Trains, Planes and Asking for Help
Alexa, play Kelly Clarkson's Independent.
In the Campbell family, my father’s family, independence is a virtue (and virtue is a grace, and Grace is a little girl with a dirty face, as my aunt Pat would sing).
Today’s therapists and parents describe independence for their children as exploratory play, independent decision-making, and self-soothing.
My family described it in stories, great feats of independence that would guarantee a call to Children & Family Services today. To us, these were signs of strong, independent souls who was sure to make their way in the world without undue bother on other people.
For instance, as a small child, it was critical to learn how to travel.
My aunts took a cross-country train at ages four and six. They memorized their cabin assignments, their train changes, and they went off, traversing thousands of miles on rail without an adult supervisor.
My other aunt was sent away to boarding school at age eight or nine. This wouldn’t have been such a big deal if it wasn’t across Africa: her family settled in Northern Rhodesia, with my father and Pat, and plopped her onto a train bound for Johannesburg. She’s in her eighties and she’s still a little hurt about it.
At nine, when I took my first unaccompanied flight as a kid, I was overwhelmed with pride and excitement. My cousin Saron had been a year younger than me during her first unaccompanied minor flight, which I resented. Of course, this was small potatoes compared to our aunts, so I amped up the experience by making up tales of visiting my divorced parents to my seatmates.
There were many other stories, little tales and myths we told about our independence.
Injuries that didn’t require hospital visits, such as the time my father’s cheek was punctured with a stick, so they stuffed a towel in it. The long scar on his belly was a result of a duct-taped wound after he’d slid down a tree and a nail tore him up. He was a big fan of duct tape for the rest of his life.
Then there was the leaving.
“My parents thought your parents were insane,” my friend Sarah told me the other day. We chat often, just like when we were eleven and would spend hours yammering on our house phones. This isn’t an unusual comment from my friends.
When I was little, I had babysitters and nannies. At age seven, when we moved onto the sailboat (a long story for another post), I was independent enough that my parents felt comfortable leaving while going out to dinner. I would encourage it, happily reading alone on the boat, happy and proud that I was so independent.
However, that snowballed. By the time we were back in a house, starting at eleven, my parents would go on business trips and not hire a sitter. I’d be alone in the house for multiple nights, a week even, while they went to New York and I stayed in Florida. A neighborhood girl would drive me to school.
Part of me was proud - none of my other friends were allowed to stay home alone. The dogs were with me and they would sleep in my room with me so I wouldn’t feel afraid. The only time I remember being upset about it was when I was waiting for them to pick me up from school and no one came. There I was, in my prep school uniform, dialing and redialing on my Nokia phone under a palm tree. I finally got through. They were in New York. I was in South Florida. That time, I remember I stayed at a friend’s house, since I didn’t have a ride.
So it makes sense Sarah’s parents thought mine were insane.
Tens of thousands of therapy dollars later, I know a part of me was upset. It was two sides of me: one was proud of me for being strong and independent, and the other didn’t understand why I had to do this and other kids didn’t. I would have never admitted that to my parents.
Dad would have called them wimps. He did, frequently. Equally as popular as the tales of our Campbell independence were us making fun of my classmates in South Florida. My friend who was eleven and had never crossed the street alone, while I was doing a solid week solo. The same friend also had to wear a lifejacket when she visited me on the boat. Lifejackets were for toddlers and bad weather, not for when the boat was docked.
Looking back, I’m glad we were friends. Maybe our combination of extremes helped both of us become somewhat normal adults.
Another theme was Dad trying to help my brother, who is nineteen years older than me and was out of the house by the time I was born. I don’t think my brother would classify it as help, and child psychologists would definitely not.
However, as misguided as Dad’s attempts were, it came from his own family philosophy: he had to prepare my brother to be independent.
Since my brother’s mother (my father’s ex-wife) was, in Dad’s view, doing everything in her power to make him terrified of the world, Dad had to double down during his short periods with my brother.
The stories I heard went something like this: my brother was scared, so my dad made him do it, and then he was even more scared. It usually involved a boat, so there was the time he was thrown in the water because he was too scared to jump in, and the time he was scared to go up the mast so my dad hoisted him and left him there.
These stories were told to me emphasizing two things: independence and the Campbell humor. The Campbell sense of humor usually involved dark jokes and pranks.
It’s hard, because when I describe these things to professionals or my mom includes them in her writing workshops, people usually turn on my Dad. She doesn’t feel the need to defend him: they either get him or they don’t. I do, because my father was like my twin soul. He was my favorite person. He was also the kindest, most patient person to me.
However, would I do that to my kids? Hell no.
But I do have to stifle the urge. After all, I’m my father’s daughter.
There were no tales of asking for help. Which, come to think of it, is pretty ironic when you consider that my father and his sisters were all sober alcoholics by the time I was born.
Asking for help seemed weak. My favorite Disney movie was the Lion King, when Simba is cast out on his own, and never asks for help. He was forced into it by Timon and Pumba. Yes, I’m watching a lot of Disney again these days, thanks to my three-year-old.
When I was in freshman year of high school, I remember wheezing in history class. My favorite teacher passed me a note. Are you ok?
I nodded.
I started to really like when people asked me if I was okay. But I always said I was. That was part of being independent: powering your way through the adversity, people visibly seeing your battle scars, and stoically insisting you’re fine.
I didn’t do a great job at the stoic part. I probably looked nuts. When another favorite teacher wrote my college letter of recommendation, she started it, [anxious millennial] is one of the more complicated students I have ever known…
All this is to say I am pretty terrible at asking for help. By the time I got to college, I despised people asking if I was okay. It reminded me of high school. I still hate it.
However, like Simba, my Timon and Pumba eventually arrived in the form of a substance abuse counselor and a twenty-seven-year-old stranger at an AA meeting. At that point, anxiety was a problem, but not the problem. The problem was my alcoholism, and it had come to a head after I’d been arrested on campus and was now facing expulsion if I didn’t get treatment, as well as a few misdemeanors making their way through the Orleans Parish courts.
That period taught me how to ask for help. Because I was so lost and broken, there was no other choice for me. By the end of my drinking and using, I was desperate. Bludgeoned and beaten into submission.
I was honest with the substance abuse counselor, and took his advice.
I went to the meeting he told me to go to, and accepted the help of the stranger who told me I never had to feel this way again.
Then, later, when I’d been bludgeoned a little more, I asked for help for everything. I sat on couches of strangers and cried. I went to meetings and shared how badly I was doing. I did everything they told me to do.
I did it until it was like a toned muscle. It was a reflex. When I was in trouble, I asked for help. I might be delusional for months, maybe years, wrapped up in my own independence, but once I realized what’s happening, I asked for help.
Many anxiety sufferers don’t get to learn that. I had to.
Today, almost fifteen years after I first accepted help and learned how to ask for it, I still have to fight against my independent streak.
I still have trouble showing weakness to my friends and colleagues. When I was at my first big girl job, my agency job, I refused to ask for help. I would figure it out. After months, I was sitting on a bench with my best friend Brooke. We had only known each other for a little while at that time. We were in Atlanta, actually during the biggest fight of our friendship, but still muscling through it.
She turned to me, and said, in the gentlest voice possible, “Do you know you make a noise?”
“What?!”
She grimaced. Clearly I was as crazy as she’d feared. “Yeah. You’re… grunting.”
“I am?” Embarrassment and shock. Who had heard me make this noise?
“Yeah, it kinds of sounds like…” She made a noise like an injured moose.
“Oh my god.”
Anxious people need friends like that, or we’re doomed.
Ten years later, I’d moved across the country, to a place where I knew nobody except my husband and my baby. We’d left the comfortable nest of New Orleans, the city that had been my safe-haven of friends and family.
And I did it again. I powered my way through it. Independent!
I made zero friends that first year.
Finally, with my husband out of town and a crying toddler, I gave up. I was desperate. I went to a women’s twelve-step meeting.
And independent streak be damned, I said, “My name’s [Anxious Millennial], I’m an alcoholic, and I need friends.”
Two years later, and the two women I met at that meeting and I are best friends.
So when I started having my nervous breakdown, postpartum collapse, or whatever you’d like to call it, I knew what I had to do.
I talked to my COO.
“Thanks for your honesty,” she said, which was surprising to me because I’d sugarcoated it. “Take whatever you need.”
I called my friends.
“I’m coming,” said Brooke. Hopefully this time I wasn’t making a noise. And while my husband was out of town, she stayed in my house, helping me with two kids, cleaning bottles, wiping snot, and making sure I got enough sleep.
“Call me anytime,” said Kelsey, a friend I hadn’t called in ten years. I could hear her talking to her daughter, whose voice I’d never heard.
I even told my mom. That’s the hardest person for me to ask, and the person who probably wants me to ask the most.
“I’ll do anything to help you,” she said, and moved into my back house whenever my husband is out of town to help me and the kids.
Weeks after this current breakdown began, I am starting to feel better.
I feel sane. I feel rested. I haven’t thrown anything in days, weeks even.
Yes, the doctor helped. Yes, my husband’s support is critical. But without my friends, I’d be fucked.
And they can only help me when I ask them for it. Anxious people need help. No matter how much we stuff it in, how well we manage it, there always comes a time when the meds don’t work and life happens.
When that happens, you better have some friends who will drop everything, give you a hugs, watch your kids, and tell you you’re making weird noises.