Hard Help

Someone asks how it’s going. There’s a pause — half a second where I decide whether to lie — and then I tell the truth: it’s slow, and it’s frightening, and there’s no relief in sight. Not on the calendar. Not in the budget. Some days, not even in my imagination. My wife and I are in the middle of it, and I’ve never been any good at the “oh, you know — hanging in there!” deflection. I’m not going to start now.

But the truth has a cost I didn’t see coming. Because after the honest answer comes the help. “Why don’t you just—” “Well, have you tried—” “If I were you, I’d—.” By now I could set my watch to it. Somewhere in the last year I became a fluent, professional receiver of advice.

And here’s the thing I keep turning over: almost every one of these people is wonderful. I’d put it at 99.9%. No disrespect in it, no lack of empathy — the opposite. They care. Caring makes people want to fix.

And it stings anyway. Every single time.

So I’ve started asking about the sting itself, not the suggestions. Is the suggestion the problem? Or is my ego standing in the doorway of something good — something I should be humble enough to accept and work on? I genuinely don’t know. I want to believe I’m being clear-eyed when I say I should spend my time on the things I’ve actually spent years learning to do. That feels right. But “feels right” is exactly what an ego would say. So I can’t fully trust it.

There’s a second thing sitting under all of it, quieter and sharper. A lot of “why don’t you just” is really “why don’t you just become someone else.” Go from being a tech person to waiting tables. Go from being a welder to being a counselor. And I get the spirit — do what you have to do, keep the lights on, no work is beneath anyone. I believe that all the way down. But underneath, it asks me to set down the thing I’m actually built to do and pick up something that doesn’t resemble who I am or what I can do — harder to walk, not easier, because it means abandoning the years I spent becoming good at this. And when it’s “have you tried X,” the honest answer is usually yes. Yes, months ago.

Here’s the part I don’t say out loud at dinner: the fear doesn’t clock out. It follows me past the spreadsheet, into the part of me that’s never been especially steady to begin with — the part I’ve spent most of my life learning to carry. This stretch feeds it. That’s the real cost of the season, and it’s the one no “just” can reach.

The most recent one was my sister. I adore her — the kind of relationship most people would envy — and she already knows enough about the battle we’re in, so her check-in carried no naiveté. Just love. Worry. The same questions I’ve been calling out here. A hundred percent care, zero percent disrespect, and I knew it while she was saying it. I know it now. And the sting came anyway, right on schedule. Both things, fully true, in the same breath — and holding both at once is the whole difficulty.

That’s what undoes me a little. If it stings even coming from her, then maybe it was never about the asker at all. The questions are going to keep coming — that’s just what love does when it’s watching someone it cares about struggle. Every time, I’ll have to decide which version of my reality I’m willing to hand over that day. Every time, the sting will find me. And every time, the only thing actually up to me is what I do with it afterward. Because people care. People want to help. People want to reach out, to say the thing, to see it turn out right for you. This might simply be one of those situations that’s impossible to do well — for them or for me.

So I don’t have a clean ending. Is the sting a signal I’ve got something backwards? Or is it earned? I don’t know. What I do know is that tomorrow I’ll get up, make the coffee, open the laptop, and keep rowing into weather that hasn’t shown me its far side yet. No answer. But not alone in the boat. Some things don’t resolve on a deadline, and this might be one of them.