60. Embracing Interdependence

Author Rainesford Stauffer reads an excerpt from her book, All The Gold Stars, about feeling needy when asking for help.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

Rainesford:  I’m Rainsford Stauffer, and it’s going to be okay.

This is an excerpt from my book, All the Gold Stars. It’s about being needy and how caring for each other might be the most ambitious thing we ever do. I think about this lesson sometimes when going in alone is just too much. The biggest limit of my ambition, of my imagination was believing I needed to do everything alone and that my aloneness.

My self-reliance, my couching of every problem someone offered help for with no worries I’ve got. It was an opportunity to be the kind of ambitious I’d heard about, capable, confident, composed in spite of everything I knew logically, how much my life depended on other people. The fact I make it out the door in the morning, write a single word, or have friends or direct results of the care I have received. But I’m sheepish in admitting that I thought I wasn’t supposed to need anybody. My need not to come across as needy was a backward kind of ambition, all on its own one that takes individualism, I reject and makes it a self-imposed standard.

When I was in the emergency room, I needed help to get to the bathroom. I repeatedly apologized to the nurse as if I’d insulted her entire family until she told me to stop. When someone tried to take care of me by sending me dinner when I was too sick to cook for myself, picking up my over-the-counter medicine. When they saw it on sale, I panicked and attempted to defend off guilt by returning the favor. Kind in practice, but more transactional than it should have been. When I asked friends for advice, I’d hedge only if you have time. It’s truly no big deal. You don’t owe me anything. Actually, a friend told me once. I hope we owe each other a lot. We owe each other everything that matters. This feels like a backward way to open a conversation on how inherently ambitious the act of caring for each other is to tell you that as much as I want to take care of others, I’ve spent most of my adulthood so far thinking I didn’t deserve it, as if rigidity would keep me on track and gentleness would let me off. Too easy to care for one another. To make one another’s lives better is the ultimate ambition, the heartbeat that creates the rhythm for everything else. When we believe it’s all up to us, it’s all on us. It becomes too easy to cut ourselves out of interdependence.