A strange thing has happened over the last several months. Actually, I don’t know that strange is the right word. Unexpected feels more accurate. Indulge me for a moment.
There have been moments recently when I have found myself sitting in my car, smiling about a conversation long after it ended. Moments when a text message arrived carrying exactly the encouragement I needed. Moments when someone offered support so naturally and generously that it lingered with me for days. The source of the support is often what has surprised me. I can hear you already wondering why I was surprised. Well I am first born daughter so high achieving, hyper independence has felt coded into my DNA. But back to the care and support.
Some of it has come from people who entered my life relatively recently. Honestly some of it has come from people whose names have been sitting in my contacts for years but have either now begun to see me differently, or I them. Probably the latter. For most of my life, I have been exceptionally comfortable occupying the role of giver. I have spent most of my adult life becoming a better listener, a better organizer of things, a better builder of systems so that life can be more efficient. So I became the person that could carry six bags of groceries, a folding chair, and the emotional well-being of an entire friend group. Apparently, I have historically viewed that as a reasonable challenge.
That was all well and good, but receiving wasn’t really my thing. If I am being honest I have always been afraid of receiving because I felt like it would come with strings attached or worse yet speak to my inability to manage. And both of those were as desirable to me as being attacked by a swarm of angry hornets. So for me receiving required a different set of muscles which I had not spent any time developing. But then life handed me some opportunities to build this muscles. Well handed is way too benign for how life taught me this lesson; let’s just say life was showing out.
A few months ago, I found myself in an environment where care was woven into the experience itself. Questions were answered before they became problems, details were handled without my input or effort, my needs were anticipated as opposed to the converse. My only responsibility was to show up and receive what was being offered and swipe my card of course. The first few days felt completely unfamiliar. I kept wanting to shrink so I wouldn’t be a bother because I had internalized the belief that I needed to justify why I was deserving of attention. Y’all I was behaving like a woman who had been handed a beautifully prepared meal and was wandering into the kitchen looking for pots to wash. Insert eye roll.
Once I settled down and allowed myself to receive, something interesting happened. I began noticing care everywhere, feeling comfortable with receiving it, and welcoming it. The result was that my attention shifted and I started noticing care beyond that experience. For someone who had spent the majority of their life surviving, noticing care was a big revelation.
I noticed that in this season, life was offering companionship, encouragement, and connection. And maybe it had been offering it before but I wasn’t ever looking in that direction. So I have changed that, and lately, I have been accepting what is offered without shrinking or apologizing for needing it. What I have discovered both comforts and encourages me. The world contains far more care than I once realized. Some of it has arrived from new people. And some of it has arrived through people who have known me for years and have become more important with time. Relationships have developed greater depth, conversations have become more honest and trust has gradually accumulated so that the change in some of the relationship has been almost invisible.
In this week that passed, I have been invited out to a life changing event by an old acquaintance that I am seeing in a new way. I have been deeply listened to by new people and a few enduring friends that I never let in before. The most surprising one was the friend of the friend who really saw me and spoke encouragement to my soul. All of these people have been giving me the gift of really seeing me. Their presence feels fresh and surprising, as though life has quietly introduced a new character into the story just when the plot needed one. But the truth is that the change has been internal. I am deeply grateful for both the support and the new understandings I am gaining.
I am both learning and appreciating that people are rarely finished revealing themselves to us, nor are we done revealing ourselves to others. The constant evolution is perhaps why some relationships deepen unexpectedly and we discover new capacities for kindness, wisdom, generosity, and connection.
Lately, life has felt full of those discoveries and they have arrived at exactly the right time. The realization has left me feeling unexpectedly optimistic. Not because life suddenly became easier. Let me assure you it has not. What has changed is my understanding of how much goodness can exist alongside difficulty if I make space for it.
For a long time, I think I viewed support as something rare. Something that had to be earned, negotiated, or carefully managed. Lately, I have been discovering that care is often moving toward us in ways we don’t immediately recognize. Sometimes it looks like a thoughtful conversation, an unexpected invitation, or a person willing to sit with us long enough to truly see us. There is something deeply reassuring about realizing that the world still contains people like that.
I am sitting with that realization, feeling grateful for the relationships that are deepening, the ones that are emerging, and the version of myself that is finally learning how to receive them. The big lesson I have learned is that opening yourself to care doesn’t make you weaker, it does however make the world feel a lot warmer and way more manageable. And lately, that warmth has been the gift.
