“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The most meaningful words I ever hear in my writing are “thanks for making me think,” and when I wrote a post yesterday about my difficult struggles to understand the boundaries of helping others and being helped, I had the pleasure of reading those words hundreds of times in many messages and tags.

I knew early this morning when i woke up that I wanted to write more about the subject, it is clearly important to a lot of others besides myself.

I have always struggled to define the boundaries of helping and being helped, it has been a painful and sometimes destructive issue for me. I want to figure it out.  In recent years, I have been learning about the importance of boundaries, of setting limits, of grasping the limitations of what I can do and the value of comprehending what I can’t and shouldn’t do.

Help can save lives. Or it can cripple them, my challenge is to understand the difference.

 Then there is the practical approach to all this silliness: “For heaven sakes,” wrote Mary Huebler Nasner on my Facebook page, “If someone offers something… Just say thank you and don’t spent time and effort analyzing it!”

Not so simple for me, my grandma taught me differently. I need to make my own way in the world, and although I have often made a mess of it. I am beginning to learn.

I am learning to trust my own instincts and emotions – rather than the instincts and emotions of others – and realize that I need to pay attention when something or someone makes me uncomfortable or uneasy.  It never occurred to me that I might be right. When I am looking to others to do what I need to do myself. We all need to find a way to live in the world, if we can. If we can’t, then we do need help and are entitled to it.

This is, in a sense, the greatest form of protection.  Our own instincts are precious, they can never be taken from us. This, like almost everything else, is a very personal issue, everyone experiences it differently and makes their own decisions about it. I once thought it was up to me to receive help, but many people don’t see it in that way.

The question of help is, In a way, a continuing issue in my life.

Helping people is now one of the focal points of my life, and my life with Maria. I started an online group to encourage people in their search for creativity in their lives, I work privately and anonymously in a number of ways to help people in hospice, people in poverty, people seeking to change their lives and fulfill themselves, people seeking to be creative.  I passionately embrace Jesus Christ’s idea  of giving the poor reasons to hope and live in dignity.

I help new and young writers find their voice and sell their work, artists create their work, the voiceless find their voice,  farmers and others tell their stories.

I am teaching in several ways, and it is among the most satisfying times of my life. I feel that i am just beginning to learn how to help people to write.

I have, for some years now been on the hero journey, and that does not make me a hero, but a pilgrim and a wanderer. I am living on one of the final stages of the journey – I  hope to write a book about it. In this stage, the hero brings back his hard won knowledge, gained from his journey out of his ordinary world and into another.

The hero offers himself in this way to help all who remained in any way that he can. The hero returns home, or he continues his journey. He bears some element of the treasure or “elixir” that offers to transform others as he has been transformed.

This is my mission, really, my idea of helping. And for better or worse, I have been transformed.

What then, are the boundaries of helping, can they be spelled out?

Yes and no, I think. We are all different.  I do not see a black and white world, as so many others do.  It is not that I don’t wish to help others, I do, and continuously. But I want to help and be helped in a way that is bounded, healthy and meaningful, not in superficial ways that are destructive to me and to others.

Helping is not saving or soothing. Helping is also knowing what I am not.  And what I can’t do.

I am not a doctor, not a therapist, not a healer or a spiritualist. Sometimes, the best way I can help others is to get them real help from people who are trained to do it. In our world, there are all kinds of people eager to tell us what to do and how to save ourselves and what to believe and think. They promise us all kinds of remedies. For me, they are not helpers, they have not helped me.

Helping is bounded.  It is okay for people to refuse it, and they are owed the opportunity. I cannot put myself or the people around me at risk. I cannot give away what I need to live, or what is not mine.  I am not a God or a prophet. That is a delusion I have sometimes held, and it is dangerous, it has never helped anyone. Helping can uplift, it can also diminish. I can do harm as easily as good. I can enable as well as assist.

I do not give help to people who do not seek or it, put in a wiser way, who I do not know or understand.  I am wary of drama, it is often the illusion of help, a major warning sign. People who decide what I want and need without talking to me or asking me or knowing me are not always helping me, they are taking it upon themselves, and for their own reasons, to decide what it is I want or need. Wanting to help, I learned, was sometimes about them, sometimes about me.

That is the loss of self to me, it is a boundary crossing, it makes me profoundly uneasy, and that is a warning sign for me to stop and consider very carefully what I am doing and what is being done to me.

A wonderful therapist taught me to respect my own feelings, if it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t right. And she did help me, she did show me how to save myself. She taught me what real help is.

Being helpful is an impulse, and a noble one, but I have learned to be thoughtful about my impulses, to pause and take a breath and consider them carefully.

For many years since I started writing books up here  people have sent me gifts, often big and expensive and idiosyncratic gifts – statues, giant paintings, baskets of exotic foods. I didn’t like it. They did not ask me if I wanted these things or needed them, they had no idea where I might put them or if I had room for them, let alone whether I even might like them. I was expected to be grateful because they sent them to me.

I asked people not to send me these gifts,  I said I would just have to return them, and for some time I spent a great deal of money doing that, and a lot of trips to the post office. I had no place to keep these gifts, and couldn’t bear to throw them away.  It made many people angry. How dare I refuse generosity, they asked? Why was I being an ingrate? Why couldn’t i just accept the things people want to give me?

Mary’s message really – why not just shut up and take whatever you could get? Why think it about it and analyze it? Sorry, Mary, that is not who I want to be.

Because identity and self-respect are precious. Once you have lost them, you will never want to give them away again, and may never get them back.

I knew this to be an important issue, an identity issue for me. I knew that people who really loved me and cared about me would not wish to give me things I didn’t want or couldn’t use. I knew that people who were worried about me would ask, not presume. This issue was not about the gifts, but about me, and my sense of self and dignity.

And this is something I learned. When I help someone, I ask them. I talk to them. I want them to participate and be treated with dignity, not simply be passive receptacles of my own ideas about feeling good.They are not helpless, that is different from being needy.

Help is about that. In recent times I have wanted and needed a great deal of help. I had open heart surgery, went bankrupt, saw my beloved profession collapse, struggled with the great recession and the end of real estate as a form of savings and security. I got a lot of help. From good people who knew how to do it.

I think I developed in this time a truer understanding than ever of what help is and what it means and how it can be either uplifting and healing or destructive and diminishing. I learned how to help myself, how to take responsibility for saving me. I learned there were no saviors or mystics out there with magic wands to rescue me. I learned that real friendship, true relationships, a genuine community could help me.

I learned to take help and be whole, and give help and leave other people whole.

I learned that I was stronger than I imagined, and that there is nothing more rewarding, inspiring, heartwarming or uplifting than learning to help yourself. There are so many people in need – we all are, really, at one time or another. Help is such a valuable thing to consider and learn. I will keep at it, and I will continue to share it.

“You made me think” are the most beautiful words a writer can hear. Thanks.