‘Word by Word’ is a column by Garima Behal on learning to ride the highs and lows of everyday life

An old friend of mine is struggling. 

The youngest millennials are now facing their first full-blown recession. With layoffs happening left, right, and center, we are more anxious than ever. I see panic attacks mentioned so often in casual conversation that they feel more like normality than symptoms of something terribly wrong—within our biological system and with the outside world. 

“Are you taking therapy?” I asked her when she confessed to having panic attacks too. 

“I thought about it. But not actually strong enough to do it,” she replied.

Strong enough? Since when do we need to be strong enough to ask for help, I wondered.

I said nothing then but thought about it some more and then ended up writing this essay. Because I understood what she meant.

Curling up with the darkness

Asking for help isn’t as easy as latching on to a proffered hand when we fall and just getting up. It is an admission of drowning into the invisible yet unforgiving ocean of our own thoughts. It is wanting more than ever to come up for air when every force in the universe is pulling you down into the depths. It is walking barefoot on the smoldering embers of the world’s scorchiest flame and finally realizing how callused it has made your soles. 

Asking for help takes an uncomfortable yet inevitable courage. Because ironically enough, asking for help is somehow considered the greatest human weakness. 

I’ve seen it far too closely, the kaleidoscopic display of emotions that accompanies a cry for help. It has looked me in the eye when I’ve been too tired to continue on my own yet too proud, too conditioned in a culture that prizes self-sufficiency, and a little bit too afraid to admit I couldn’t do life alone.

“It’s just a boy; why are you crying after a boy? It’s not the end of the world.”

“Every family has disagreements. You don’t need therapy to deal with such small things.”

“Come on, are you really that much of a lost cause?”

Turns out, sometimes your worst enemy is your own voice, always getting in the way and always holding you back from listening to the voice of reason.

For the most part, I agreed with this waylaying voice. I was not a weakling. I was capable of dealing with my problems on my own. I didn’t need anyone else to bother with these tiny non-issues, anyway.

I gave myself a beautiful bunch of excuses. Till I wanted to spend every night curled up in my bed, crying into the pages of an unlucky book or the yielding softness of my favorite pillow. Till I found myself preferring to sulk alone than smile in the company of my friends. Till I had no choice but to head to Google and type: Free therapy online. Because even though I had admitted I needed help, the voice inside my head still screamed:

• What will you even tell the therapist? They’re a stranger
• You’re too broken to be fixed
• Do you even know how expensive therapy is? Are you really going to waste that much money?
• What will your parents think? Imagine how embarrassing it will be to tell them that you’re struggling.

Luckily—and I am aware of the irony—the pain was so gut-wrenching and so unending that none of these reasons deterred me any longer. 

Letting light in

I started small, which is sometimes the only way to start big things. 

I emailed a counseling service that let us write letters to a counseling therapist if we weren’t ready to talk just yet or attend an in-person session. After 6 months of exchanging emails with a kind soul I had neither seen nor met yet whom I could confide in, the fog of self-doubt and self-criticism inside my mind started lifting. 

Yet, I knew that the view was much more beautiful from the top. And that I had only reached the base camp. The summit would need me to keep climbing. It would also need me to adjust my approach, ready my gear, secure my crew, and form a support system.

With this mental guide map, I started opening up to my loved ones. To my relief, I discovered that all the judgment was simply inside my head and that people, my people, actually wanted to be there for me as I hiked my way up and out of the abyss. 

Surrounded by unconditional empathy, support, and care, I took the next step and registered for virtual therapy sessions. With each session (and homework!), I slowly came around to acknowledging the good that coexisted with the bad, which I had so far been oblivious to in my self-pity.

I also realized how much I ended up being in my own way when I refused to let people show up for me and have my back. Didn’t I owe it to myself to forge ahead and make the most of my one, precious, impossibly short life?

TL; DR? It was powerful, life-altering stuff. Yet, it was more hard work than magic, more conscious effort than happenstance.

What I’m trying to say, more to my friend than to anyone else is that asking for help is by no means the end of the journey. It is only the beginning of one that lasts an entire lifetime and takes a lot of learning, unlearning, and relearning. Yet, it is sometimes the only way to become the people we are destined to be. I shudder to imagine how many possibilities I’d have closed myself to had I never taken that scary, hesitant, floundering first step. And discovered how letting myself be helped became one of my greatest strengths.