Saying yes to help
Help doesn't mean you're an incapable or incompetent human being or father.
There's this old teamwork challenge that I used to run in workshops all the time.
The idea is that you're blindfolded in a maze and you need to find your way out.
The secret (yep, I'm going to go ahead and ruin it now) is that there isn't an actual way out. You're stuck in a never-ending loop that you can't actually escape on your own.
The key is simple. You need to raise your hand and ask for help.
You're told that this is an option from the very beginning, and then the facilitator repeats it over and over again to remind everyone that they can always ask for help. Any time someone asks, they are secretly and quietly pulled out of the maze to join the ranks of others silently snickering away at those who don't want to "give up".
Like all other teambuilding activities, it's cheesy, but kind of entertaining. And more importantly, the lesson at the heart of it is a good one.
I hate accepting help. I'm terrible at it.
Clean and spacious garage with enough space for fun and activities. Thanks to help.
For me, it's a control issue combined with the inner need to never burden another human being during my time here on earth.
For others, it can also be a sense of wanting independence, a toddler seeking autonomy, a lack of trust in others, a sense of judgment and embarrassment that follows, or one of another million reasons on the laundry list.
And once you're charged with parenting a newborn, all of them should get thrown out the window (save the trust issues of handing your baby over to a convicted predator or anything of real true unimagined danger).
The new house we're in came with a garage that, in apparently(?) classic Greek tradition, was full of the previous owners shit they didn't want anymore. They pretended like it was a gift, not a burden.
Yep. Nailed it. Exactly what I wanted was a bag full of weird plastic clowns, ten boxes of clothes that don't fit me from the 90's featuring holes kindly chewed by mice, and enough old and broken tools to make any abandoned house truly abandoned.
So it's been on my radar to take care of.
I wanted that space to fill a lot of purposes. I want storage because we have a lot of bikes and skis. I want a place to workout when it's cold. I want a place to play around with carpentry and other things I've let go by the wayside while living in a van. But for a while it was just an overwhelming stack of garbage what was too much for me to look at.
A friend visited and was instantly stoked on organizing and cleaning the mess that I was putting out of sight and out of mind.
My natural reaction to her wanting to help out was to push it off, tell her that she's visiting to have fun not clean old dust, and do it myself at a time later on (probably in like a year). I did want to burden her. I wanted control over making it my own.
Whatever it was that pushed me into just accepting the help is now my favorite unknown thing in this universe. Because today, my garage is so clean and tidy. Yes, there's still a lot of junk in there that needs to be taken care of, but it's organized, the floor is clean(er), and I don't freak out when I go through the door.
Saying yes to help was weird to me, but it's something that I'm pushing myself on doing as I take on so many other responsibilities with a newborn in the house. And to be honest, it felt pretty great. Well, not the saying yes part, but the reward from saying yes.
Whatever it is that's holding you back from accepting help, take a real hard look at that. What's the denial of help giving you? What could it look like if you said yes for once? What do you have to lose by letting a friend help clean your garage?
Because more often than not, the reason we're saying no is actually a pretty great reason to say yes.
