I'm Okay, Everything is Okay

(Please send help.)

Photo by Stormseeker on Unsplash

If you’ve ever said you were “fine” when you were not at all fine, then we already understand one another. A few weeks ago I was texting with a friend and I made a joke that everything was good, I just needed to re-examine all my life choices. I then quickly followed it up with, I’m okay, it’s nothing a long walk with my dog won’t solve. She texted back, Haha, but are you really okay? And I spent ten minutes writing and deleting texts because I did not want to seem too vulnerable, too messy, too not at all okay. She watched those three dots blinking for a while, and then she called me. She called me because she is also someone who doesn't like to ask for help, so she recognizes the language underneath the language. The thing not said.

I have had times in my life when I have felt so overwhelmed, so at my breaking point, so completely and utterly maxed out, I really didn’t know how I could go on, and yet I didn’t reach out to anyone. I didn’t say, I am really struggling here. I don’t know how or if I can keep going. I don’t think I can hold everything together anymore. I’m crying myself to sleep a lot. I could have reached out in the sense that I had people who would have been there for me, but I couldn’t reach out because I couldn’t get the words out. I didn’t want to be a burden. I’m the one who takes care of other people, that’s my job. I’m not allowed to not be okay unless I’m paying a therapist to listen, and even then I’m going to make sure I’m entertaining. I’d never want to be the client the therapist dreads.

I know this is an old tape. It’s ridiculous to expect yourself or anyone else to be strong all the time, because life will break your heart, and probably more than once. Probably more than half a dozen times, and that’s the estimate if you’re lucky. Relationships will end, people will betray you, someone you love with your entire heart will die, the ground underneath your feet will shift in ways you didn’t expect and definitely didn’t want, and there will be moments when you let yourself down, badly. It doesn’t matter if you’re a yoga teacher and you have tools and you lead a community and know how to calm your nervous system and breathe and bring yourself back to center. Sometimes we all just need to fall apart and have someone show up for us and say, Hey, it’s okay. Go ahead and cry. I’m here, I’m not going anywhere and you don’t have to do everything on your own.

I feel fairly sure that people who struggle to ask for help are the people who were let down in some essential way as children. When the people who are meant to protect and care for you are not reliable, or make choices that put you in harm’s way whether they meant to or not, you understand early that you are not safe. You’re tiny in an unpredictable world and no one is looking out for you, so you’d better look out for yourself. Parentified children understand this. Kids who had to grow up way too fast for any reason know what I’m talking about. Kids who had to keep secrets for the grown-ups around them, for example. The wiring is not set up to ask for help, it’s set up to hide the fact that you need help. Needing help makes you weak, it makes you an easy target. If you got really unlucky, you might have had the horrible experience as a child of asking for help and being denied. Being left to figure it out on your own. Lessons like those run deep, and they breed shame - the shame of not being (good) enough. Children of alcoholics will understand this. Children who were scared and had no one to turn to, no one to validate their feelings, no one to get in the line of fire for them and fight, will know exactly what I mean. When you ask for help, you set yourself up for the possibility of being told no through words or inaction - of having asked, and having to live with the fact that you weren’t worth the effort. Better not to ask.

When I was thirteen a man assaulted me in a stairwell on my way to ballet class. I’ve written about it before, I won’t go into details here. At the time, it was the scariest thing I’d been through. I didn’t understand why he’d done that, how anyone could do something like that to someone else. I fought for my life and I got away, but the whole time I was stunned, terrified, and so deeply confused. Afterward, I could not stop shaking. For reasons I will never understand, my mother didn’t come to the studio to get me. She was four blocks away and they called her and told her what happened, and she did not come. My mother had her own trauma, she really struggled to face the devastating things in life, the biggest losses. I have so much empathy for her, but that was a defining moment for me. I had to process what had happened in the stairwell, but I also had to swim in the pain of not being worth whatever it would have cost for her to come. And to my thirteen-year-old mind, it didn’t seem like it could have cost very much at all.

As for my dear old dad, my job was to help him. I could never buy that man a reasonable Father’s Day card because nothing fit. It was what it was, there’s no point dwelling on these things once you understand how they affect you, but I learned early not to rely on him for support, protection or reassurance. 

I became an expert on caretaking and being okay. I learned how to keep myself safe by being a good girl. A good girl doesn’t need anything. I got straight A’s and starved myself and listened and smiled and did what I was told. I grabbed those brass rings, learned how to read the room and adjusted accordingly. I wore what I was told to wear and did what I was asked to do without talking back. Eventually I didn’t even know what I needed or wanted, so asking for anything, including help, was a moot point. Even when the help I wanted was for my mother, not myself. Won’t someone please try to figure out why my mother is drinking so much and becoming so enraged? No, no one will do that because your mother is fine, you are the problem, and if you don't stop talking about this subject, you’re going to lose the title of good girl which is the only thing you’ve got. 

When you get thrown to the wolves by the people who were supposed to take care of you, why would you ever think to ask a friend or a stranger for help? It’s a lesson you’re taught again and again, and if you’re a girl or a woman, the world is going to teach it to you most of the days of your life. When you walk by construction sites and men yell lewd comments and no one tells them to shut the fuck up - when in fact, people avert their eyes and leave you to figure it out for yourself, there’s more shame in the mix. Is it that the people around you don’t hear what’s just happened, or that they think you deserve it because of what you’re wearing or how your tits bounce in that t-shirt even if you’re wearing a bra and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it? Is it because you have the audacity to exist?

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I didn’t know a soul and I had to hustle to make the rent. I was teaching yoga classes all over town, and at this one studio, a guy who took my class decided I was attracted to him because I stepped on the outer edge of his foot in Warrior 1 so he wouldn’t screw up his back knee, and because I played a Sade track on my playlist that he knew was just for him (it was not). I wasn’t attracted to him or interested in him and I told him in as kind a way as I could, because you always have to let the guy down gently and carefully, we all know this. Otherwise he might kill you. But it didn’t matter. He knew how I felt even if I didn’t. He showed up at the studio where I took class one morning because I’d made the mistake of sharing that information with my students, and when I let my teacher know I was uncomfortable due to some alarming emails this man had sent, my teacher wouldn’t do anything about it. When I went to the female manager at the studio where I taught and asked to have him banned from my class, she said she could not do that because he was a member, and weird emails weren’t enough of a reason to lose a customer. When this man followed me home after class, six miles from the studio so he could “give me a cd” as I got out of my car and stood there shaking in my own driveway, I went to the police. They wouldn’t do anything because he hadn’t threatened me. When I said I felt pretty threatened, they said to call back if he did anything that rose to the level of a real threat. When this man came back a few weeks later and looked through my window pounding on my door as I stood frozen in my living room in a t-shirt and underwear, yelling for me to just let him fuck me one time, the police finally came. But that is what it takes to get help, even when you ask, even when you’re scared, even when you’re embarrassed to be talking about it at all. 

Photo by the late, great James Vincent Knowles

Years ago I was in a relationship with a man who became increasingly violent, and when I left one night with my dog and my belongings, he chased me down the hall and called me a “replaceable hole.” A woman opened her apartment door and peered out looking horrified, but immediately closed the door when he turned, looked at her and yelled, “Yeah? What?” That guy sent me a friend request on Facebook years later, along with a disgusting message that I found in my “other” file talking about how he still missed certain body parts of mine. I reported him to Facebook and I’m sure he paid dearly. Meaning I’m sure he didn’t pay at all.

It’s easy for me to jump in the line of fire for people I love. I don’t have to think twice about it. If you attack my friend in life or online, you can bet I’m going to let my New York City out. If I see something happening to someone I care about, I’m going to do what I would want someone to do on my behalf, and I’m not going to wait to be asked. But turn that attack on me, and I’m going to struggle because I grew up with uncertainty. There’s nothing more vulnerable than watching your mother’s face twist in rage and finding yourself pressed up against the wall with your arms over your head saying you’re sorry for you don’t even know what, wishing you could figure out how to make her love you. Being attacked is triggering as hell, it sets off my fight, flight, freeze or fawn response, and it takes a while for me to come down. I know this about myself. I know what to do to soothe my nervous system, but that doesn’t make it easy.

It’s hard to ask for help because you know what you’re asking is for other people to take the risk of becoming a target themselves. How can you knowingly ask anyone to do that on your behalf? And if it matters to you that people think you’re strong, that you have it all together, that you know how to handle whatever life throws your way, then that factors in, too. It’s the whole façade thing. We live in a world where the way you’re perceived feels like it matters. The older I get, the less I worry about it. I have nothing to hide, nothing to prove and no interest in pretending. I remember arguing with my editor when I wrote Yoga’s Healing Power. She said I was sharing too much of my struggle, and why would anyone listen to me if I wasn’t an expert on healing? If I wasn’t beyond all the struggle, like some professor at the lectern, or preacher at the pulpit,  because we all know those guys have it figured out, insert eye-roll. Insert grifting, taking advantage of vulnerable people who need help in every imaginable way, insert whatever else comes to mind. The people who scare me the most are the ones who pretend to float above the surface of the earth like they have it all figured out. Give me the teachers who acknowledge their own blindspots, their continued growth, their mistakes. It was really hard for me to push back because I still like to “please the teacher” - those good girl instincts are hard to overcome - but thank god I have writer friends who told me you don’t have to take every note, and an agent who said she would back me up no matter what. So I told my editor that is not something I’ve ever pretended to be. Healing is not some finish line you get to after you work on yourself for a long time, and then you’re done. You’re never done because you’re always evolving. Healing is knowing yourself, and continuing to leave the door open to know yourself ever more deeply. It’s recognizing the areas where you’re still tender, giving yourself a little grace, and making sure your pain or your rage are not in the driver’s seat. It’s being able to talk about these things openly so other people know they aren’t alone. It’s being able to admit that it’s sometimes hard to ask for help, but it’s also recognizing that same tendency in other people and showing up for them even if they don’t ask. Because you realize maybe they can’t. It’s knowing when three blinking dots are actually a cry for help, even if the person is texting you that they’re fine.

Massive gratitude and a huge shoutout to the friend who knew how to interpret my three dots. Go subscribe, you will not be disappointed.

If you’d like to meet me in real time to talk about why it’s so hard to ask for help and why it’s a good thing to work on, I’ll be here 4/5/24 at 11:15am PST or you can wait for the Come As You Are podcast version. And if you’d like to meet me in Portugal in June, there are still some spots left and I’d love that so much. It’s going to be amazing.