On a second note, as some of you
may know, I recently acquired an editor for this blog. While I don’t like
giving out personal names, the individual graciously offered to assist me when
I requested assistance, and I could not be happier! So starting as of this immediate blog post,
said individual will be the first one to take a look at my work, and help bang
out any grammar or punctuation mistakes, because I suck at those.
And on to todays’ article.
Before we get started, I highly
recommend- you know what, I am going to stop myself right there. I am starting to notice that every time I
start typing up one of these articles, I always mention, “Oh, this one is going
to be pretty long, so make sure you get a drink and a snack.” Like I have ever
written a short article. So I think
going forward, let’s all just assume that I am going to write up some long
thing regarding whatever topic we are addressing. That way I don’t have to give
a warning about it. Ha ha.
Pride can be a funny thing. It can give us confidence, it can give us
motivation and general desire to pursue something we want. I am sure many of you know of individuals who
are quite prideful; they do things alone, but are seen as someone who can get
things done, someone who is not impacted by the general day-to-day mishaps that
are life. They never ask for help; an
individual who is willing and has come through for you, time and time again,
without ever asking for help in return?
This is typically a prideful person, and since I am one of these
individuals, I will be using a lot of personal experience.
Pride, as I mentioned, is a
strong tool. In my opinion, is almost as strong a motivator as hate or
anger. With pride though, it is a
self-motivating engine. You in general
know you can do something, you will do something, and nothing is going to stop
you from doing it. Whether you have seen
it work or not, it is a real force. But,
much like anger, pride has a terrible backlash.
A prideful person is just that,
prideful. They are self-sufficient. They
can and will do things on their own. They don’t require help and typically
refuse to ask for it. They believe that
no matter what life throws their way, they can handle it just fine. Eventually though, things can and will pile
up to break those individuals down, and if they’re not careful, their pride
will end up destroying themselves.
My entire life I have been a
fairly independent person, even growing up at home. Now, before anyone reads on
and tells me, “Oh, it sounds like you had a rough childhood, that’s why you’re
so independent," let me stop you there.
I had a fantastic childhood. My parents were supportive, and they were
there if I ever needed anything. I also had a lot of friends and spent a lot of
time with them. So no, I had a wonderful
childhood and young adult life. Anyways,
I have always been a pretty independent individual. I played alone, I worked alone, I traveled
alone. Even when I did make some close friends, I still stayed fairly alone
with them. I don’t remember when this
mind set came to be. In fact, I don’t even remember when I started thinking
this way. But I truly believe in self-motivating. And while I do not think it
stupid or shameful for others to reach out and ask for help, I do find it
shameful and weak of myself to do so. I
honestly believe in being self-sufficient.
In fact, I have programmed myself with an arsenal of phrases and quotes
to re-motivate myself through almost any situation. A few come to mind:
“How can you help others, if you
can’t even help yourself?”
“It isn’t a question of can or
can’t. In life, there are somethings you just do.”
“If you know you can do
something, and your mind keeps throwing up road blocks, know you can always
just drive right through ’em.”
“Protect your emotions, then
protect your friends.”
These are very common phrases I
use any time I find myself in a situation where I might be in trouble, but
there comes a time where even the “strongest” individuals start to break down.
I hate hate hate hate hate asking
for help. If I was drowning and you
reached out to help pull me out, there's a 99% chance I am going ignore the
fact that your hand is there. I will either sink, or I will swim. I am still a firm believer that if I can’t do
it, then let me fail. I don’t even know
why. Realistically, I know people don’t
expect me to be a stone wall. I know people don’t expect people to get slapped
with terrible news and act as if nothing had happened at all, but that is who I
am.
I am so “prideful” that I refuse
to share pieces of my personal life if there is still a possible chance for me
to fail. Here is an example: I started
going to college about three years ago, I received a call from my mom in about
October or November asking me to come home for something.
“Oh I can’t I am not in town.”
“What, where are you?”
“Im in ‘whatever city I was in’.”
“Why!?”
“I’m doing this thing for
school.”
“What school?”
“Oh, I guess I didn’t tell you,
I’m in college, gotta go.”
Another good example is my dad's
car accident a few years ago. I think I might have told one person, if that. My mom went to the hospital a while ago and I
did not tell my fiancée until she was out of the hospital and fine. Don’t ask me why, I just don’t share
information about myself or my life very often.
Which makes this blog an anomaly for my life.
I am just a backwards individual
as well. You can come ask me any day of
the week for advice, help, whatever it is, and I will truly give it my best
effort to assist you with anything you need.
But a life problem presents itself to me and do I bother asking for help
in return? No, I will deal with it
alone. It's not that I don’t think you can help me, I am just not going to ask
for it. I love helping other people and,
generally, I believe others love to help too. But asking someone on a pure
heart-to-heart level to help me, no thanks.
I’ve been struggling with the
above statement a lot lately. I say struggling, because I am just becoming
aware that my pride is turning into a bad habit. I have asked for help before, time and time
again. I have been let down, time and time again. That is one of the reasons
why I learned to become “self-sufficient." For someone like me to actually
reach out and say, “Hey, I have actually been having a tough time…” might seem
like no big deal to you, but it so against my internal design as an individual
that it literally hurts just typing up those words. Even thinking about asking for help causes my
emotions to swirl up and spiral out of control, and I think that a lot of
people don’t understand how big of a deal it is for someone like myself to even
bother reaching out.
I also believe the world itself
doesn’t seem to understand what a stride that is for someone like myself. Some of you follow me on the book, and have
seen my statuses or tweets here and there regarding what is happening in my
personal life. I have been struggling
with school so horribly this semester that it is literally breaking me to my
core. I have never slept so little, my
course work is drastically too much, I am attempting to save for a wedding and
working full time. I am really struggling with finding time to manage all of
that; manage my friendships, manage my relationship, do homework, study, keep up
on my house work, go to work, and distress.
It is literally crushing me and slowly breaking me apart.
I’ve come to realize this and
honestly a few people told me, “You should really reach out to your
instructors” and inside its like, "Seriously!? Do you have any idea how
hard it was for me to open you in the first place, and now you want me to go to
some random individual and do the same thing? Yeah, thanks a lot,
jackass." For someone like me it
just adds insult to injury. And while realistically that may be you trying to
help, it just seems more like, “Yeah, I don’t care. Tell someone else,” even if
that is not your intention.
So okay, I will go talk to my
instructor. I have never done that in the entire time I have been going to
school, but I am feeling this wave of despair start to sink in, so I will go do
so. Except when I reach out and open up
to them saying that I feel like I am struggling and I can’t grasp the material
or I need your help, I get something like: “Read the chapter more.” Or one of the
things that really got to me was, “Why would I go over the problems in class
when you don’t even bother to show up?” This was said to me after I only missed
one day of class. One day, over five
weeks, I missed one day. Granted, in
class she did slow down and start to go through problems more thoroughly, but
did she do this because I requested it? Or because we just hit that part of her
teaching regimen? I don’t know.
When people like me reach out, it
is because we seriously don’t know what to do. We need guidance, and if we
can’t find it, it makes everything worse because, honestly, it strengthens our
main idea of, “Why ask? People don’t care, and people won’t help.” Now most of you out there are very sweet, kind-hearted
individuals who truly want to help people like me, but we don’t reach out
because we don’t want to feel vulnerable. We don’t believe we need your help
and we honestly believe that we should be able to handle things on our
own. It is like if I went to fill a
glass of water; "Hey can I help you with that?” “With what? Filling this
cup? NO. If you think I can’t fill a glass of water, get out of here!” We end up missing that kind gesture of, “Let
me help you,” and see it as, “Seriously, you better let me do it cause you
cannot handle it.” And that is really true!
The world in general seems to forget that people want to and usually
mean well. Everyone is so sensitive and feels attacked by the tiniest of things
that it can be near impossible for anyone to let anyone in because we all are
always constantly feeling judged. So instead, everyone tries to play it cool
and act like nothing phases them.
Lately, I’ve been feeling like I
am drowning. For the first time in my life, I am reaching for a hand to just
pull me out of here and make everything better. But I miss, or slip, and I’m
not getting where I want to go and it just eats away at me inside. All I want
to do is scream out of sheer frustration.
I sometimes think of just running away from here and starting over,
because the fact that I cannot do this, and that I ask for help and it gets
thrown back in my face, is going to lead to me failing. The worst part is that I am really trying out
there. Some might say, “Hey, you gave it
your all and you lost, but at least you gave it your all!” NO!
Are you kidding me? That is not how someone like me thinks. If I am out there giving 100% of my effort
and I fail, I am not going to be okay with that statement. You basically just told me that I gave 100%
and it STILL wasn’t good enough. I can’t
handle something like that. I feel as though I should be able to do everything
without failure, and on the first try.
The thing is though, people are not designed to get everything right the
first time. Life is messy; we are designed to occasionally fail, and we are
supposed to learn from those failures.
That is the point of this article
today. From the above, you can tell how
independent I am, and even how ridiculous I am, but even after this article, I
really am still going to try and do it all. The difference though, is that I
know it is okay to reach out. Asking for
help, especially as a prideful person, takes a much larger amount of strength
and courage than it does to tackle any normal thing. It is 1,000 times easier to remain silent and
stoic than to openly express that I need help.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you take
one thing from this, please understand that ASKING FOR HELP IS NOT A
WEAKNESS. It takes a tremendous amount
of self-respect and power to open yourself up and say, “I need help.” So please, do not be afraid to reach out to
friends, family members, or whomever it is that can help you. More often than
not, they sincerely want to help you.
The other night I was on the
verge of a mental break down at work. I
messaged my fiancée and basically just poured out my “crazy” over our IM
system. I was stressed, I couldn’t
manage work and my school work load, it felt like everything was closing in
around me, I was having trouble breathing. I am pretty confident I was having
an anxiety attack or something, and when it finally calmed down all I could
tell her was, “…I think I’m in trouble here.”
Not because of my maybe anxiety attack, but because for the first time,
I mentally and physically don’t think I can handle what is happening. And that
if I don’t ask for help soon, I am going to break. Also, yes, I do have moments of enlightenment
where I remove myself from my own problem and see it from a different point of
view. In fact, that is what gave me the inspiration for this article. To help others like myself, and maybe help
myself a little, mentally, by pouring it out somewhere.
While this is not something that
you can just change overnight, it is something that people like me need to work
on. I still am not able to fully and
mentally comprehend the amount of work I have before me, and I am deathly
afraid that I am going to fail and not be able to provide the future I want for
my fiancée and our future family. I don’t know if I can balance all of this
stuff, because right now I am falling apart and I know things are starting to
slip. So know that while you are out
there, struggling with your battles and burdens, you are not alone; so let’s
help one another.
Now I cannot say I am going to
become a magically open book who asks for help any time the sky turns gray, but
I can see and acknowledge when I need help, and I know who I can turn to. So if you feel like you just don’t know where
you can go, at the very least, always know that this blog is here for you. To help you, to listen, to do anything it can
so you don’t feel like you’re drowning and no one will reach out for your hand,
because we’re right here.
As always, thank you so much
taking the time to read on to the end. I
truly hope this does help anyone who is feeling the same way or can relate. If you ever need help, want advice, or want
me to talk about something specific, feel free to comment, email, or message
me, and I will do whatever I can to help you out!
Sincerely
The Q man
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