Help: Asking for help can be the hardest thing we ever do. When and how did you ask for help? Alternatively, did someone ask you for help and how did it play out?
Living overseas this past year often felt like one long exercise in asking for help. I can’t count how many times I needed to find someone who spoke both English and Korean to help me with something that would otherwise be basic. Things like getting a cell phone, ordering food, changing money, getting a locker at the subway station, grocery shopping even. There were other ways that I needed other foreigners who knew the lay of the land to help me out too. They pointed me to foreigner-friendly shops and service-providers. And then there were all the ways that I needed people back here at home to help me. Finding things tucked away in storage that I realized I needed in Korea after all, and shipping them to me. Buying things I couldn’t find there (like reasonable panty liners and non-drowsy cold meds) and sending them off. The other big helping hand that I got from back here at home was the emotional pick-me-up that I often needed to just keep me grounded and not panicking.
When I say that I can’t count how many times I had to ask for help, I mean that. I really feel like I did a lot of asking and I’m grateful that I pretty much always felt like I was going to get the help I needed. So in the area of getting help, I’ve been damn lucky. And that’s extended to being back here at home. I’ve had a lot of help getting back on my feet financially as well as the emotional help that’s continued to keep me from completely melting down.
So have I been as helpful to others? I doubt I could come close to giving as much as I’ve received this past year. Maybe that’s next year’s project. There were many times when I had the opportunity to be an emotional support to friends going through their own challenges in the past year and that was really fulfilling for me. I’d like to think it was helpful to them too.
Probably the most challenging way that I was presented with being helpful though, was being there for new foreigners in Korea in the way that others had been for me. Some of you may remember a couple posts I wrote last year about a woman I worked with named Mona. Her time in Korea represented the first time she’d ever lived away from home even though she was 36 years old. I went grocery shopping with her one day to help her navigate the store and we spent about 20 minutes discussing the purchase of a spoon. In the workplace she expected a lot of hand-holding despite the fact that she actually had two weeks of teaching experience on me. After about a month or so of this, I was ready to throttle her every time I saw her. I refused to eat lunch with her, I didn’t include her in conversations if I could help it and I did not socialize with her. All that helping was making me resent the hell out of her. I finally did manage to tell her quite calmly that she needed to be more self-sufficient and she was really hurt. This happened with another co-worker as well though our conversation about it was far less calm. I could see the pattern starting to repeat itself with yet another co-worker and finally had to really think hard about my obvious lack of boundaries. Somehow, me being helpful was turning into me being a doormat.
I’ve never been very good at boundaries. It’s a real work in progress for me. I think my lack of boundaries makes me want to pull back from being helpful because it so often turns into being taken advantage of. But then I feel bad about not being as helpful as other people seem to be. I wonder why it is that I feel put upon so quickly.
I’d like to think that as I keep working on maintaining healthy boundaries, I’ll get better at being helpful and maybe be able to help even more than I think I’m presently capable of. If nothing else I’d like to generally feel like offering a helping hand doesn’t leave me with bitten fingers.
