This is a guest post by Christa Gallopoulos of Carry It Forward. I’ve invited a couple of kindreds to post this week while my family gears up for and makes a local move. Christa is an artist, a photographer, a writer, and one who rises again and again through intense challenges. I’m in awe of the trust that she embodies. Christa recently launched a beautiful new iteration of Carry it Forward, which I hope you’ll go peruse, and is soon to launch a new venture with Belle Pirri at www.outrageousself.com. Thanks so much for being here, Christa!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about help, so it was no surprise when Kristin asked me to write about it here! There are so many associations in my mind with that little four letter word – helpful, helpless, The Help – the book (and soon, the movie!), the help I give, the help I struggle to take, those who need help but reject it, those who seek help desperately. In the end, though, this is what I come up with: we all need it and we all give it, often without even knowing the impact we have on others.

It’s no huge secret that I didn’t have an idyllic childhood, and I’ve been encouraged strongly (pleaded with, lately) to write about my recovery from those years full of abuse and trauma. Somehow, I turned out okay, better than okay on some days, and those in the helping professions (there is that word again!) tell me over and over what a help (!) it would be to many if I could just put my experience into book form.

While I love, love, love to help others – it is so much easier to help others than to help ourselves – I hesitated for a long time. Not because I don’t want to save the world, or because I am embarrassed or ashamed of what happened all those years ago, or because I am afraid of putting bad ideas into the wrong people’s heads (although all of those reasons have come up) but because I really wanted to write the book from a positive place. For so long, I didn’t think my story was all that extraordinary, but with the assistance of a whole team of incredible folks and years of hard labor, I am finally in a place where I can see the good in it and tell my tale. Happily.

And here’s the basis of the story: there was always someone in my life who helped me get from point A to point B. As an adult, I realized that it was likely that these blessed individuals carried me forward without ever knowing what was going on.

I grew up in a small town, and even though Rule #1 was that we did not talk about anything that happened at home, I think I believed that everyone knew. That they saw what happened on the bad days and even on the good ones. So the librarian who opened the public library for me on New Year’s Day so that I could do my book report, who spent hours reading to me in the back office, who introduced me to the photographer who was the first to see and help me recognize that I had a visual eye? It seems that she didn’t know that she might as well have been a wand waving fairy godmother.

And the woman I babysat for, who had known me most of my life and showed me the way a mother could love her children, who gave me my first road map for a healthy life? It turns out that she had no clue whatsoever that things were less than safe at our house. And sadly, she felt as if she failed me when she learned what had been going on, twenty odd years later. I’m not sure, still, that she understands just how much she helped. They both, along with a larger cast of angels, helped me to thrive under less than ideal conditions. Without their guidance, support and love, I know for a fact that I would not be here now.

My point is not that I had a horrible time as a kid. It’s really not. What I am trying to say is this: we all help, all the time. It is what we do naturally. It is when we begin to worry that we can’t help enough, or the right way, or that we might screw things up, that we falter and freeze. If we let fear get involved, we get all tangled up and can’t follow through on our good intentions, on our innate knowing of what is true and right, on the love that we bring to each other.

And it works in reverse, too. If we are afraid of seeming needy, of being honest, of telling our stories and speaking our desires, we cannot be helped. We put up shields, all the time. We get in our own way. We stop the flow of love and we become helpless. And really, who wants to be that?

I believe in the innate goodness in the hearts of all people. Sure, it gets mutated and lost sometimes, but if you are reading this, it is within you. You can do it – and it doesn’t take a huge amount of effort. A simple smile, a quick “you did that so beautifully”, a little note of thanks – that’s all it takes. And that, you can do.

So get out there, run straight out into the game we call life. Help, be helped. Even when you can’t see immediate results, it’s all good.