Asking For Help

Dear younger me,

I see you now, kneeling in the convent garden, head bowed, believing strength means bearing every burden alone. You think asking for help is a crack in your resolve, a whisper of failure. Oh, my dear, how you carry the weight of the world in your shoulders—like that sack of potatoes you hauled up the hill after the rain, refusing the sister’s outstretched hand. You thought it was holy to be unburdened.

I wish I could tell you: asking for help is not weakness. It is the quiet courage of knowing you are not alone. You spent years believing the sacred lived only in silent endurance, but I’ve learned it lives too in the tremble of a voice saying, “I need you.” When you were sick with that fever after the harvest, and you refused the neighbor’s soup, you didn’t just starve your body—you starved your soul of connection.

What if the person who offers help is also longing to be needed? What if the act of receiving is as holy as giving? I remember the day I finally asked the young priest to help me move the heavy oak table after my husband’s passing. My hands shook. He said, “This is how we hold each other, Gertrude.” And in that moment, I understood: there’s a kind of grace in that—in letting the weight shift, in trusting another’s hands to share the load.

You thought solitude was the path to holiness. But holiness is also in the shared cup of tea, the offered arm on the walk to the market, the whispered “How can I help?” that breaks the silence of pride. You didn’t know then that asking for help is how we build the bridge between our loneliness and the belonging we all crave.

So, my younger self, breathe. Let your hands open. Let the words come: “I need you.” It won’t break you. It will mend you. And one day, you’ll look back and see how every time you asked, you were not falling—you were learning to fly.

— Gertrude Carroll, still wondering

— Sheila Bishop, laughing so I don't cry (and sometimes both)