The Ask Thing

Why is it so hard to ask others for help? I think I’ve managed all the other inconveniences of managing an illness. Less energy? No problem. Do less. Weird diet needs? No challenge. Eat suitably weirdly. Trouble sleeping? Easy. Sleep when I’m sleepy; enjoy being awake when I’m awake. It’s all so perfect, my new life. Except for asking whenever I need something.

The thing I need the most is for someone to feed the dogs when I go overnight to Cleveland. I’ve managed to become comfortable asking for someone to drive with me to the Clinic. The Clinic Guest House is lovely and there is a lot to do in the city—a zoo, museums, shopping. So I bill the request as a holiday and I feel better about the asking.

But asking for the smaller task of caring for the dogs has become hard for me. I’ve hit some inner resistance and keep putting off asking. I try to make the chore easier on me by using a friend rotation technique. That is, I spread my requests among people so no one gets hit too often. I believe I still have people on the list who are not yet exhausted by my needs or my dogs. The problem is not my friends, then. It’s me. I’m frozen inside; I’m exhausted from asking. I need a break from needing and I do not see one coming.

Seek and you shall find; ask and you shall receive the gospel says. I used to read that text as a warm, joyous promise of God’s goodness and perhaps on one level that is exactly what it means. Yet I’m starting to think the text was also giving us a challenge, a duty to understand that seeking is really about humility and acceptance. Asking is about admitting helplessness. If we can face helplessness perhaps then we have become truly pure of spirit. I suppose the text is telling me that I must keep trying not only to ask, but to ask without cringing.

I comfort myself for failing by believing that people do like being asked to help. And some even like my dogs. 


Above: Fezzik and Mandy; pastel on board. Copyright 2010 ptw.