In your adolescent years, you have a very strange conviction that you have everything figured out. You start to see the cracks beneath the rose-colored lenses you’ve been wearing. You ask questions, and when adults don’t have the answers to those questions, you feel like you know everything. You have it all figured out…
…nobody has it figured out.
People give you advice, prefacing it with, “if I was your age…” But they’re not your age. You tune it out, no matter how hard you try to listen to be respectful. Because you want to go out and live. You won’t make those mistakes, right? That advice is outdated anyways, isn’t it?
You grow up and start to echo the same sentiments of the adults. You ask questions and start to search for those answers yourself, no matter how long it takes. Life becomes a maze. You come up against dead ends or a left turn where you thought you’d go right. It seems to go on forever, and you can feel lost. Alone. Confused.
I recently asked for advice about a question in my life that was scary. It was related to mental health, and I wasn’t sure that it’d even be received well. It’s a difficult situation no matter how you look at it, isn’t it? Mental health is all in your head, sort of.
But since it’s related to so many factors, it starts getting hard to tell what’s youand what’s outside factors.
Am I not taking care of myself? Am I just exhausted?
You cut corners. You drink a little more coffee or say “just one more” when you aren’t feeling great. The new normal for you isn’t normal for everyone. You just don’t know it yet.
Asking for advice can be tiring. People tell you there are resources on a college campus, but they can be spread out or spread thin. And schedules turn into reschedules which turn into even more reschedules.
But my friends told me to stick with it. Keep asking for advice on how to solve my problems. And if they didn’t have answers, go to other people who might. Seek out resources. Stick with the long, winding path to ask for help, no matter how many reschedules it takes.
In life, it takes a whole lot of courage and strength to face every day without knowing what’s going to happen. It can take even more courage to ask for help and admit that you don’t know all the answers. That you can’t carry the weight of it all alone.
To ask for advice, or for anything really, opens you up for vulnerability. And that, in itself, is a very fearless thing.