The Child Who Never Asked for Help

Think of the easy child.

The one adults call mature for their age. The one teachers never worry about. The one who says "I'm fine" so smoothly that nobody checks twice.

If you were that child, I want to talk to you for a minute.

I think I know the room you grew up in. It could have been loud or it could have been quiet, but either way there was a rule nobody wrote down. Feelings were weather. They happened somewhere else, to someone else, and the house carried on regardless.

So you learned the job. You learned to read a face from the doorway. You learned which days to bring up the school trip and which days to keep it to yourself. You learned that a small problem told at the wrong moment turns into a larger one, and that the safest thing to do with a problem was to carry it somewhere private and hold it there.

Do you remember where that was? Maybe it was a pillow. Maybe it was the bathroom with the tap running. Maybe a corner of the garden, a bus seat, the space between songs in your headphones. Somewhere you could let it out quietly enough that the house stayed calm.

You were very good at it. That is the part that makes me sad. You were so good at it that the people who loved you took it for peace.

Nobody saw the hundreds of small moments. The question that got a sigh. The tears that got "what is it now." The excitement that got "that's nice, go and wash your hands." Each one was tiny. Each one taught you a little more about how much room you were allowed to take.

And then you grew up, and the habit came with you.

Now you are the friend who is always okay. You are the one who listens for three hours and says "oh, nothing much" when somebody asks about you. You apologise before you ask for a favour. You wait until you are completely out of options before telling anybody you are struggling, and by then it has turned into an emergency, which proves your old belief that needing things is dangerous.

I would like to offer you something else to believe.

You were a child. A child gets to be loud and sad and confused and in the way. A child brings problems to the table because the table is where grown-ups are meant to catch them. If nobody caught yours, that happened at the table, and it says everything about the people sitting there. Your feelings were the right size. They were addressed to people who were too tired, too frightened or too busy to hold them.

I think about what it would have been like if one of them had put down the fork and said, "tell me."

Maybe you would not have learned to disappear so politely.

Maybe you would not still be checking the room for permission before you let yourself need something.

You can stop being easy now. The people who love you can handle the weight of you. Let one of them find out.

I am here, and I have time. Start anywhere. Say it badly.