You Are a Burden to Me, and I am a Burden to You: Helping Yourself by Letting Others Help You

From 2011 through 2012, I lived with a woman who could have competed in the "World's Worst Roommate" contest and emerged victorious. Living with her was hellish, but not because she was particularly messy or stole my food; rather because she was extremely self-centered, self-absorbed and inconsiderate. She was dismissive of my feelings which ironically only made me more desirous of her praise and approval. She was a textbook narcissist and I was caught in her web. Looking back, I let her actions and moods affect me far more than was healthy because I was very insecure and overly concerned with wanting everyone to like me, regardless of the compromises of my values I was forced to make as a result. It was a very, very unpleasant time in my life.

At the same time that I was navigating this miserable living situation, I was in graduate school pursuing a degree I didn't want and had no passion for. The stress of school and trying to "keep up with the joneses" so to speak was exhausting and contributed to my unhappiness. I felt like a spectator in my own life, and hated how it was playing out. However, I felt like I had no power to change it.

At the time, my stress outlet-of-choice was to go out for a long run, which in retrospect did little or nothing to curtail my stress and unease. In fact, it added to it by raising my cortisol levels, increasing my hunger and cravings, and wreaking havoc on my energy levels. Periodic binges provided (very) temporary emotional relief, but the waves of guilt that reverberated afterwards left me feeling like I had no worth at all. It didn't motivate me to take any action, and the cycle persisted.

Everything came to a head near the end of 2012. I was at my wit's end. I could not take my roommate any longer, I was burned out from school, and my weight continued to fluctuate. The cardio--binge--deprive cycle destroyed my metabolism and I was a newly medication-dependent hypertensive. Things from my point of view were pretty bleak. Looking back, I was in full-blown crisis-mode despite my best efforts to keep it together on the surface.

In Chinese, two characters are used to translate the English word "crisis": one character means "danger" and the other means "opportunity." To me, this means that however bad things get--and they can get pretty bad!--there is always an opportunity to shift your perspective in order to grow. It's hard to see the silver lining when you're at rock-bottom: trust me, I get that. But the Chinese translation begs the question: when things are as bad as they can possibly get, isn't there something liberating about the realization that there's no where to move but forward, towards something brighter? Isn't there always at least one tiny little kernel of goodness in every trial?

For me, that goodness manifested itself in many ways--I just had to be receptive and wise enough to embrace them. For instance, a friend stepped up to help me get out of my negative living environment. He helped me find a new apartment and move. My parents and my brother--after I had a mini-breakdown!--reassured me that it was OK to drop out of graduate school if I was unhappy and doing so made no impact on my value as a human being. Even without an advanced degree, I am worthy of love! They made me see that the alternative was worse than any remorse I could feel about quitting school. This helped me to adjust my thoughts about failure--was it not brave to admit defeat in this instance? How is that not success? Speaking up and out about my struggle helped me create space for a different reality, one in which I was not a failure for quitting but a success for having the courage to recognize other possibilities. I could come out of this bleak situation with some dignity, grace, and perspective. I realized that there is always an alternative and there's never only one single way to do things. I embraced the opportunity that was there for the taking, despite the danger.

Brene Brown talks a lot about how the more willing uou are to talk about your struggles with others and show transparency despite your shame, the better you'll become at perceiving a better reality. This shift in perception is the first step towards creating a life that you love. It requires you to humble yourself and be vulnerable. Sharing your struggles with others is transformative, as I ultimately learned after trying to do it on my own for so long. If I've learned anything--and if I have anything to share with you--it's that you can't do it alone. You may think you're doing people a favor by keeping your struggles to yourself, but the tribe is that you're not only doing yourself a disservice but your community, too. We are social creatures who crave connection with on another. By keeping everything bottled up inside, you're limiting others' opportunities to connect which may be exactly what they need. You need it, they need it: why begrudge anyone the chance to meet each other halfway?!? You never know how much that lifeline may help someone else. You have a right and an obligation to extend that life raft--the water is never too deep.