Help.

I was rooting around in the ivy in front of the new (huge and impersonal) Oakland Tribune building at 11:15 last night when I realized I'd hit a low point in my life.

A frightened security guard confronted me via speaker phone from the lobby desk, and I turned to see her standing timidly in a window. I dragged my fifty-pound suitcase to the glass doors, looking both pissed off and helpless, and the following monologue spilled out of me like word vomit:

"Look, I work at the Oakland Tribune - I'm not some ghetto crackhead lurking in the bushes. My coworker dropped me off at the airport on Friday and I need to get my keys. Since YOU were not willing to hold my keys at the front desk, I am now wading through the landscape in the middle of the night trying to find a paper bag hidden FBI-style in the shrubbery. OKAY?"

The attitude-frontin' security guard simply nodded her head with her jaw hanging open, and told me she'd seen my coworker behind the second palm tree near the handicapped parking spots. I mumbled a thank you, walked straight into the bushes, and located the bag. This ALL could have been avoided if I'd simply asked someone to drive me to the damn airport.

I have a problem asking for help.

This is probably one of the most crippling and detrimental flaws of my personality. I won't try to disassemble my conscience on this one because I'm definitely not gifted in the realm of psychology, but suffice it to say that I have never been even slightly comfortable with accepting favors. The song "Find Out Who Yours Friends Are" by Tracy Lawrence is my idea of what I would LIKE to feel some day, but right now I literally feel terror and anxiety rising when I try to ask for help from anyone outside my family.

"You find out who your friends are
Somebody's gonna drop everything
Run out and crank up their car
Hit the gas, get there fast
Never stop to think 'what's in it for me?' or 'it's way too far'
They just show on up with their big old heart
You find out who your friends are"

Brian has tried to gently coach me through the process of healing whatever wound has caused me to be so reluctant. My sister Janina offered to pick me up first, but I assured her that my car was near the airport until I realized RIGHT before stepping on the plane: oh shit, I don't have my car keys. I made a major step later on in the evening when I called the completely kind Shannon (a fellow Coast Guard girlfriend) to ask if I could pay her to drive me home to Concord since she lives near the Oakland airport. She was more than willing and supportive, turning down my money and warmly saying that I could just buy her a drink during our next outing. As soon as I hung up the phone I first felt a sense of relief, then an inward cringe at the thought of making her pick me up in the dead of night to drive 27 miles east and then back again.

So this is both my admission and my attempt to get better: I need help. I need people to be here for me because I just lost 3 members of my household and I feel like I'm completely alone in this little house. I need whatever you're willing to offer: a girl's night out or a promise to drive me to the airport or a hug and some coffee. I need movie nights with popcorn, and I need to be called on a week day "just because," and I need someone to go shopping with. I need friends to sit and do nothing with, to lay out at the lake with, to be young and carefree and reckless.

Brian thought we'd find these potential and rhetorical friends through some common interest, like church or our coworkers or even the pet owners we meet at the dog park every day. Not so. We have no friends in Concord despite having lived here for a year, so every tiny emergency while Brian is gone feels a little more scary because I don't have anyone to call for help. My hometown may be 20 miles away, but it almost feels like one hundred because of the "burden" I feel I'm putting on friends by asking them to visit. It is discouraging that I have not made any new friends in all this time, but I realize that my workplace isn't exactly full of people my age, nor is the community we live in.

In any case, I don't feel any more comfortable for having written this, but I do feel as if I've made a step in the right direction.