A Look At Four Tough Words To Admit

Everybody needs a hand up sometimes.

I Need Your Help

Pound for pound, these are four of the hardest words to say, and the heaviest to have to say. It sucks to have to say those words. Four words put together can be the most powerful you’ll ever speak. For example, consider this point.

The most terrifying words in the English language are I’m from the government and “I’m here to help.”

-40th President of the United States Ronald Reagan

Consider how the effect of four words can change things. How do the words make you feel? Four simple little words can be a blessing or feel like a gut punch. That’s why some people struggle with saying, “I need your help.”

But imagine you never ask. How is that option going to affect your life? Will you continue to struggle, and things get worse? Wouldn’t it be correct to believe that by not asking, you’re letting things get out of control?

It’s good to have pride and be self-sufficient in life. And if the stars aligned, and all things went well, everybody would be able to get to that point and stay there. Each of us would be self-sufficient, fully functional, healthy, and successful on our chosen path.

Now, I imagine the other side of the coin. The thing that is often ignored or forgotten. There’s always part of a story that we don’t see, and when you fill in the blanks, a good portion of the time, it could happen to us all. After all, the idea of all “men” being created equal stops at birth.

Reasons People Find Themselves Needing Help

Health crisis: You may think you’re fully healthy and in good shape. Kudos to you. Enjoy it while it lasts. Because you could do like I did, go in for a routine doctor’s visit, and suddenly you are dying. Cancer can creep up on you, and before you know it, you’re in stage IV, it’s in your lymph nodes, bones, organs, and you are left to pray for the miracle of remission or at least slowing the progression down. (Slowing the progression is my only option.)

Mental health: People never know the strain of life until they tackle it while suffering from a mental health emergency or a long-term mental health crisis. It is one of the hardest things to work through, particularly while trying to tackle the day-to-day. Consider the causes of mental health emergencies. Family crisis issues, divorce, death of loved ones, children with a chronic disease, and so on. Each of those can have devastating effects on someone in the home, or all of you.

Workplace traumas: The loss of a job, demotions, and in some professions, the bloodiest of traumas can occur. These can create issues that push a person to make a mistake in life.

Financial Hardships: These can be something like the effects of a sick or ill child, all the way to a serious cancer diagnosis. Including things like job loss, loss of income, out of control inflation, and human error, it can leave a person feeling like they are buried and unable to get out of the hole before the dirt covers their heads.

People expect everybody to be as solid as they are in life. That is where the mistake happens. We aren’t all made the same way. We haven’t all been through the same things that build character, inner strength, a moral compass, or coping mechanisms.

While fighting cancer, I got laid off. It was a blow to say the least. The loss of income and insurance benefits is scary. It took three months to get through the approvals for insurance and get meds approved. In the meantime, bills kept coming in, and my income got chopped by 55 percent.

It didn’t break me mentally, but it could have caused a person to slump into a depression. Not to toot a personal horn, but already dying, starting to feel the effects of a terminal cancer diagnosis, and losing the thing that kept me going every day, made it a challenge to stay positive or want to get up. I only did it because to beat the odds, you have to get in the fight.

As deep in the hole as this put me, particularly with meds costing into the thousands a month, and medical bills and my normal living bills not stopping when I lost more than half my monthly income, I still go back to that voice in my head.

“Never give up, never surrender!”

-Tim Allen (Buzz Lightyear)

But I need your help; the words came out of my mouth. As the pain started and struck me in my feet, ankles, and legs (Particularly my right femur, where the cancer was worse in my bones), I would ask for help with things I didn’t feel good enough to do that day.

I’m always reminded of this:

Pride goes before destruction, and a naughty spirit before a fall.

-Proverbs, 16:18

If you’re in a position where you need help, you have to do three things.

• Talk to someone you trust
• Ask someone for help, whether it’s a trusted person in your life, a doctor, a financial counselor, a mental health professional, or another
• Take the help that’s offered, and remember, as much as it might feel wrong or off for you to take help if you’re having life troubles, you can always give back when you’re doing better

Takeaways

Sure, maybe success, happiness, or health escaped through your fingers like sand in an hourglass. But it can all get better.

There’s no shame in needing help. We live in a society that props up success stories as if they are gods, and they are just roadmaps we can use for success. But even the most well-known success stories had someone help them at some point in their lives.

Don’t let the struggles get you bogged down. Ask for help, talk to a trusted source or person in your support structure, and take the help that’s offered. Once you start developing that momentum in life, you can always give back to someone else who might need it.

If you would like to show some extra support, I’m on Kofi

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