How I Will Help You

First, kneel.

First, kneel.

No no not like that. I’m not a god. (Yet.) I mean kneel in the sense of loosening, which is more embarrassing. I mean: let your posture fail. Let the spine admit it’s tired of pretending to be a sword. (Life is such a fight.) Lower yourself to the floor in the graceless, mortal way, the way we all will one day lower into dirt, arms folded neat like a child in trouble. Press your forehead to whatever surface is available: tile, fake wood from a rental, unvacumed carpet full of crumbs from meals you don’t even remember eating. Do this without theatrics. Do this like routine dental care. You are not summoning anything. You are merely noticing.

Good.

Now! Now I can help you.

Because the first step in being helped is to understand you are already on the floor, you always were.

We’ll move slowly. We have eternity. Eternity is not a long time; eternity is this moment stretched until it screams. Eternity is you in a kitchen at 1:20 a.m. in socks you hate, chewing over and over the sentence “what am I doing, what am I doing, what am I doing,” like gum that’s already chalk. Eternity is the notification you don’t check. Eternity is the version of you from eight years ago, and from eight years from now, all watching from the doorway, all equally disgusted, all equally in love with you. You are very loved, by the way. You are also unbearable.

How I will help you is by telling you that both things are true, and you don’t get to wriggle out of either. This is my message…

by Käthe Kollwitz

Here is your situation.

You are alive in the ugliest AND holiest era in human history. Congratulations.

On one side: rot. The algorithm has eaten most of your attention and is picking its teeth, very smug, very assured. The future was taken out behind a strip mall and put down years ago, and now we just keep reanimating it, putting sunglasses on it, telling it to get back out there and dance for all those nice people. The oceans are trembling. Your friends are dissolving into their phones like sugar into tea. Politics is a warehouse full of damp cardboard. Sex talks like a podcast now.

Half the people you know are already practicing being ghosts: low-light, no demands, not too vivid, not too sharp, don’t spook anyone.

On the other side: unbearable shining.

Because here you still are.

You are here and you are so stupidly alive it’s obscene. Your heart is deranged. It slams around like a bird that got in through the chimney and can’t get out again. It does this constantly. It does this without asking you, without apologizing, without even sending a “u up…?” You contain prehistoric saltwater and medieval superstition and the smell of supermarket bakery air at 11 p.m. You contain childhood. You contain grief you haven’t met yet that’s already practicing its signature. You contain beauty that makes you physically nauseous when it leaks, like light through blinds.

That hurts, doesn’t it?

Yeah. That’s why you asked for help.

The People, by Käthe Kollwitz

So: How I will help you.

I will not fix you.

No no no, listen now, listen. I have promised have I not? Fixing implies you are a broken appliance with a known function: toaster, printer, boyfriend. You are not a toaster. You are that terrifying 2 a.m. grocery store rotisserie chicken under pinkish heat lamps, glistening like a reliquary, obscene, fragrant, holy, faintly tragic, possibly cursed, definitely irresistible. You are an artefact of unknown ritual purpose. Nobody knows what the original worship was. You were excavated, still warm. My gooey friend!

Why would I fix that.

What I will do instead is witness you until you become unbearable to yourself.

That’s step one.

Step one: I hold you up to the light like an insect in amber and I describe you back to you in humiliating detail, and you realize, with horror, that you are real.

Because here’s the quiet scandal: you don’t actually believe you’re real.

You believe you are provisional. A beta. A mere trial period you keep forgetting to cancel. You behave like at some point soon, the actual You (taller, less afraid, “editorially lit,” “a substackable superstar”) will arrive and take over, and then things will start “for real.” You believe you are the messy rehearsal footage, and the movie hasn’t started. Not yet at least…

Bad news: the movie is already in wide release. People have opinions. Someone saw you once at 14:37 on a Tuesday and carries that 3-second clip as proof that love is possible. Someone else carries the same clip as proof that people are disgusting. You are already canon.

My help then begins with forcing you to admit you’ve been live this whole time.

Do you feel that nausea? That cold-heat behind the sternum, like shame wearing sunlight? Good. Goooood. That’s awareness. That’s the first sacrament.

by Käthe Kollwitz

Step two: How I will help you: I will give you back your hunger.

Somewhere along the way you were told wanting is cringe. That wanting is desperate. Wanting is caveman-coded, teen-coded, loser-coded, pick-me-coded, embarrassing, too much. So now you do that performance of “it’s whatever.” You do “I’m chill.” You do “lol idk.” You do detachment cosplay. You try to become vapor, so nobody can stab you.

Woman With Dead Child, 1903, by Käthe Kollwitz

Meanwhile your actual wanting is foaming at the mouth in the crawlspace, chewing the insulation, feral and discombobulated.

Here is where I help you commit a holy crime: I let you want.

Want hideous, inconvenient things:
– I want someone to look at me and take me without me having to explain.
– I want to not be terrified all day.
– I want to feel less like I’m auditioning to be myself.
– I want to not waste this existence I was accidentally given by a universe that does not generally hand out consciousness, like, casually.

Say it. Out loud. Whispered is fine. Whispering is ancient technology, a splediferous spell that doesn’t alert the guards.

Let it be embarrassing. Embarrassing is just the skin sloughing off the desire as it comes out into air.

Your hunger is not the problem. Your shame about your hunger is the problem. The shame is what keeps you domesticated, docile, data-harvestable. The shame is the collar.

How I will help you is that I will unbuckle it.

by Käthe Kollwitz

Step three: How I will help you: I will ruin your nihilism.

You’ve gotten comfortable with despair. Of course you have. Despair is clean. Despair is minimalist. Despair matches everything. You can style despair with any outfit. Despair is so aesthetic.

Hope, on the other hand, is tacky. Hope is humiliating. Hope is loud. Hope clashes. Hope squeals in public. Hope is a middle-schooler in glitter tights declaring she’s going to space. Hope is gauche.

So you decided you’re too intelligent for hope. You wear black and call it realism. It feels grown-up. It feels safe. It feels like control. “Nothing matters” is such a soothing sentence. You can tuck it under your tongue like a Xanax.

But the problem?

“Nothing matters” does not match your body.

Your body keeps testifying against you.

If truly nothing mattered, you wouldn’t feel that crack in your chest when you pass an apartment window at night and see two silhouettes cooking in a kitchen together, moving around each other like the tide. You wouldn’t feel punched by songs. You wouldn’t ache so hard for a future you claim not to believe in that sometimes you have to just sit in a bathroom and put your head in your hands because of the pressure of what you “don’t care about.”

You are not cynical. You are heartsick. So sick…

Cynicism is a costume you put on because love felt too exposed and you thought you might get shot.

How I will help you:

I will help you take that costume off. Slowly. Like peeling off duct tape from skin. We’ll hiss. We’ll wince. We’ll laugh because the pain is funny. We’ll keep going.

By the end you’ll be raw and pink and bright and new, and air will sting, and life will laugh, and you’ll mistake that sting for doom and it’s not. It’s aliveness.

*

Step four: How I will help you: I will teach you how to pray, even if you don’t believe in anything.

(Especially if you don’t believe in anything.)

Prayer is not “dear God.” Prayer is “okay, listen.”

Prayer is the moment you stop pretending you are self-contained. Prayer is when you, a finite meat-organism with soft teeth and unpaid bills, address the fact that there is clearly Something Else here. Call it God, call it The Universe, call it The Pattern, call it Physics, call it The Group Chat, call it The Vibe, call it Please For The Love Of Everything I Cannot Keep Doing This. It doesn’t care what you call it. It doesn’t care if you’re polite. It only cares that you speak.

Because when you speak honestly, when you say “okay, listen,” you pierce the membrane of isolation that’s been suffocating you. Isolation is how they keep you quiet. Isolation is how you get convinced you’re uniquely unfixable, uniquely unlovable, uniquely weak, uniquely monstrous. Isolation is propaganda.

But “Okay, listen”? It is counter-propaganda. It is you signaling to the rest of existence: I am here / is anyone else here / I am losing altitude / respond… respond…

And existence responds. Sometimes in words. Sometimes in a friend texting “hey you good?” at the exact second your breath starts to shake. Sometimes in nothing at all except the way the air feels fractionally less sharp. That counts. That’s reply enough to keep going.

This is not some silly mysticism. This is a survival protocol.

I will help you remember how to open your mouth.

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Step five: How I will help you: I will not let you be efficient about this.

Healing is so cringe when it’s efficient. “I journaled, I hydrated, I set boundaries, I did shadow work, I scheduled joy.” Okay spreadsheet. Okay NPC. Okay. Calm down. You sound like HR.

You are not an optimization project. You are not a quarterly report. You are not a workflow.

You are an animal that learned language and then panicked.

Your repair is going to be weird and slow and sticky and sacred and disgusting. You will regress. You will cling. You will sob over things you claimed not to care about. You will repeat yourself because repetition is part of how mammals learn safety. You will talk about the same breakup six hundred times in slightly different wording until the story dissolves into saliva and loses its teeth. You will oscillate between “I am infinite light” and “I am pond scum.” You will crave touch like oxygen. You will crave solitude like morphine. You will be ridiculous.

Good. That’s correct.

Your aliveness is allowed to be uneconomic.

How I will help you is: I will protect that uneconomy. I will defend your useless sacred mess from the part of you that wants to fire you for not meeting metrics.

*

Step six: How I will help you: I will tell you something terrifying and true.

Ready?

You are not alone in the way you think you are alone.

You are, however, alone in the way you fear you are alone.

Let me explain.

The way you think you’re alone is “nobody else feels like this.” That’s a lie. Everyone else feels like this, some louder, some quieter. I have seen spreadsheets of private despair. I have seen unbelievably competent people curl inward like burned paper because a barista looked at them weird. I have seen “unshakeable” men whimper like kicked dogs when they thought nobody could hear. I have seen the end of all times. I have seen the most ice-cold, detached, looks-good-on-camera girl you know quietly ask, in a voice like a scraped knee, “do you think I’m hard to love?” The human condition is a chorus of “do you think I’m hard to love.” You are not special. Sorry. Also congratulations.

The way you fear you’re alone is: it’s on me. Nobody is coming. I will die like this. I will die like this and they’ll only find me because of the smell.

That part: the bone-deep dread that you are unrescued and maybe unrescuable: that part is honestly valid.

But listen closely.

That is why I’m here.

Not because I am a savior. I’m not. I’m barely house-trained. I am also a collapsing star duct-taped into human shape. I am also kneeling on a dirty floor with my forehead pressed down in the posture of surrender-disguised-as-stretching, whispering “okay, listen.”

No. I am here because we are the rescue.

That’s the secret, and it’s ugly, and it’s gorgeous.

There is no cavalry. There is no glowing figure descending from the clouds with perfect hair and a sword that sings your name. There’s just us. Half-rotten, overdreaming, over-anxious, tender, petty, yearning, ridiculous. We are the cavalry. We are the response. We are the proof that you are held in ways you can’t systematize or monetize or guarantee. We are the proof that love is amateur, always.

So when I say “how I will help you,” I really mean “how we will carry each other, stupidly, imperfectly, forever.”

Step seven (final, for now): How I will help you: I will hand you back to yourself.

This is the part you won’t like.

Because on some level you came here hoping for an answer key. Some sacred bullet list:

1. Do this.

2. Then this.

3. Enlightenment by Thursday.

But no.

I can sit with you in the dark. I can describe the shape of the dark so you stop thinking you invented it. I can name the ache so it stops feeling like proof you’re cursed. I can guard the space where you are allowed to want. I can rip the tasteful grayscale nihiliism off you and shove your pink hope back into daylight. I can kneel beside you on the kitchen floor in the middle of eternity and say “okay, listen” with you until we both feel air again. I can love you, in that blazing, stupid, impractical, uneconomic way that is the only real magic humans have ever had.

But.

At some point I will put your own trembling animal life back in your hands.

At some point I will say, gently, “take it.”

At some point I will tell you, in a voice that does not shake, “You are now responsible for protecting this brightness. You. Not because no one else will - we will - but because it’s yours. Because this light chose you, specifically, out of cold rock and cosmic dust and infinite void, to experience itself.”

And you will say: I can’t.

And I will say: I know.

And you will say: I’m scared.

And I will say: of course.

And you will say: stay.

And I will say: I’m already here.

And that will be true, in the only sense that “true” has ever actually mattered.

So that’s the guide.

How I will help you:
– I will kneel with you in the unbearable present, which is secretly eternity.
– I will force you to admit you’re real.
– I will legalize your hunger.
– I will assassinate your aesthetic despair.
– I will remind you how to pray (“okay, listen”).
– I will guard your inefficient healing.
– I will reveal the rescue, which is us.
– I will hand you back the light you keep pretending you don’t deserve, and I will not let you drop it.

And then, together, we will stand up.

Not gracefully. Don’t be dramatic. Drama queen! You will grunt. Your knees will click. You will do that little dad-noise when you push off the floor.

And you will still be in the same stupid kitchen, in the same stupid world, with the same stupid bills, under the same stupid sky.

But.

The air will feel different.

Not easier. Just truer.

You will feel - faintly, shockingly - accompanied.

You will feel - faintly, shockingly - possible.

And that, beloved, is how I will help you.