I Trust You. Go Ahead. We Are Here.
Sometimes, the support we need isn’t someone telling us what to do. It’s knowing they’ll stand beside us while we do it.
9/6/20264 min read
The need to have your family and friends stand by you in your decisions is not a man or a woman thing.
It is a human thing.
Not a need for validation.
Not weakness.
Not dependency.
Sometimes, it is simply the need to know that if you take a difficult step and fall, someone will be there to catch you.
Over the last four decades, I have watched people go through situations that made me wonder:
Why doesn’t he leave?
Why doesn’t she decide?
Why doesn’t he do something about it?
I have heard these stories from people around me. Read them in the news. Watched people stay in things that looked unbearable from the outside.
And, like many of us, I formed opinions.
Sometimes judgmental.
Sometimes sympathetic.
Sometimes, with people close to me, I even said: “I will support you. If this is what you need, go ahead.”
I thought strength came from within. Maybe it does.
But I am beginning to understand that there is another kind of strength we often underestimate, the strength that comes from knowing the people you love will stand beside you while you use your own.
I have found myself standing at that edge too. I have taken that step. And then put it back down.
For years, I didn’t understand why.
I always thought I was self-sufficient. Independent. Capable of taking the big decisions of my life on my own. I didn’t want anyone supporting me financially. I didn’t want anyone carrying me through my problems.
So I never really asked for support.
And that, I think, is where I misunderstood what support even means. Because support doesn’t mean solving my problem. It doesn’t mean paying my bills, fixing my life, or making my decision for me.
Sometimes it simply means someone saying:
“I don’t fully understand this, but I trust that you do. Go ahead. We are here. If you fall, we will catch you.”
Instead, when I did share, what I often got was solutions.
Listening ears.
Analysis.
Questions.
All well-intentioned.
None of it unwavering.
Because when you’re already struggling to take a step, you don’t necessarily need someone helping you analyse whether to take it.
Sometimes you need someone to make the fall feel less frightening. Maybe that’s why I never really asked. I didn’t know how to ask for that.
Let me start with something not entirely personal, but one many of us understand.
Our jobs.
There are days when the politics, the comments, the judgement without the full picture, all of it becomes too much to hold. Days when you just want to resign and be done with it.
But you don’t.
You tell yourself it’s the bills.
The fees.
The EMIs.
The fear of not finding another job.
The fear of not knowing what tomorrow holds.
All of that is real.
But underneath it can be something quieter, an untested trust that if you actually said the words out loud, your family would stand behind you. You just never said them. So you never found out.
The same thing happens in relationships. In friendships. In the ordinary, daily decisions where the person living through the pain knows something no one watching from the outside possibly can.
We see the situation. They live it. We admire the people who finally leave.
We call them strong.
Brave.
Courageous.
They are.
But I think we’ve misunderstood where some of that courage actually lives. It isn’t only in the final step, the leaving, the deciding, the walking away.
That happens once. In a breath. The courage is often in everything that comes before it. In telling the people you love, again and again:
This hurts me.
I need this to change.
I need to leave.
It’s in facing their doubt. Their fear for you. Their:
“Are you sure?”
And explaining the same pain a hundred times, not because it happened a hundred times, but because you were asked, a hundred times, to explain why it was painful enough to deserve an ending.
That’s the part that wears you down. Not the situation.
Proving the situation.
From the outside, we only ever see the outcome.
The person who left the job.
The marriage.
The friendship.
The family.
The situation that had stopped being right for them. We see the courage, and we applaud the strength. But the person who lived it knows something we may never fully see.
Sometimes, the hardest part was never surviving the situation. It was having to keep explaining why surviving it wasn’t enough anymore. And perhaps that’s what I’ve been slowly understanding about myself.
Being independent doesn’t mean I don’t need support.
Being capable of taking my own decisions doesn’t mean I don’t need someone standing beside me while I take them.
Being strong doesn’t mean I should have to prove, over and over again, that I am hurting.
Asking someone to stand beside me doesn’t take away my ability to walk on my own. Maybe I’ve confused independence with having to carry everything alone. Maybe strength was never about not needing anyone. Maybe strength is also knowing what you need, and being brave enough to say it.
Not:
“Tell me what I should do.”
But:
“This is my decision. I’m not asking you to make it for me. I’m asking you to stand beside me while I do.”
Because sometimes what we need most isn’t someone to tell us what to do. It isn’t even someone to understand every detail of why we feel the way we do. Sometimes, we just need to know that if we finally take that step, we won’t have to take it completely alone. Someone will still be there.
Not to stop us.
Not to question us.
Not to fix it.
Just to say:
I trust you.
Go ahead.
We are here.