Ask for Help.

“Ask for help.”

It’s the battle cry of mental health professionals everywhere.
It’s what mothers say when they’re overwhelmed.
It’s what partners say when they’re exhausted from carrying everything alone.

Just ask for help.

But here’s the question no one really talks about:

Who?

Because asking for help requires one fundamental thing – you need to know what’s wrong. You need to know what you need help with.

And that’s where I’m stuck.

My problem isn’t pride. My ego isn’t that inflated. I don’t struggle to say, “I need help.”
I struggle because I don’t know what is wrong.

For the longest time, I’ve felt… stuck.
And no, I can’t elaborate more than that. I just feel stuck.

Tired.
Overwhelmed.
Restless in a way I can’t quite explain.

At some point I realised: this isn’t sustainable. I need to do something.

So I started with the basics.

Am I sleeping enough?
Am I eating properly?
Am I exercising?

Tick. Tick. Tick.

I was doing the “right” things. And yet the tiredness lingered. The kind of tired that whispers, This isn’t normal.

Naturally, the hypochondriac in me decided it had to be medical. Off to the lab I went, almost hopeful that something, anything, would show up. A hormone imbalance. A rare condition. Something dramatic enough to justify how I felt.

Short answer? Nothing.

No abnormalities.
No mysterious disease that’s about to win someone a Nobel Prize.
Just a clean bill of health.

So then what?

Why am I so tired?
Why am I so unmotivated?
Why do I feel like I’m wading through invisible mud?

That’s when the next theory crept in.

Maybe it’s my job.
Maybe I’m drained.
Maybe it’s time to move on.
Find something more challenging. Or less challenging. Or better paying. Or more flexible. Or abroad. Or completely different.

And suddenly I had a whole new set of questions – and absolutely no idea who holds the answers.

Enter the torturous feedback loop.

Step one: Ask ChatGPT what to do. Obviously.

It gives me a neat list of skills I already know I have because of my degree.
Great. Now what?

Straight to LinkedIn.
Scrolling through jobs.

What job am I even looking for?
Who do I ask about these jobs?
How do I know if any of them are “right”?

Next bright idea: a career counsellor.
They’ll tell me what I’m meant to be.

But which one?
And will they actually help?
Or will I just walk away with more personality assessments and more options?

Maybe I need to move abroad.
Maybe a new country will magically fix everything.

Back to ChatGPT.
“What work can I do abroad?”

Again, a list of possibilities. Each one leading to more questions.

And still not the real one.

Because underneath all of this job-searching and blood-testing and future-planning is a quieter question:

Who do I ask when I don’t know what’s wrong?

I am asking for help.
I am yelling for help.

But it feels like no one is answering – because I don’t even know who to direct the question to.

And maybe that’s the part we don’t talk about enough.

Sometimes the hardest place to be isn’t crisis. It isn’t rock bottom. It isn’t diagnosable or measurable.

It’s the in-between.

Functioning, but flat.
Healthy, but exhausted.
Grateful, but restless.

Knowing you want more – but having no idea what “more” is.

So if you’re stuck too, maybe this is your permission to admit it. Not in a dramatic way. Not in a catastrophic way.

Just in an honest way.

“I don’t know what’s wrong. But something isn’t right.”

And maybe, just maybe, the first step isn’t knowing who to ask.

Maybe it’s learning how to sit with the question long enough for it to become clearer.