Why busy people turn down offers of help

Do you know someone who has too much to do, isn’t quite keeping their head above water, but never takes up anyone on their offers for help?

I know several people who are like that. They are very annoying, aren’t they? You know their load will be lessened greatly if they would just stop being so stubborn and share it with the people who are genuinely offering to carry some of it for them, but they just won’t.

And yet… I do exactly the same thing myself. I am one of those annoying people. And this is why I don’t accept help when it is offered:

1. You add to my cognitive load

Yes, it was nice of you to offer to take care of something, or suggest I give you some of my jobs to do, but that means I have to factor you into my day in a way I didn’t have to before – you become something I have to deal with and think about in a timely manner, rather than something I can come to when I have the time and space for you in my brain. You’re offering to do something for me, but if I take you up on that offer you become one of the balls I’m juggling.

This is the same whether you are a colleague offering to help me at work or a friend offering to make me dinner after work. Something I didn’t have to think about becomes something I have to think about. And from your side of things it may seem like a no brainer, but when your brain is too full, it’s a bit of a straw-that-breaks-the-camel’s-back kind of scenario. Sometimes your offer of something nice is just one thing too many.

2. The jobs get bigger and heavier when you have to hand them over

When someone offers to help with something, I actually have to give even more thought to what you’ve offered to help with than I did before. It’s amazing how much of what I’m doing is only half-formed in my brain, but still works for me. It’s like a scrawled note on a napkin – it means something to me, but I can’t give it to someone else like that. I have to make it more solid and actionable before I can hand it over, which feels like way more work than just keeping the note on the napkin and running with that.

3. I feel like I shouldn’t need the help

There is every possibility I could do all the things if I just managed my time better. When I’m feeling stressed out, I often switch off (mentally speaking) for chunks of time. I take little attention breaks – look at something that isn’t one of my jobs for a little while to let my brain just fizz for a bit instead of broiling.

But when someone offers to help, I feel extremely guilty about all of these little attention breaks. I should be getting through more work than I am – and I would be if I just got my act together. I feel like giving you some of my work to do is a sign that I’m failing you, somehow, because if I was doing my work better I wouldn’t be giving you some of it.

Oddly, this is also why I hate having the work I’m doing acknowledged. I know I could be doing better, so when you tell me I’m doing well, all I want to do is say “You have no idea how badly I’m doing right now, and how much I’m trying to keep that from you.”

4. I lose control of the outcome when I give it to someone else

And here’s one of the big ones. If I give someone some of my tasks to do, I should (if I’m being sensible) trust them to do them well and in a timely manner. 

Sometimes I do trust them, but it turns out that something that was at one rank on my list of things to do is on a lower rank of their list of things to do, and I actually would have done the job better and sooner if I just did it myself. Then I have to snatch the job back again and run like heck to get it done.

Sometimes it would actually work out – I can give it to that person safe in the knowledge that they will do it their way, but do it well. But even if it’s not on my plate any more, it’s still on my list of things to worry about, only now I no longer have control over how it’s done and when. That’s just highly stressful.

And so even though accepting help is a smart thing to do, and seems a simple enough decision from the perspective of the person offering to help, it’s just easier for me to keep having too much to do.

And now that I’ve realised this is what I’m doing all the time, I can clearly see that it’s also exactly what my friends and colleagues are doing when I suggest they should accept help when it’s offered to them.

I wonder what the solution is? Maybe there isn’t one.

The Zen of Grumpiness

“Every day might not be good, and that’s good.”

This is a quote from a Grumpy Cat calendar that I’ve had on the wall of my cubical for the past year. I’m getting rid of it now, as part of a tidy-up, but I just wanted to take a moment to honour it and reflect on it.

Grumpy Cat (for the three people who might be Internet savvy enough to read a blog, but not enough to have come across Grumpy Cat) is a cat that looks permanently grumpy, and has been part of a long-running series of memes in which she is apparently saying or thinking grumpy things (the actual cat had a genetic condition that caused the grumpy appearance and is, sadly, no longer with us – but her owners took many pictures of her during her life so we can continue to bask in the glory that is Grumpy Cat for years to come).

Its her job to “say” grumpy things, and we are expected to think “Oh, how adorably pessimistic and grumpy!” in response.

But I’ve been reading some Koans and Zen writings for my bed-time reading lately, and I’ve been amused by how often her “grumpiness” sounds a heck of a lot like something one of those old Zen masters would tell their students. 

The point of a Koan (or Kong-an), if you aren’t familiar with them, is to encounter something that doesn’t match what you expect – something that takes received wisdom and says “but what if that’s not how it is after all?” and leaves you to think through your presumptions and assumptions. After mulling over a Koan for a while, you might end up changing your mind about something entirely (you realise the mountain isn’t so big after all), or you might come to a different understanding of it (you understand that the mountain is big for reasons you never previously considered), or you might realise you’ve been looking at the wrong thing the whole time (the mountain is irrelevant). And different people get different things out of the same Koan – it all depends on what assumptions you have that need shaking up.

Grumpy Cat frequently says something good is awful or something awful is good, and if you look at it in the right light, that’s a very similar thing to a Koan.

There’s an old Zen proverb “Every day is a good day”, and I have to admit that Grumpy Cat’s rejoinder (perhaps not intended as part of a Zen discussion) tickled my fancy.

“Every day might not be good, and that’s good.”

“Every day is a good day” is supposed to remind you not to compare. Taking each moment on its own merits, with nothing to compare it to, and no vision of what it “could” be if things were otherwise, there is no reason to believe today is anything other than a good day. Or, as everyone’s favourite doomed Shakespearean character* famously said: “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”.

Yet, as Grumpy Cat points out, it might not be good.

You can try to say “oh, but if you can’t compare it with anything else…”, but let’s face it: sometimes to be truly “in the moment”, you have to acknowledge that this moment is not “good”. If you’ve just been in a car accident and you have to wait for someone to cut you out and you can’t feel your legs, that is not a good day. If you’re watching someone you love die slowly and painfully from a repertory illness, that is not a good moment. 

Even without comparing it to anything else, you can say that this moment, just as it is, is objectively terrible. And that’s okay. It doesn’t have to be good. We don’t have to pretend it’s good, or convince ourselves that it could be worse. We can meet this awful moment on its own terms and say “well, this is terrible”. It is what it is.

“Every day is a good day”. But it might not be good. And that’s fine.

*Polonius from Hamlet. He's my favourite, at any rate.

So, I met a bird

 I dropped my mother off for an appointment near a park today, and my grand plan was to sit in the park and read through some documents while I was waiting to pick her up again.

This park is the oldest park in the city, and for many decades it has had an avery in it. Not always the same avery, and for a while now the avery I remember from my childhood has been semi-abandoned. The plants are still there, but the birds have been gone for a while. There have been signs saying they were "planning what to do with the avery" for a while.

Well, there is now a new avery. They ripped out the rose garden and put it there. The last time I visited this park there were signs saying they were "planning what to do with the rose garden", so maybe they're going to tear down the old avery complex and put a new rose garden there. Who knows.

I suppose the garden curators do.

Anyway, two things struck me about this new avery. One was the sign on the side saying it had been constructed in 2019. Now, my memory of this year is hazy at best (to be honest, my memory of any year is hazy at best) but I would have sworn I visited this park earlier in 2020, and there wasn't an avery here then. But maybe it really has been over a year since I last came during daylight hours (I went to a play in that park one night a few months ago that was staged on the opposite side of the gardens to the avery, so I wouldn't have noticed it then).

The second thing that struck me was the mystery bird in the lorikeet enclosure. This fancy new avery had three enclosures with native Australian parrot species in each enclosure. One held cockatiels and galahs (they each had signs on the side of the enclosure), another held a sulpher crested cockatoo and a long-billed corrella* (also listed on the side of the enclosure), and the biggest one held blue mountain lorikeets, according to the signage, and nothing else.

Except there was something else in the enclosure. Something that definitely wasn't a blue mountain lorikeet. Something like this:

Image by JJ Harrison, from Wikipedia

If you haven't seen a blue mountain lorikeet before, I assure you they do not look like that.

While I was trying to find out what this bird was, I noticed a giant spider in the same corner of the enclosure the bird was sitting in, and I walked closer to admire the spider. It was one of those massive orb-weavers that eat large insects and small birds, and I spoke to the spider:

"You are magnificent, aren't you?"

I don't know if the bird thought I was talking to it, or it noticed I was talking about the spider and wanted to engage in a conversation with someone who wasn't one of those idiot screetchy lorikeets, but it started chattering away to me.

We had a good natter for a few minutes, and I found myself saying I would happily take it home to have the run of my house, if I could. It seemed quite interested in this offer, and the tone of the conversation actually shifted slightly. (This is pretty much how I got my cat, actually - she engaged me in a conversation and I thought "Well, this cat seems pretty cool"). But then I mentioned that my house is not as light and airy as the avery and I probably wouldn't be allowed to take any of the birds home anyway, and the bird lost interest in me and went to attack the sprinkler system.

Still, it was fun to actually meet a bird at an avery and have a bit of a conversation. Most of the time you just get accosted by bored cockatoos who are driven half mad by humans who can't provide much entertainment beyond bad cockatoo impersonations.

I found out later on that this beautiful creature is a crimson rosella. You would think I would recognise it from the side of the tomato sauce bottle I've been using for years,**,*** but I didn't. It really has the most lovely plumage - especially on its wings. If you ever get the chance to chat to one, you should.

*These birds look vaguely like a zombi galah. They're kind of cadaverish.

** Rosella is a brand of condiments in Australia. They have a rosella in their logo, which is on the side of all sorts of bottles and jars in my cupboard.

*** Update! The Rosella condiments have an eastern rosella as their logo, not a crimson rosella, so I feel less dopey about not recognising it now.

Je suis fatigue

It's one of the first phrases I learn in any language:

Je suis fatigue

Ich bin müde

Ma olen väsinud

Actually... ma olen väga väsinud

I am (very) tired.

It's because they get you to fake conversations with people where you ask standard questions like "how are you", and my honest answer, most of the time, is "I am tired".

I have been tired since I was a teenager. Around about the time I hit puberty I also came down with something (glandular fever, I believe), and I've been tired ever since.

Say I was a car with a V8 engine. On my good days, I'm running on 6 cylinders. Most days, I'm probably on 4. Sometimes I'm on 2. And when I get really run down (which is more often than I'd like), I'm limping along on 1.

I'm still somehow functional, even at my worst - even though I feel like I'm going to lose consciousness every time I blink when I'm running on next-to-nothing, I never actually pass out. I never actually find it impossible to get up and keep going. So a lot of the time I do just get up and keep going. Although sometimes (it seems to be happening more and more often lately), I'll recognise I'm no good to anyone in that state and just stay home.

It comes and goes. I have good stretches when I'm moving between 4 and 6 for weeks at a time, and bad stretches where I keep dragging myself along at 2 wondering when I'm going to hit 1. 

When I'm particularly tired, everything is so much "worse" than it normally is. Lights are painfully bright, sounds are distressingly noisy (there's a particular cupboard in the staff tearoom that slams shut in a way that I can ignore completely when I'm feeling good, but shoots right through me when I'm run down)... And people are just overwhelming.

When I think about it, I normally find lights a bit too bright and noises a bit too noisy and people overwhelming, but I ignore it better when I'm not completely worn down. When I am, I don't have whatever fortitude helps me cope with all of that.

All I want to do is pull myself into a quiet space free from expectations - somewhere where I don't have to think about what other people feel or need or want from me. Somewhere where I can just stare into space for 20 minutes straight, if that's what I want to do, while working up the energy to lie on the couch and read.

If I'm feeling of two minds about something, when I'm run down is when I'll be stuck thinking about the negatives. When I'll be wanting to avoid making decisions because if I do, I'm going to make the pessimistic choices. If I'm feeling stressed about something, this is when I'll try to drop it like a hot potato so I can just finally stop worrying about it (although then I'll worry that I've made the wrong choice because I'm run down).

Arguably, these are decisions/choices that I should be making anyway - getting off the damn fence and choosing something with the idea of minimising pain. I still feel terrible about them afterwards - especially if they involved other people. I much prefer it if my moodswings don't impact others.

At this stage, depending on your mental health background, you're probably wondering: "Depression?"

Well, I was diagnosed with clinical depression when I was in high school. Back then I'd been tired for several years, was suffering from several undiagnosed food intolerances and probably an undiagnosed ASD as well (I still don't know about that one - I have my suspicions, but I probably know too much for the tests to be conclusive, and I've had my quota of inconclusive tests for a while). Some doctor (who we since became quite dubious about) decided depression was the cause. I remain convinced it's a symptom.

Of course I'm depressed. I'm tired all the damn time, my neck and shoulders ache constantly, I frequently have aches and pains in my other joints and muscles, nothing I eat seems to agree with me, and I have the kind of memory issues you'd expect in a woman with onset dementia. And that's just my normal. When it gets really bad, and the headache flairs up, and I ache all over, and I have to work hard to form sentences, and I have to force myself to go for a walk because I desperately need the exercise but staying upright for it seems like hard work...

Well, if I didn't feel depressed I'd be rather surprised.

But there's nothing particularly wrong with me. I've had enough tests over the years. They all come back the same: there's nothing particularly wrong. Just lose weight, get more exercise, eat better food and tidy up your sleeping habits.

If I keep doing all of these things, if I keep trying to pull myself up by my own bootstraps, maybe it will work. Maybe it will eventually all fall into place and I'll feel something other than tired.

Right now, though?

Je suis fatigue.

Horrifying

When I was younger (particularly in my teens) I used to have trouble with what I think of as "waking nightmares". Just before I'd properly fall asleep, when your senses are getting all fuzzy and making nonsense, I'd get flashes of images that were the sort of thing you'd see in a horror film. They'd startle me awake, and give me the heebie jeebies, and I'd struggle to calm down enough to try going back to sleep.

As someone who has had trouble sleeping since forever, this didn't help.

They were often things I'd actually seen in an ad for a horror film or on the cover of a DVD case or book. Sometimes they were new and exciting combinations of these things. I think, for some reason, my brain just decided to process anxiety and/or depression by showing me things I found unsettling - things I hadn't wanted to see in the first place, and now wished I could unsee because I was getting to see them again and again - quite involuntarily.

You know how, when you have a cut somewhere on your ankle, you suddenly keep kicking that spot on your ankle whenever you walk even though you never do otherwise? It was a bit like that.

And I've always had this weird thing happen with my sight and hearing when I'm overtired (which is quite a lot of the time, really). I'll see movement in the far reaches of my peripheral vision that isn't there when I turn my head to look at it, and I often hear sounds I can't pinpoint. Add that to the fact that I grew up in a Christian denomination that believes in demons, and that demons try to manipulate you...

Well, let's just say I started being completely terrified by the threat of being terrified. I needed to sleep in a room that was controlled enough for me to keep tabs on everything, so I could tell myself what every shadow and sound was, and I'd still feel on edge. I still hate sleeping in a room where you can see your reflection in a mirror (that lovely half awake state you get into when you're just conscious enough to catch sight of something moving in the mirror, but not quite awake enough to realise it's *you*). I'm not fond of being in a dark room with a mirror in it, in general. Those things are just inherently disturbing.

And I guess, even though I'm now much better at shaking myself out of the "creeped out" zone that I used to get in back then, I'm still a little bit on edge about things like this. I still have ideas and images I didn't particularly want in my head in the first place come back and visit me when I'm trying to relax.

This is one of the reasons why I hate clicking on "hey, you should see this!" links that have no indication of what they are or what I'm going to see. Things that other people don't even notice (especially if they often watch the kind of things I avoid watching, like horror or violent films) can just leave me feeling creeped out or depressed for days.

I think people who know me well tend to share lighter, brighter things with me, because they know I don't like the dark stuff, but newer friends and acquaintances are always a bit of a minefield.

And I'm not sure it's necessarily "Horror" (as we think of it in terms of a genre) that does it for me so much as cruelty. I can read old-school ghost stories by the likes of Poe or James without drama. Zombies chasing people to eat their brains or vampires trying to seduce people before draining them dry? I can take it or leave it, depending on how it has been executed. But something where someone is being hurt or disfigured (by natural or supernatural beings)? Or forced by demonic powers to hurt or disfigure themselves? Nope. Nope nope nope.

And anything with really strong, visceral imagery is a big "no thank you!"

There's a theory (in a couple of schools of Buddhism, and probably some other faiths as well) that heaven and hell are where your head is at. When you are feeling swamped by negative and dark thoughts, then you start to spiral into a hellish state. I also think that what you put into your head through the media and images you consume contribute to this. How can you feel bright and happy when you are weighing yourself down with things dark and cruel? 

Or, as the old saying goes "garbage in, garbage out"... only the garbage tends to stick around for a while and mess up the place, in my experience. 

St Paul's advice to the Philippians - to find things that are lovely and admirable to dwell on - is sort of a basic survival tactic for me. I think lovely and admirable things come in all sorts of forms (often in genres that are looked down on as much as those that seem "nice" on the surface), but the one thing they have in common is they make you feel lighter after encountering them, not weighed down.

And certainly not horrified.

Sometimes, When You Wear the Scarf

 One of my favourite television shows when I was in university (for my first undergraduate degree) was a short-lived puppet-based show called Don’t Eat the Neighbours. 

I’ve gone through a number of periods in my life when I was able to watch children’s television during the day. There was my own childhood, of course, and then I watched TV with my younger cousins when I was a teenager, and saw the children’s television of their era. My first degree in the late 90s/early 2000s, and my library qualifications in the mid 2000s… All told I’ve got a good 20-30 years worth of children’s television under my belt. These days, thanks to catch-up TV, I’m starting to get another dose, as I watch new classics like Bluey when other people are watching crap like The Bachelor.

 

My first degree, though, was probably the biggest period of children’s television watching outside of my own childhood. My timetable was such that I really only had time to watch TV during the morning, when mothers plonk their kids in front of the set while they try to get the house wrangled into some sort of order. I became such a fan of the first series of Hi-5 that I bought one of their cassettes to play in my car. To this day I can still remember most of the lyrics to “Boom Boom Beat”. 

 

I guess I was old enough to have kids of my own (other girls my age started when they were 19), but I didn’t. I just refused to accept the idea that not being or having a child meant you couldn’t enjoy things that had been created “for children”. I also have a deep an unending love for picture books, which I often borrow from the library. I’m taking them home for myself to read, even though there are no children in my house, because I enjoy them.

 

Don’t Eat the Neighbours involved a family of Canadian wolves who moved to England and found themselves living next door to a family of Rabbits. Both families were headed by single parent fathers, which was interesting, and most plots involved the interaction between a predator and a prey animal in a situation where it was both expected that there would be an altercation, but also kind of rude and unnecessary. There was also a fox, voiced by Simon Callow, who was clearly both gay and highly interested in the father of the Wolf family. It was never quite clear if Wolf noticed, or just thought Fox was his new best friend. They both tried to catch Rabbit (and his best friend, Terrapin) whenever possible, and Rabbit and Terrapin spent their days out witting them.

 

The kids in the families got along well with each other, had no interest in their parents’ petty feuds, and would either thwart the adults’ plans or just do their own thing and ignore them.

 

At one point, the wolf kids were asking Fox a question, which lead to the following exchange:

FOX: Do I look like your mother?

WOLF CUB: Sometimes, when you wear the scarf.

 

This really stuck with me. It stuck with me so much that I used to say it all the time. Whenever my answer to a question was “sometimes”, it just seemed perfectly natural to follow it up with “when you wear the scarf”. It became one of several quotes from obscure children’s television shows that I used to say so often in my university days, that by the time I left uni I had several friends also quoting those shows regularly – even though they had never seen them.

 

Which is fun, I think. The fact that I was constantly quoting things that no one had seen became irrelevant after a while. They stopped caring about the fact that they didn’t share the TV shows with me, because after a while they simply shared the catch-phrases with me, even though they were divorced from their original settings.

 

That’s kind of how catch-phrases work, I guess. I, too, quote things I’ve never seen, because I’ve come across those quotes elsewhere and picked them up along the way. Sometimes, I picked them up after they shifted in meaning slightly from the original. Take “I say it’s spinach, and the hell with it.”

 

Ah, but perhaps that’s another pointless, rambling story.

Worth Your While

You’ll never fly as the crow flies
So get used to a country mile
When you’re learning to face
The path at your pace
Every choice is worth your while
- Indigo Girls, Watershed

 I was having a conversation with a friend the other night and it took an interesting turn. He’s a fairly new friend, so hasn’t been privy in the past to my endless rambling indecision about what I want to do for a PhD. As you may recall from either this blog or others, I have been thinking about doing a PhD for some time, but can’t settle on a subject or a discipline.

 

As often happens when I mention the degrees I’m interested in studying in the near future, the topic of “getting a career out of it” came up. To which I gave my customary answer, which always seems to throw people out slightly: “Oh, I’m not looking to change careers – I’m quite happy being a librarian. I just like learning things.” We’re so used to thinking of study as a stepping stone to the “next thing”, or even some sort of career advancement, that I think I thoroughly confuse people when I say I want to go through the pain and drama of a university degree just for the heck of it.

 

I mentioned that the thing about being a librarian is that everything you learn benefits your practice in some way, so you really can study whatever you like and it makes you better at your job without necessarily making you think about what it means for your “career” – at which point he said something interesting: that I was the only person he’s ever met who seems to have her life sorted out. I’m not sure I’d agree with that 100%. I go through stages where I wonder what I’m doing with my life. The job that I have at the moment isn’t exactly my “calling”, and I have been known to waste valuable sleeping hours in the past wondering if I’m wasting my time.

 

But a while ago I realised that your job isn’t there to fulfil you and make you happy. If you think it is, then you are setting yourself up for disappointment and dissatisfaction. No, what you should be aiming for in your work is a job that you don’t hate that allows you to do things you do enjoy, while giving you the opportunity to make a positive difference in someone’s day. I have that, and I’m very grateful for it. I hope you have a job like that, too. If so, just take a moment to appreciate it, and try not to feel hard done by if it isn’t anything more than that. If not, can I suggest that you look for something else – and that you stop looking for a job that makes you happy and just find a job that doesn’t suck and gives you time to do a hobby you actually enjoy? It may be a step backwards as far as the people around you are concerned, but you’ll have a better time of it.

 

The other thing my friend mentioned is that he’s currently feeling overwhelmed by fear of making the wrong decision, so he’s fallen in a bit of a paralysis regarding deciding what he should do about his own career. He realises that not making a decision to change is more or less the same as making a decision to stay, but he hasn’t quite landed comfortably in that decision either. I have been there, done that and bought the T-Shirt. I still sometimes find myself paralysed by the thought that I’m going to make the wrong choice for the wrong reason and stuff everything up.

 

But there is something that I have been sitting with lately, and it has given me a lot to think about. Most of my fear of making bad choices has stemmed from the fact that my previous choices haven’t panned out the way that I’d hoped, and I was taking the “failure” personally rather than chalking it up to experience. When past choices lead to past pain, you don’t want to make more choices that will lead to future pain. It all boils down to worrying about making the “wrong” decision. 

 

But (and this is what I’ve been sitting with): There’s no such thing as the right decision and the wrong decision. You can definitely make choices for the right reasons and the wrong reasons, but the choices that you make are simply the choices that have been made. Regardless of your reasons, the outcomes of your choices will unfold as they unfold, and you just have to see what happens and work with that. If you are making the best choice you can in the circumstances (i.e., the choice that is either for the most good or the least harm), there’s no guarantee that it will pan out at all the way you hope it will, but at least you’ve made a choice. And, as the Indigo Girls once sang (and probably still do at their concerts): “Every choice is worth your while.”

 

In the past, in my youth, the choices and decisions I made to follow my dreams ended up with my dreams being completely smashed to pieces. For years I thought that such misfortune was God or the universe putting me in my place and telling me I was wrong to have those dreams. Now I realise (although I do sometimes forget), that my “dreams” are more of a vague direction than a destination, and they just nudge me along until I find something comes up and I should change course. It’s one of the most counter-intuitive things, but the old Lojong slogan “Abandon any hope of fruition” is one of the most encouraging pieces of advice I’ve come across in the past few years.

 

Don’t worry about making the right decision or the wrong decision. Just make the decision that seems best given the circumstances and be prepared for everything to go in unexpected directions. And – and this is the hardest bit – remember that the outcome will only be undesirable if you decide you either don’t desire this outcome, or you get hung up on the fact that you desired something else. It is what it is.

 

And every choice you’ve made so far has lead you here, and made you the person that you are. Without being here, now, as you are, you wouldn’t be in position to launch out from this spot to take off in new and exciting directions. Or confidently hold the course and see what unfolds.

 

So, yeah. Every choice is worth your while.

 

Now, if only I could make up my mind about that darn PhD…