Make them an offer they can’t refuse

I ask for help all the time.

I don’t mean I’m not afraid or not too proud or any of that, I mean I ask with something approaching wild abandon.

I am absurdly short, so I often have to ask strangers to get things off high shelves for me. Two things are achieved here: I get the thing, and I’ve grown more comfortable talking to strangers.

When I was younger, had two fewer compromised ankles and weighed many cakes less, there was a trick with the shopping cart I perfected for reaching things myself. But no more. And less said about the balancing act the better.

We’re always being told to ask for help. Once, a long time ago, someone famous said, “Ask and you’ll get stuff.”

It's become, it seems, a virtue. There are posters for your kitchen, keychains, bookmarks, coffee mugs and books.

This is not a bad thing.

It makes us less insular for one. And, as Caribbean people, I believe we are not predisposed to insularity. We didn’t survive by hacking it on our own. We are familiar with community. My parents talked about the communities they grew up in as natural extensions of their households, their interests, their work.

And how I wished I knew that way of living, because I feel it in my blood, but I don’t have quite the same organic fabric surrounding me.

But, about asking. It’s important. Do it.

The thing that disturbs me is not our ability to ask for help. It is our reluctance to offer help when it is clearly needed.

If asking for help has been lofted into the virtue category, then not asking if help is needed should be cast as a sin. Or at least a very bad thing.

Who needs help? Why don’t we offer to help? How can we help?

Everyone, at some point, needs help with something. I do. You do. The country, the world, all creatures great and small, we all need help. We can’t all ask for it. Cats, babies, people who may be too frail to utter words – they can’t.

People we won’t talk to because we’re afraid of them can’t ask. The neighborhood’s “everybody know he mad” man, shunned by all, can’t ask. But he does need help. And not just a few dollars.

But this space is not reserved for the we-won’t-touchables. Others can’t ask because, well, they can’t. Class barriers, closed religious gates, social lines in the sand. All those mixed metaphors serve a purpose: we are as confused/confusing as they are.

Depending on who you are and where you stand, there is someone out there who is going to judge your deservingness based on something superficial. This can happen in the big, much-headlined “real world.” Or at home.

Helping the less fortunate happens in our country all the time. Sorry if I implied otherwise. We’re awash with organizations that do nothing all day but help people. This is not quite about them. Maybe a little, sometimes.

We have trouble helping each other on a regular person-to-person basis. Within circles of friends, families, teams, communities of shared interests – it’s almost as if the closer we are, the harder it is to help. “I can’t get involved, I’m too close to the situation” or “He won’t accept it from me, he’ll be embarrassed.”

Sometimes it looks like we’re saving up our kindness, generosity, patience – whatever particular gift someone might be needing at that point. Saving it up for what, though? Our own moments of need? Just because it’s ours?

Now, how can we help?

First, like the doctors are supposed to do: Do no harm. And that’s a great help right there. Just don’t make situations worse. Think for a second of all the ways in which your own life would be so much better if someone had simply not made something worse by word or deed.

Show up. Be there. This is not about money. Certainly not only about money. We have become so terrible at paying attention to what others need that when someone does it, it’s treated essentially as eccentricity.

Do it anyway. Asking can be hard. That’s why all the teaching tools cited (tea towels, books) earlier were made.

Somewhere along the way, the world became a difficult place in which to say, “Things are not ok, can I talk to you about it?”

We can make the whole help-needing matter fractionally easier. We can make the first two moves: pay attention, and ask if there’s something we can do.

Remember to talk to your doctor or therapist if you want to know more about what you read here. In many cases, there’s no single solution or diagnosis to a mental health concern. Many people suffer from more than one condition.