When We Help Ourselves, We Help the Helpless

In my freshman year of high school, one of my closest friends suffered severely from a clinical depression that required both therapy and medication. Not only had she even attempted suicide, she was confronting the repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse by her former stepfather.

It was too much for me to handle.

Her constant crying and dismal moods made me feel helpless, and then irritated, and then angry at myself for not having a large enough well of empathy to help her. I selfishly began resenting her for draining my mental energy when I was already stressed with the other countless demands of being a high school student in an academically competitive environment. For all the terrible inner demons my friend was confronting, all I could think was: what about me?

Slowly yet surely, our small circle of friends began passive-aggressively excluding her from our conversations, and we stopped speaking to each other for the rest of the school year. We awkwardly avoided each other in hallways, and pretended that the other person did not exist.

It wasn't until the following year that, miraculously, we became friends again.

Looking back on this, I now realize that I couldn't help my friend because at that age, I didn't even know how to help myself. I simply lacked my own emotional resources to be there for someone, and the intensity of her suffering was too terrifying for me to handle on my own. I did not know then that I could have opened up to a parent, a teacher, or a school counselor to give me the tools to navigate this fragile situation. Instead, I completely averted the situation with the only coping mechanism that I knew then: holding all my frustrations inside and pretending that the problem didn't exist.

However many times I've heard the concept of self-love and gave lip service to Eleanor Roosevelt's quote "Friendship with oneself is all-important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world," it took me many years for the truth of those ideas to truly be felt. You really cannot help the helpless unless you really know how to help yourself.

In response to this week's call for content "How Can We Help the Helpless?"