Asking For Help

Four times I have moved to Nashville; each time with a renewed vow to get my writing career off the ground, live simply and learn to enjoy life. This last time I quit a high stress job in the non-profit sector and loudly informed all my friends and relatives that I would never go back to corporate America again regardless of how hard it would be. After one week on my new job as a receptionist at a laid back massage therapy spa, I realized I was making 43% of my previous salary and would not only be unable to pay my regular bills but I would also barely be able to eat one meal per day. And right before payday, I sometimes would not eat at all. This was not as bad as I thought it would be, though some days I was very hungry and began to daydream about eating out a restaurant I used to frequent in my other life where I had money to burn.

I told my friends that I was broke, but they did not seem to understand the seriousness of my plight. After all, everyone believes they are poor, don’t they?

Around the same time, my then boyfriend drove my car and noticed that the brakes were going out. He forced me to take it in for repairs that depleted my bank account entirely and made me accept his payment of the other half of the bill. I cried over his generosity, but mostly I cried over my utter humiliation that I could not take care of myself at 31 years old.

At my lowest point, I called my parents and asked them to send money. It was my last resort, as I had already begun looking for a higher paying job and decided I was destined to be a slave to my inadequacies. My mother sent a $20 check.

Now I was humiliated and angry. Every artist I know has fallen back on their parents countless times for emergency financial support. And time and again I have marveled at how happy the parents are to give, often stating that they do so because they believe in their child’s dreams.

I traced through my life trying to remember a time my parents had come through for me in a pinch simply out of generosity and support of my dream. Short of buying me a blank journal every year at Christmas, I could think of only one time in 1995 that my father wired me $200 to pay for a prescription I was forced to take after I talked my doctor out of admitting me to the hospital for exhaustion. Equally disturbing was that I could not remember a time when one of my parents fostered my dreams by taking time to help me work to achieve my goals.

I have always been the independent child in my family. I thought it was an inherited personality trait passed down from my grandmother like the color of my eyes. Now I know that my independence and “don’t need anyone” attitude is my way of survival in a world where I have been conditioned to believe I can rely on no one. Asking for help, for me, opens a floodgate of insecurity and is reserved for only when I am truly starving to death.