becoming yourself is a social project

how to let people help you

Jeanie Tomanek

help is closer than we think

I keep thinking about how often the right help arrives through an almost-random conversation. You mention a problem over dinner and a friend says, oh, you should talk to my friend. You describe what you are stuck on and someone tells you, I went through this exact thing. You tell someone what you are trying to create and they say, wait, I think I know the person you need. Suddenly someone has enough context to see the door you were standing beside.

But what if you never had that conversation? What if you never happened to mention the problem? What if the person who could have helped was someone you forgot to update, because you did not realise they were relevant to this chapter of your life?

This is one of the inefficiencies of social life. The help we need is often much closer than we think, but it stays dormant until our lives become legible enough for other people to know where their care, intelligence, or context might be helpful.

This matters because becoming more fully yourself is rarely a solo act of will. My sense is that we contain much more potential than we are able to access alone. We may feel the dim outline of another life, but the path toward it is often obscured by small barriers: not knowing who to ask, what to ask, nor that someone near us has already crossed the terrain where we feel most lost.

Which leads to the question underneath this whole essay: how do we make this kind of help less accidental?

the problem of staying visible

Over a lifetime, we meet people who care about us. These are friends, professors, mentors, managers, collaborators, acquaintances, former colleagues, internet mutuals, people we met once at a dinner and had one unusually alive conversation with, people who saw something in us before we could see it ourselves. But staying meaningfully in touch with all these people is surprisingly difficult (as I explored in the art of staying in touch).

This is because even when people care, there is still a friction. This friction, to be clear, is usually just a few sentences typed into a glowing rectangle. But distance can accumulate its own social gravity. Time between conversations can make people feel further away than they are. The longer it has been since you spoke, the more a message can start to feel like an Event.

Social media somewhat solves this, but only in a flattened way. People can see that you moved cities, posted an essay, went to a dinner, got a new job, or became briefly obsessed with making ceramics. But the inner thread of your life is harder to transmit. Social media shows artefacts and signals, but it rarely shows the actual shape of your becoming.

That kind of context usually only emerges in real conversation. We give people fragments of the update in passing: over coffee, on long walks, in voice notes, at parties, in the compressed three-sentence version of our lives we offer when someone asks what we have been up to.

Conversation is wonderful, but it has natural limits. There are only so many people you can keep meaningfully updated in real time, and only so many times you can compress the same chapter of your life into a different conversation without losing your mind, though of course I will keep trying.

If help is often obscured behind the absence of a question, and staying in touch is too bottlenecked to happen only through catch-ups, then maybe what could help is a lightweight form for making our lives legible to the people who care.

a life update

I started wondering whether more of us could benefit from a small ritual for this: a recurring note to the people who care, somewhere between a letter, a field report, and a gentle ask.

Startups do something like this with investor updates. I think the useful part is the shape of the ritual, which involves reflecting regularly, keeping people close to the journey, and making it easier for help to know where to land.

What would a softer, more human version of this look like for a life?

Maybe a semi-regular note for mentors, friends, old professors, former managers, interesting acquaintances, and people who care. It could include something like: here is what I am working on, here is what I am learning, here is where I could use a lantern.

I am interested in the power of an intentional 1:many version. I think the best version of this is a way of remaining in relationship with the people who have helped shape you, and letting them know enough of the story that they can participate if they want to. There is generosity in context. It lets people care for you with more accuracy. It gives them enough of the thread to know how they might be able to help.

The medium matters because it lowers the bar. A catch-up is beautiful, but it requires scheduling gymnastics. A group chat is intimate, but it can create weird reply-all dynamics. Social media is easy, but it often flattens the signal. Email might actually be the best container because it allows one shared update and many private replies. Everyone receives the same note, but anyone can respond personally, which creates a lightweight bridge between broadcasting and intimacy.

When I tweeted about this idea, I learned that lots of people apparently already do versions of it, which delighted me. One friend told me that since moving overseas, he makes graphic zines over iMessage to update his friends on his life.

Another person said she has done something like this since college, and that her list includes old bosses, internet friends, airport strangers, and baristas in Europe.

Of course, email is only one version of this. The deeper pattern is creating small, recurring containers for reflection, accountability, companionship, and help.

I already do this in more intimate forms. A few friends and I have quarterly life strategy sessions, complete with presentations, memos, and a section for questions we want help thinking through. During my sabbatical, another group of friends and I did a daily morning standup, where we shared what happened yesterday and what we were planning to do that day. I also have a weekly call with a friend where we go through a shared note, tracking the habits we are trying to maintain and talking through what is working.

A life update comes from the same instinct, a small ritual for letting other people stay close to the thread of your life.

But the moment you try to write one, you may find the tender part underneath the ritual. It is easy enough to tell people what happened. It is harder to name what remains unresolved, where you feel uncertain, and what kind of help would actually help.

the vulnerability of asking

The first difficulty is recognition. Asking for help requires you to notice the gap between where you are and where you are trying to go, which sounds obvious, but often is not. Sometimes I can feel the chasm, but I cannot yet name it. I know I am stuck, but not what kind of stuck. I know I am confused, but not what question would clarify me. There is a state before the ask where you are moving around inside fog, aware that something is not working, but unable to turn the feeling into a sentence another person could respond to.

The second difficulty is exposure. Even once you know what you need, asking for help requires admitting incompleteness. It punctures the fantasy of independence. It says, I cannot fully do this alone and I am not yet who I am trying to become. I trust you enough to let you see the unfinished part.

Kevin Kelly has a beautiful essay about what he calls being “kinded,” the state of receiving kindness from another person. He writes about how many people resist being kinded unless they are in dire need. We often know how to give care, but can be much worse at receiving it.

The odd thing is that the vulnerability is often much stronger on the receiving side than the giving side. What feels to you like neediness may feel to someone else like a welcome invitation to be useful.

This is worth remembering because I have learned many people often love helping each other, when the help is made legible. They love being invited into another person’s becoming. They love making the introduction, recommending the book, asking the clarifying question, saying the obvious thing you somehow could not see because you were standing too close to your own life.

I keep thinking about this after a conversation I had with my friend Franko, who changed my life with one suggestion. When I was trying to figure out my next career move, he told me to post publicly about my job search. It was obvious in retrospect, but it changed the surface area of my life. Once the need became visible, people I would never have thought to ask started sending roles, names, introductions, and pieces of context I could not have accessed alone. This is the power of making the ask legible: it gives other people somewhere to place their help.

the update is useful before anyone replies

There is another benefit to asking for help: it forces your confusion into language.

This is part of why mentorship is so powerful, though I think we sometimes misunderstand where the power sits. A good mentor gives advice, but they also create the conditions for articulation. Before someone can help you, you have to metabolise your vague sense of stuckness into language.

In this sense, you can almost have any mentor in the world before they even know you exist. You can imagine the conversation. What would I ask Paul Graham? What would I ask Virginia Woolf? What would I ask my wisest friend? What would I ask the person who has already lived the chapter I am trying to enter?

Even if you never send the question, something in you sharpens when you try to formulate it. You begin to notice what kind of help you are actually asking for. Do I need encouragement or tactical advice? Do I need an introduction or someone to tell me my standards are too low? Do I need someone to reality-check me or to remind me that I am allowed to want what I want?

Most of us are inside our own lives too continuously to see them clearly. We move from task to task, city to city, love to crisis to ambition to admin, and only occasionally pause long enough to ask what the plot actually is. A life update creates a small reflective checkpoint. It asks you to metabolise experience into narrative, and narrative into questions.

becoming easier to help

I think a full life has many kinds of witnesses. Some people know your childhood self. Some people know your professional self. Some people know the version of you that appears when you are most alive. None of them have the full map, but each of them may hold one useful angle.

We are shaped by the people who ask better questions than we do, by friends who notice patterns and mentors who widen the frame, by old bosses who say, actually, I think you are underrating yourself, and by the friend who remembers what you wanted before you became practical. Sometimes someone else can see the door before we can, because they are standing at a different angle.

This is what I mean when I say becoming yourself is a social project. Far from a solo act of will, a full life is shaped through many co-authors, editors, witnesses, catalysts, and mirrors. Most of us are surrounded by more care, intelligence, and help than we know how to access. Maybe part of reaching your potential is learning how to become easier to help.

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One possible template could be a note with four parts shared every few months (or any cadence that feels right):

• Where I am: what happened, what changed, what I am working on, what feels alive.

• What I am learning: what worked, what did not, what patterns I am noticing, what I am slowly understanding.

• What I am wondering: the questions I keep returning to, the decisions I am circling, the places where I feel uncertain or unfinished.

• Where help would help: the advice, introductions, examples, encouragement, reality checks, or questions that would be useful right now.

Even if you never send it, you may learn something from the attempt, because to articulate your life is already to see it more clearly.

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