Earlier this week, I got some news that landed heavily for me. Someone I care about is going through a hard time with their health, and it's been weighing on me the way that kind of thing can do sometimes.
This isn't unfamiliar territory, and I have a very familiar move for it. One I've made almost my whole life. I sit upright in a meditative posture, I breathe. I give the thing my attention, and I wait it out alone. I've done this for years, sometimes with a less disciplined look than meditation, but this kind of isolation has always been my go-to. When something is hard, when I'm struggling, when I'm in pain, I tend to turn inward. I don't reach out for other people.
And it's not that this doesn't work, it does. There's real use in learning to stay with your emotions, to keep them company. But it hides something. It hides the part of me that actually needs something. The competent part is sure I have to handle it all on my own, that I have to carry the weight myself. And it finds it nearly impossible to let my troubles be seen by anyone else. I've been like this my whole life. I even built a whole self around it.
The other day, I did something different. Not as part of some grand project out of my therapy. Something small. I was sitting on the sofa with this ache about my friend, and my wife, Melissa, was in the kitchen getting dinner ready, dancing around the way she does. The old move would have been to sit there and quietly wait it out, to let her have her evening and to carry it by myself until it passed. Instead, I called her over. I remember the urge not to interrupt her, not to bring the mood down, and then alongside it, a kind of curiosity. What would it be like to let her in on what was happening? So I told her I was having a hard time, and I asked her to hold me.
It felt foreign. I think I half expected nothing to come of it, but I could feel her warmth and tenderness come over me. And there was something about that, something even just about letting her in on what was happening, that let me let go.
What really stays with me, and why I'm sharing this with you, is how hard it was to ask. Even with her just in the other room. Even knowing she would, of course, say yes. Some part of me didn't want to disturb her. But more than that, it didn't want to need. It was sure I could do it all on my own.
This is the kind of thing I notice all the time. So many of us find it hard to receive. There's a whole performance in which being stoic is the prized thing. It's the part of us that learned early that we got praised for handling ourselves, or that when we did reach for help, the door got shut in our face. Or worse. So we learned to carry it all alone.
I'm fifty-two years old. I help people, for a living, learn to ask for what they need and let themselves be met. But I'm still learning how to turn toward the person closest to me and say the simplest thing. I could really use you right now.