Teaching myself to receive
A friend of mine told me a year ago that she had learned to surround herself with people she could count on. The conversation came up when she was asking to help me out and I kept saying no, and she said you need to learn to let people do for you too. I said I wasn’t used to having people do for me. But turns out last year I had some incredible friends solidify in my life – J, my neighbor and friend who became someone I could lean on even from my sick bed and B the one who said this to me, as well as others such as R&A next door. I was always better in the giver role, than in the receiver, but I spent the last year welcoming the giving that my friends were offering.
Now I’m having a crash course in receiving the gifts a partner has to offer – gestures of kindness, flowers to mark a date on the calendar, remembering my preferences in thought and deed – I’ve entered some new phase of my life where I receive gifts, from my friends, from my lover, from life – and these gifts of time and thought are all so sweet to me that I wonder why I wasn’t more open to them before – it was surely a side of myself that should have been exploited yet wasn’t.
I know in the first phase of my mid-life crisis, I did start asking to receive – but it took a while to start actually opening myself to the possibilities.