“Something I will never do again is carry the burden of a difficult time alone…It doesn’t make you weak to ask for help,” Alexandra Cooper.  Regardless of the context of a difficult time, the lesson is the same: we are capable of getting through tough situations.  As humans we tend to classify what deserves help and attention based on the circumstances.  While I don’t pretend someone facing a bad grade is on the same level as someone facing death, the one truth that remains is that a difficult time is a difficult time no matter what it is.  We don’t get points for how many hard things we can survive or solve on our own—this isn’t a contest of emotional strength. It is a matter of building tools to navigate different situations.  Each situation may require different attention and resources to resolve.  It isn’t about comparing the severity of the difficult time, it’s about learning to navigate them successfully.  Part of that is releasing judgement and being able to recognize scenarios for what they are—look at the situation objectively.  It can be challenging to manage thoughts/feelings during these circumstances, but the truth is there is always a solution. 

I agree with Cooper’s analysis in that it doesn’t make us weak to ask for help.  We need to know that there are people who have faced what we are dealing with no matter what it is and there may be a way to shorten the learning curve and reach out for assistance.  It doesn’t make us weak or incapable to need help navigating something others have done before or something that others do differently.  We each have different experiences and we are meant to use our tools to come together to create a new way of approaching things, a new way to solve things.  Our skill sets are meant to complement each other’s so we aren’t left on our own.  We were never meant to handle anything on our own.  We were meant to build off of each other and to support each other.  As I have spoken about numerous times, we are an expansive species and that means we need to utilize each other’s skill sets and knowledge so we can create new things, so we can develop new things and so we can adapt to the ever changing universe just as much as create that change.

Difficult times change the shape of what we know because it forces us to see what we think we understand in a new perspective.  Those different perspectives give us more opportunity to solve things as well as different and more effective ways to relate to other people.  Problems give us a chance to relate to others because we shift our focus to a common goal.  Our society has shifted to a mentality that we need to be strong all the time and our definition of strong has more to do with power than it does skill.  Survival is about learning how to navigate things together, about how forming community and cooperation makes us stronger.  Asking for help brings us to a solution quicker—and depending on the situation it’s a teacher.  We are not meant to do it all alone—our strengths are someone else’s weakness, and our weakness is someone else’s strength.  It’s a beautiful thing to come together and a nice reminder that not everything has to keep going as it is—we can shift the weight and learn to carry it differently.  That makes it easier for all of us.