’t care if my friends were gay – I only cared about the kind of person they were. And at first S seemed cool. But when I became friends with another girl who I will call A, S accused me of being in a romantic relationship with her and from that point on, I became her and the rest of my “friends” target. I remember at the time, finding that accusation so crazy, because it simply wasn’t true and she knew I was straight.

She became so obsessed with getting a reaction out of me, I literally had to change my phone number multiple times because she wouldn’t leave me alone. She would call my new friends, saying she was someone else, looking for my number. This was all before social media and whatsapp. I cringe to think would have happened to me if social media had been around like it is now back then.

She would spread all these rumors about me and tell people who I was becoming friends with that I was talking about them behind their back. It was awful. Most of my new friends saw through it all, but some didn’t. Some didn’t want to become S’s target and stopped talking to me altogether. And S seemed to delight in it.  

After ignoring her for awhile, the bullying stopped. And I don’t know why it did because I never thought it was going to end. Maybe teachers intervened, I don’t know.

But one day when my junior year started, S came up to me at my locker. I immediately felt like it was all going to start back up again and was on guard, but she was actually….nice to me. She said she hoped that we could be friends again. I kind of brushed her off and was like, yeah, we should get coffee sometime.

We were never friends again, though. I couldn’t trust her and she was still a mean girl. She and her “crew” (as she called it, who were also my former group of friends) were always bullying other kids. They were always going after other people, dragging them down and tearing them up because it made them feel better. And I just wasn’t that kind of person and didn’t want to be around people like that. 

Years removed from the situation; I think S had a lot of issues going on at home than we ever knew. She was also dealing with her own feelings about her sexuality in a very conservative town, and I know that had to have been really hard for her. Junior and senior year she started experimenting with drugs, which wasn’t my scene, either. We just went down different paths and were different people.

It can be so hard when you are being bullied to believe that how people treat you has less to do with you and more to do with them. How do you not personalize what is happening to you? How does it not feel like it will never end?

I feel like today, there are more resources and ways to handle situations like these. But there also more ways for bullies to get at their victims, too. I do feel like it is less tolerated than it used to be, but I also think it is happening more often than it has before, too.

I do have empathy for S, but what she did was completely unacceptable. I wish I had handled it better and faster, but I really didn’t know what to do.

But as humans, I feel like when we see someone being bullied, we need to take a stand and tell the bully to stop. There is strength in numbers and the more people the bully has standing up to them, the more likely they will back down.

Remember, the bully is someone who is extremely unhappy with themselves. They feel better focusing on perceived flaws in others because it distracts them from having to face themselves.

A couple of years ago, I found a subreddit called AITA (Am I the Asshole?). It’s been around for a long time, I’m just late to the party in finding it. I asked the ole magic 8 ball, also known as the Google, if I was wrong for standing my ground when it came to setting boundaries with my family out of desperation. I was struggling with guilt, years of unhealthy programming and gaslighting that I was seriously confused about whether or not saying no to my family about unreasonable requests made me a horrible person. The idea of saying no back then caused me to feel a tremendous about of guilt and that I was being incredibly selfish.

One of the first results from the google was a similar question that was asked in that subreddit. I read through some of the posts and discovered that one of the most common themes that people replied to posters with was the idea that you are not required to set yourself on fire to keep others warm. As crazy as it sounds, this was a new concept for me. And the more I saw people responding this way to people in similar situations as me, I actually felt somewhat…validated.

When you find yourself debating in your own mind about whether or not you are required to set yourself on fire to keep others warm, give yourself this litmus test:

If a friend was in your situation and they were about to light themselves on fire to keep other people warm, what would you tell them?

I’m willing to bet you would warn against them doing so…and to set strong boundaries.

Last year, two of my relatives came to my husband and I asking if we could pay their power bill. Long story short, we were not in a financial position to do so, so we politely said we couldn’t help them out. One of the relative’s reasons for asking us was that he hadn’t worked as much lately, and he didn’t want to go into his savings account to pay the light bill. He had thousands of dollars in his savings account but told us that he needed that money for his future. Yep. He actually came out and said that.

Prior to that, I had told him that my husband was worried about losing his job because of the pandemic and that our financial situation wasn’t what it once was. “No” should have been a complete sentence for me, but at the time, I felt like I needed to explain myself – again, bad programming I was still overcoming.

In the world my husband and I operate in, if we have to go into our savings account to pay a bill, that’s what we have to do. It’s not someone else’s responsibility to pay our bills. But for whatever reason, this relative didn’t really seem to care about our financial situation. He just didn’t want to have to go into his savings account because according to him, it was for his future. Our future or present, really, didn’t seem to matter to him at all.

Had my husband and I given them the money, it would have been difficult for us to make our own ends meet. We would have lit ourselves on fire to keep someone else warm.

My relatives were not happy when we said no. And it is totally okay for someone else to not like you setting boundaries that you have to set for yourself. But, pay attention when people react with anger and hostility to your boundaries. You have found the edge where their respect for you ends. You can be empathetic to the person’s situation and try to help them come up with ways resolve the issue. We tried to help our relative come up with solutions to pay the bill. They didn’t really want to hear it, though. They just seemed to be interested in us paying it for them. Just remember that empathy without boundaries is self-destruction.