One of the most common things that I will hear someone say is, “I’m great at giving love. I’m terrible at receiving it.”

I actually relate a lot to this comment. I like jumping in to help if someone is struggling or for collective teamwork activities like cleaning up a kitchen. I’m really terrible at being touched in general. I’m weird about hugs and I prefer both hands to be free. Touching by performing labor, turning my two hands into helpful hands, is okay. It’s fine. I like feeling useful. Being touched by another person’s pair of hands is often unbearable.

Admitting that we are great at giving love but bad at giving is easier than admitting that we are better at giving criticism than receiving it but I have found that both can be true together. Taking feedback can be just as hard as receiving a loving touch. Receiving attention isn’t easy either. A lot of us hate talking about ourselves. We would rather talk about anyone else except for ourselves. Someone once told me that I’m a bit secretive. I told them that I’m an open book, I just don’t think that I’m very interesting.

So, it’s not just love or touch. It’s also critique and attention. It’s feedback and it’s compliments. Sometimes, it’s money. Despite popular assumptions, receiving money is one of the hardest things. Receiving food or housing is also hard. If a friend lets me stay with them for a few nights, I always think that they must be getting very tired of me by the end of my stay.

Receiving help is even harder. You know when you want something to be done exactly how you would do it? Why would you ever let anyone else help you when they’re just going to fuck it up? That’s what denying help can sound like inside of the human brain. I’m the type of annoying person who follows my super around when he comes to fix a thing in the hopes that I can just do it myself the next time around. Even when I really should not be trying to do something on my own, my brain keeps wanting me to exercise some self sufficiency and figure it out.

Why are so many things so hard to receive?

I think about that term I hear so many people use. “Learned helplessness.” I understand this term to some extent. It’s about putting your self image into another person’s hands, believing that what someone else thinks about you is more true than what you know about yourself. I also propose another term—learned helpfulness. Learned helpfulness is when you want to be the one who gives because receiving is just so unbearable but you still want connection. Giving is a type of connection. You give help all the time. Sometimes, the help is kind and welcome. Other times, the help comes in the form of sharp critiques and mean words. Regardless, you’re trying to help. You’re trying to be helpful.

Obviously, feeling helpless to other people’s opinions and wanting to be helpful all the time can go together.

I think a lot of it is about control, at least for me. I want to feel like I’m in control so I don’t like to receive. I prefer to give or even withhold. I don’t know. I think that everyone should feel some semblance of control in their lives and relationships. I also think that I fear losing control because I feel out of control politically.

I actually have a little doubt around the idea that helplessness is learned at all. Have you ever met a baby? A baby is so helpless. Totally dependent on other people. Human babies are much more helpless than any other kind of baby. We come out of the womb when we aren’t finished developing. We can die just because we fell asleep with a blanket over our faces.

If we came out of the womb helpless, then who is to say that our helplessness is learned?

People need other people for everything. I’ve been watching this weird Youtube documentary about history recently. It starts with the big bang and goes through Neolithic times. No one was able to live in this world without other people around them. We’re not able to hunt on our own. We’re not able to do agriculture or cultivate the world around us on our own. We’re not able to forage without the knowledge that only other people can teach us. We’re not even able to hide from predators on our own because we rely on taking turns to keep watch.

People are completely dependent on other people. We depend on each other, on our food systems that we make together, on our sewage systems that we maintain together, on our water systems that we build together. Every single thing that keeps you alive is a measure of teamwork.

I think that this is the hardest thing about people—being around people, wanting to connect with people, getting sick of people. The hardest thing about people is that we actually just need each other. That feeling of not wanting help or critique or touch or attention or love? Not wanting to take it? We don’t like to be reminded that we’re actually just so helpless to other people. I, for sure, don’t like it.

We need political community to survive. We need people to notice and understand our survival concerns. We need people to wear a mask and we need people to agree to not kill us. We’re actually so vulnerable to other human beings. We can fight back but only if we have a collective that fights with us. We literally can’t fight alone because we can’t survive in this world alone.

I don’t like to be touched and I have a touch of being anti-society. Society can kill you but we still live in one. We are dependent on societies that sometimes try to kill us. When people aren’t trying to kill them, they’re still imperfect. We are dependent on imperfect people who can still hurt us even when they’re not trying to.

Other people’s opinions are actually really important. Your brain pays attention to what other people think because your own survival is dependent on your attachments. If you fear what other people think, you’re not tripping out. You’re having an instinctual moment.

I understand that this is terrible news! For queer people, for anyone who can be deported, for anyone who is disabled and ill, for anyone targeted by populist mass violence—this idea that we are impacted by popular opinion is absolutely terrible news. But it’s still true. Society can kill us. We live in one. We are trying to build our own. To do that, we’re going to have to understand just how much we need each other. Once we do the work of understanding that fundamental thing, we will have a purpose for learning how to take care of each other.