Nobody Wants A Handout

By the time this post goes live, I will have had the absolute joy of letting someone know that they’re going to get life changing medical treatment to the tune of an extremely substantial amount of money. All thanks to the kindness of a VERY generous stranger.

It got me thinking about how much people hate the idea of a handout.

Humans will be suffering debilitating chronic illness, and refuse a ‘handout.’
We’ll be deep in all-consuming grief, incapacitated on a core level, and refuse a ‘handout.’
We’ll be mentally on the edge and battling to get out of bed, and refuse a ‘handout.’
We’ll be in the tiresome trenches of early parenthood and struggling to put food on the table, and refuse a ‘handout.’
We’ll be burning out trying to juggle multiple jobs with uni work, and refuse a ‘handout.’

The connotations feel deeply personal and shameful.

And yet, what if instead of thinking of a handout as somebody tossing money at us in charity…we thought of it as a hand reaching in, to help us out of our current situation?

Not a handout,
but a hand out.

What if we saw it not as charity, but community.
The common-unity being that we all struggle with something at some point. Relationships, health, housing, and yes - even money.

The foundation of this disdain seems to be our hyper-individualistic way of life.
Our ‘every man for himself’ mentality. But if extreme independence were the point of this whole thing, you would probably be occupying your own planet somewhere. But you’re not. We’re all here together. An ecosystem that needs every part in order to thrive. When we stop trying to do this whole thing alone, we tap into a much deeper power.

What if we let the parts of the ecosystem that are stable, support us when we’re in a season of instability?
What if we understood that sometimes our leaves have fallen. And that it might take some time before we can bloom again.

What if we humbled ourselves enough to know that we might sometimes need to receive? That the very nature of a thriving ecosystem depends on it.
That everything won’t always be mental clarity and full bank accounts and able bodies.

What if we let ourselves accept a helping hand out of our current struggles, so that one day we might know the weight of the gift we are offering, when we extend our own hand into somebody else’s darkness?

Much love,
Lysette
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