Until three weeks ago, my idea of accepting help was allowing another driver to let me in front of him while changing lanes in stop-and-go traffic, a gesture I always met with a hand-wave of gratitude that doubled as an apology for the inconvenience. Maybe this is nothing to be proud of, but, as a rule, nothing makes me prouder than being self-reliant. Nothing makes me feel more like myself than not asking for anything.
So suffice it to say that since Jan. 8, when the house I was renting in Altadena, Calif., burned to the ground, turning all of my material possessions into ash, I haven’t quite been myself.
I’ve had to accept more help in more forms from more people — friends and strangers alike — than in the entire preceding 50-plus years of my life. I’ve slept in their guest rooms, eaten their home-cooked meals, borrowed their clothes, used their addresses to receive mail and introduced my enormous shaggy dog into their homes and backyards. I’ve accepted donations of pet supplies, beauty supplies, podcasting equipment and cleaning supplies, which I’ve used to wipe the floor after my dog leaves a trail of dirt and debris in his wake. As of a few days ago, I’ve accepted an offer to stay in a friend’s small guesthouse for “as long as you need.”
I pray my parents aren’t watching any of this from the afterlife. In their household, self-sufficiency was a religion. My father had grown up very poor, raised by a single mother who took in boarders rather than accept assistance. He carried those values with him even as he resented the conditions that came with them.
My mother made it clear that imposing on anyone for just about any reason — even asking for a ride home from school from a friend’s parent who was going that direction anyway — was an almost unthinkable transgression. Trick-or-treating at Halloween was likened to begging. When my father, alone in our suburban house, had the first of three heart attacks at age 49, he walked to the hospital rather than call for help. Decades later, when my mother lay dying in her small apartment, she became insistent that we financially compensate the kind neighbor who’d offered me a spare bedroom.
“But people want to help,” I explained. “Refusing kindness is a form of unkindness.”
I didn’t entirely believe my words even as I said them. I was my parents’ child. But I could ask for help on someone else’s behalf.
That appears to be a natural human impulse, as demonstrated by how many of the approximately 3,000 GoFundMe pages for Los Angeles fire victims are set up by third parties on behalf of their loved ones. When I heard that friends were conspiring to make a page for me, I put an immediate stop to it. Given that I was able-bodied, relatively financially stable, a renter rather than a homeowner and had no human dependents, I found the idea unseemly.
As texts and emails piled up from people asking how they could help, I told them the best thing was to become paying subscribers to my podcast through my Substack page. “Now’s the time to pony up for all those bonus episodes,” I said. “Plus discounts on merch!”
But that wasn’t enough for them. They didn’t want to pay for my services. They wanted to be of service. After the 11th or 12th person explained as much, I finally got it (and reluctantly agreed to a discreet “tip jar” on the Substack page). This wasn’t about me asking for help. It was about them asking to be allowed to help. They might have been the ones opening their doors and often their wallets. But the heaviest door of all was the one my pride kept shut tight, turning them away as if they were asking only as a formality. And that kind of rejection, I suspect, is a lot ruder than asking for a ride home from school.
Shortly after the fires, I gathered with a group of friends and neighbors near Altadena. Several had lost their houses, many more were evacuated with no idea when they’d be able to go home. The air was still heavy with smoke and the National Guard had set up blockades of the devastated streets, which were now lined with lot after lot of ash and rubble, almost nothing standing but chimneys and the occasional charred appliance.
There were plenty of tears to go around, but I was struck by how those who hadn’t been directly affected were in some ways more capsized. Several admitted to survivor’s guilt. Even more expressed what I can only describe as the grief of adjacent loss.
This grief, at least for the moment, seemed almost deeper in a way, more existential. While we who lost our homes were still cushioned by the shock of it all, others were left staring into a different kind of abyss. Without the granular distractions of insurance claims and cobbling together basic necessities, they were able — forced, actually — to take a step back and survey the full catastrophe. In their despair, their best source of comfort was to reach out a hand.
“Please, please let us help,” one neighbor said, crying. “You must understand that we are asking this of you. This is for us as much as it is for you. Do not push us away.”
I will undoubtedly learn countless lessons from this disaster, many of them bitter and unwanted. (For instance, the way GoFundMe can be a vehicle for the rich getting richer, since affluent people tend to have the most generous friends.) But the greatest so far has been the realization that help plays by the same rules as love. In order to give it, you must be willing to accept it. In accepting it, you open the valve for even more. I wish my parents and grandparents had been able to learn this lesson. Their lives would probably have been better for it.
As terrible as things seem right now — I’ve lost a lifetime’s worth of books and cherished artwork, a career’s worth of manuscripts and archives, and every family photo ever taken — I have to believe a day will come when my life will be better, too. That will be the day that I’m the one doing the helping. I can’t wait.
The post The L.A. Fires Taught Me How to Accept Help appeared first on New York Times.
