it’s always okay to ask for help.

A worry kept internal has no fixed size. It expands to fill whatever time it is given, and it is given all the hours between two and five in the morning.

Said out loud to another person, it has to become sentences, and sentences have limits. You hear yourself reach the end of it and notice, sometimes with something close to embarrassment, that the end came sooner than expected.

That shrinkage is not the other person fixing anything. It is what happens to a shapeless thing when it is made to take a shape.

The asking is the mechanism. The help is the bonus.