I don’t know when I decided this, but it had to of been before I left high school, otherwise I would’ve probably pursued a different path.. I’ve written it before, but for those that aren’t familiar. Yeah, I probably should’ve been a therapist. Haha, I’ve probably been an unpaid version of one for years, but.. that’s the way I would want it. Because I chose the people that I wanted to fill that role with, generally the ones I was in a relationship with. I always thought it was helpful to them, and hopefully they did too.. but if they were paying me to do it, and I had to show up to an office every day, and I didn’t get to choose who I was talking to.. man, that job would get exhausting super fast.

Because there are people out there that don’t know what they want, and.. they may want to get better, or improve their quality of life, or their mental health, or whatever.. but from my experience, people need a direction in order to do that, they need motivation, and that isn’t something you can fake. Truthfully, this is where I am right now too. Feeling like you’re moving in the right direction is incredibly misleading without a plan, it constantly feels like you’re getting closer to something.. but you’re never sure how close, and you don’t know if you’ll ever make it there. It’s like having a tentative plan, or.. do you ever walk around the house and look at things, thinking “I need to do that.” And then you move on, do something else, forget about it, and the next time you see it, you remind yourself that, “I need to do that.”

I do it all the time because I know it does need to get done, but having the motivation to start on it is just a struggle unless I’m in the mood for it. I know it needs to happen, I know that it’s going to happen at some point, and I will eventually do it.. but that could be tomorrow, next week, a month from now.. who knows? But it’s going to get done.

It’s not good enough. For small everyday shit, yeah, maybe.. but you can only force motivation for things you don’t want to do for so long.. like, back to the therapy example.. if you want to get better, but you don’t have the drive to do it, it’s almost impossible to have someone else make that decision for you. No one else can wake up, drive to your therapy appointments, and stand-in for you. The same as no one can wake up in your skin every day, and make you want to get out of bed.

I’ve dealt with a lot of things in my life on my own.. I haven’t leaned on many people, even when I should. I know I have a support system around me that would jump to the opportunity if I needed help and asked for it.. I just.. don’t. And that isn’t saying that you should do the same, actually, you should probably do the exact opposite and lean on people when they offer the opportunity. Because a heavy task gets lighter with more hands.

However.. when we throw trauma into the mix, I can straight-up tell you that the reason I don’t ask for help is because when I have in the past, I’ve either: felt like a burden, been rejected, denied, teased, felt stupid.. whatever. There was generally always a reason that pushed me to avoid asking for help.. and as I got older, I started to understand that even though that is a pretty toxic quality to have, it’s also the one that probably keeps me the most resilient out of everything I’ve been through.

It keeps me trapped inside my mind, fighting my own struggles internally, and that’s not a bad thing.. sometimes I’d rather keep those struggles internal than wear them on my sleeve. And that comes from being bullied- I don’t show weaknesses when I can avoid it, because it’s just more ammunition for that person use against you. It’s fucked, really. Because not everyone in the world is going to use it against you, not everyone wants to hurt you.

We are creatures of habit, though, and we can be trained and conditioned to give certain responses based on what we’ve been through. It’s a pretty direct line from A to B in my life.. “A” is sharing things that were personal to me, being vulnerable and open, hoping to be accepted for the things I say, or the feelings I was feeling. “B” is the response that I received when I was finished with “A.”

After a while, if you constantly open yourself up to sharing your vulnerability, and regularly get shit on for it, you start to put those two things together: ‘If I share my vulnerability, people will not only be able to have the ammunition on the surface, they’ll have a direct route under my skin, and history has shown that more times than not, that information was used negatively against me.’ And if something like that happens a few times, you start expecting the same result, and why wouldn’t you? If that’s what people have shown you.. then you would expect the responses to stay consistent.

Do nothing = get bullied
Ask for help = get bullied for asking for help
Use resources to try and ask for help = get bullied with new information from those resources
Confront the problem and try to face it = get bullied for trying to stand up to it
Just stay quiet and be bullied = oddly enough, just taking it was better than any other alternative.

This is sad.. like, this is super fucked up when I look back on it.

I was getting fucked with so bad in 4th or 5th grade, that I went to talk to the school counselor.. I know now that she was just some woman that probably wasn’t qualified for shit, but she listened, and it made me feel better. Until we decided to confront the source of the problem.. we confronted my bully, sat down and talked to him outside, I bawled my eyes out, he lied, downplayed everything I said, and I felt like such a fucking pussy because.. well, because I believed him, and my counselor believed him, and I started letting it into my head that I just needed to suck it up. It was all in “good fun.“

We learn from consistency, whether that is good or bad consistency, we still learn from it. If you get burnt from touching a hot stove, you’re probably not going to touch it again.. but if you need to, you probably won’t touch it a third time, because if it burns you EVERY FUCKING TIME, at some point, you have to be the person that figures out that you don’t like being burnt. It’s not always a lesson you want to learn either, but unless you’re the one choosing to put your hand on the stove, sometimes those lessons just find us instead.

So.. what I learned from about 10 years old, until I hit about 27, was that if I shared my problems with other people, or told them what was going on in my life.. not only would I not be supported for it. I would be ridiculed for it. I would be laughed at, made fun of, and then when I tried to go to someone with any amount of power, or their job was to listen.. they would make the situation worse.

At some point, and to no surprise from anyone, I stopped asking for help. Because.. well, why would I keep asking if it kept making things worse? The ‘best’ way to deal with it was to just keep my mouth shut, and try not to react.. and then, just.. not talk about it, because I didn’t want to be a burden, and I definitely didn’t want anyone to ‘help’ and make it worse again.

You don’t have to do it alone, and that’s true.. we really don’t have to go through life doing everything alone.. but if you are, or you know someone that is.. you’re not doing it wrong. Don’t beat yourself up for it, or feel like you have to share anything with anyone. It’s not that easy, and relearning how to ask for help.. truthfully, it feels like such a hit to the pride, even though I know it’s something so basic as to just say, “hey.. I need your help.” or “hey, I’m struggling.”

We’re all just trying to survive, and because it’s such a conditioned response.. it feels ‘safe.’ Plus, when you’ve seen what happens when you go against it.. it’s hard to change your way of thinking to let you believe that people actually do want to help, if a lot of what you’ve seen has come from the opposing side. It does help to talk to someone, for me, writing helped a a lot too.. understanding where they came from is only about half of the problem if you do intend to heal from the trauma that started it.. it’s not always black and white though.. everyone has walls for a reason, and they have to choose to take them down on their own, no one else can make that choice for them.

‘Til next time,

Cowboy