It’s okay to need help

What is resilience? Resilience has many parts to it and are shown everyday through people’s actions. Resilience is something everyone has whether they believe it or not. Everybody has gone through something in their lives to show a part of resilience even though everybody shows it differently. In the article “what is resilience?” by Kendra Cherry she writes about all the different characteristics of resilience and describes what they are. There are seven characteristics of Resilience, however I think the most important one is asking for help.

I think asking for help is so important because you can’t always handle everything on your own and that’s okay. This is something I have learned over the years in my journey with the struggle of anxiety and depression which is why I think asking for help is the most important part of resilience. It started in about sixth grade when my father no longer wanted to see me and my sister. I felt like he abandoned me and still do at times. I was so upset at first that I didn’t want to do anything, I would lock myself in my room for hours avoiding my family. I wouldn’t eat anything and I would cry all the time, I ended up being in a really bad spot mentally for a long time. Everybody ignored my depression and eating problem, even myself because it was not something I wanted to admit I had. This lasted until about eighth grade when finally a teacher noticed and began to invest her time on me, making sure I was okay which is when somebody found out I was harming myself and notified my mother. My mother put me in counseling immediately after. which is where I learned that asking for help was okay and this is where I developed my resilience technique because it was the first time I had asked for help. In counseling I learned positive coping skills and my counselor taught me that it was not my fault that my dad didn’t want to see me. My mental stability increased and after about two years in counseling I felt a whole better. But that didn’t stop it from coming back my junior year of high school. Last year, my mother and step-father divorced which was the only family I had known since I was three which was extremely hard for me. I struggled to get out of bed in the morning and was sick all the time. I missed a lot of school and then got even more overwhelmed because of all the work I had missed and needed to make up. I knew it was time to ask my mother for help because I was starting to slip into my old ways and couldn’t handle it on my own. I needed help and I knew it. She made a doctor’s appointment for me and they prescribed medicine for me and wrote a referral to a counselor located right at the school. I met with her about once a week. Having somebody outside of my family to talk to really helped and we developed a plan to get my grades back up so that I could succeed. I am glad that I asked for help because it helped me get through my junior year of high school.

Asking for help is one of the most important aspects of my life now and is where I show my resilience. I am comforted by the fact that I know I can go back to counseling anytime I need to and that things will always get better. I couldn’t imagine where my life would be if I hadn’t asked for help back in middle school. This is why I think asking for help is the most important part of resilience.