Maybe Dependence Isn't a Design Flaw

On illness, interdependence, and the strange shame of needing each other

“I can do it by myself!”

It’s one of the first declarations of independence most of us make. A four-year-old refuses help with her shoes and puts them on the wrong feet. She buttons her coat crooked. She pours the milk and misses the cup entirely. We smile, because we know what we’re watching: a person learning to take care of herself, which is exactly what we want. We cheer the first steps, the first day of school, the driver’s license, the first paycheck, the first apartment. Adulthood is narrated as a long, successful departure from dependence.

At some point, independence picks up a moral charge. Needing less starts to count as a virtue, and inconveniencing anyone starts to count as a failure. We praise the people who never ask for anything.

She’s so self-sufficient. He’s never any trouble.

The slogan of a four-year-old in backward shoes hardens into a philosophy of adulthood.

Then, life happens. A parent dies, a marriage ends, a baby arrives, you get sick, your car quits on the shoulder of the highway. One afternoon you’re sitting on the kitchen floor, crying over something that would’ve been manageable six months ago, and you realize you need help.

For me, chronic illness has made this hard to ignore. My husband, Scott, does quite a bit of the cooking and the laundry now, jobs that used to be mine, and he does them happily. When I need it, he helps me shower. Once he washed my hair. The entire process was a mess, but it helped me enormously.

Even when the help is freely given, receiving it can feel strangely uncomfortable. Believing it’s freely given is its own chore; gratitude shows up, and guilt rides along.

I should be able to do this. I don’t want to be a burden. I’ll make it up to you.

Somewhere in my head, a tab opens. Two dinners, three loads of laundry, one hair wash. Running total. Listen closely and you can hear the assumption underneath: need is a debt.

We have a word for what humans are: interdependent. It admits that none of us exists alone, that we give and receive. But, I wonder if we reach for it too quickly, because plain dependence makes us squirm. Interdependence sounds like a balanced scale. I carry you, you carry me. You make dinner tonight, I make it tomorrow. The scales wobble and eventually settle. This describes a lot of marriages and friendships.

Except sometimes they don’t settle. Sometimes one person needs more. Sometimes the imbalance lasts a day or a decade, or never resolves. Someone drives you, feeds you, fills out the form, remembers what the doctor said, makes the phone call, sits beside the bed. We’re remarkably good at treating this kind of help as an aberration, though it’s part of the basic design of being human.

Even people who never need a driver or a caregiver lean on others all day. Someone maintains the road you drive on. Someone made the medication in your cabinet and the phone in your hand. Someone grew your dinner and you’ve never met her. We call ourselves independent when, in reality, our dependencies have grown invisible.

We hide them for a reason. Needing someone hands them the chance to fail you, and most of us have kept the receipts. A parent who didn’t show up at school pickup. A best friend who found a new crowd in junior high. We’re a tribal species, wired to want a place in the group and to dread being cast out of it, so rejection registers as danger. We learn to need less, and everyone calls that growing up.

Something eventually breaks the habit. For some of us, it’s the kitchen floor, the afternoon nothing holds together, and there’s no managing alone any more. Still, most of us never “hit the floor”. The smaller version is enough: a ride to the doctor when we can’t drive ourselves, a phone call we can’t make because the emotional weight is too much to bear. Each one asks us to risk being failed again, and each time someone shows up, the receipts lose a little of their value. Those small, awkward moments turn an acquaintance into a friend. Over years they accumulate into a community, the kind where someone remembers your name and notices when you stop showing up. People in that kind of community help because someone needs help. Nobody is waiting to be paid back.

Scott and I talk about this a lot. Independence, taken far enough, looks like isolation, and human beings were never meant to live in solitude. Infants who are fed but rarely held can stop thriving. Adults run a slower version of the same experiment, and loneliness now shows up in the current research on illness and early death. We start in dependence, spend decades chasing independence, praise ourselves for reaching interdependence, and pretend we’ve outgrown our need for help that won’t ever be paid back.

I’m beginning to think the hard part is receiving help without keeping score or promising to be useful enough to justify the gift of another’s help. Each time I decline help, I also decline the person offering it. A community forms out of people who let each other in on the mess. It also spreads the weight. Between two people, the scales may never balance. Across twenty, they often do, because the giving comes from many hands and the receiving goes to many people.

Dependence is the design, and the wanting is innate: we come into the world wanting, needing, to be held, and, most of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, never stop pursuing this desire. Community is where that wanting gets answered. The design flaw is a culture that taught us to mistake needing no one for being fully human. We will need each other, unevenly and inconveniently, sometimes for much longer than feels fair.

The sentence I’m learning is two words long: Help me. It sounds like a confession and works as an invitation. Whoever hears it, a friend or a stranger, gets to do what people have always done for each other.

Scott washed my hair because I couldn’t do it by myself. That was the whole reason, and it was enough. The mess belonged to both of us. When I total up what I owe him, I’m counting the wrong thing. He was handing me a place in his life, the one where he gets to take care of someone he loves, and accepting it takes me sitting still while the water runs.

People help each other. It’s what we do. I spent years trying to earn a place in that, and then I noticed I was already in it.

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Beth Keller Kirycki is a researcher, writer, and information architect. Plain Sight is about noticing—and naming—what’s already there.