Women, in general, are very good at being there for other people.
We show up. We listen. We remember the details (or at least we did pre-menopause) —And we give generously, sometimes to a fault.
But ask us what we need? Suddenly we’re very busy avoiding eye contact and staring out into the void.
So when I got to the very last page of Annabel Monaghan's newest novel (not a spoiler, I promise), Dolly All the Time, and read these words, I had to set the book down for a minute – I mean I was at the end of the book, but I set down to think too:
“That it’s worth moving through the chest-pinching vulnerability of asking for help. That it’s an act of generosity to share something as precious as your life with someone.”
An act of generosity.
We often think about sharing as giving something away. Sometimes we even think about it as connection, or intimacy, or a form of trust. But generosity? That framing made me stop and think.
Because here's the thing about generosity: it implies you have something worth giving.
Much as I hate to admit it, most of us were quietly (persistently) taught the opposite.
Not in a dramatic way. Nobody sat us down and said, "Your inner life is not that interesting" or "Don't make your needs someone else's problem." It was subtler than that. It was the message we absorbed from watching the women around us make themselves smaller to take up less space. It was learning that "I'm fine" was the socially acceptable answer. It was decades of being capable and competent and handling it — and somewhere along the way, confusing “handling it” with “not needing anything.”
We became experts at saying things like: "Oh, you don't have to do that" or "I've got it" or "Don't worry about me."
And we genuinely believed we were being considerate. Thoughtful. Low-maintenance. (Who else really hates the label, “high-maintenance”?)
But I wonder now if what we were actually doing was deciding that we weren't worth the trouble.
Sharing your life with someone — really sharing it, the messy and uncertain parts, the wants and the fears, not just the edited highlight reel — requires a belief that doesn't come naturally to a lot of us.
It requires believing that your life is interesting enough to offer.
That your experiences have value to someone else. That letting another person in — to your struggles, your hopes, your half-formed ideas and 2 a.m. anxieties (or 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. or all three) — is not burdening them. It's giving them something. It's saying: I trust you with what is most real about me.
That's an act of generosity because it takes courage to give something precious. And your life — your actual, specific, complicated, wonder-filled life — is precious. It just might take a while to believe that.
Dolly also mentions the "chest-pinching vulnerability" of asking for help, and I don't want to skip past that, because I think that's where a lot of us get stuck.
We know intellectually that sharing ourselves is good and connection is important and blah blah blah. We've read the books. We've nodded along to the podcast episodes. But in the actual moment — the moment when we could say "I'm struggling" or "I need you" or even just "I don't want to figure this out alone" — something seizes up.
It feels too big. Too much. Too risky.
We worry that people will think we’re too much.
I believe that chest-pinching feeling is less about the other person and more about us. It's the feeling of believing, finally, that we have something worth sharing — and being terrified that we're wrong.
But that terror? That's the proof that you're offering something real. If it didn't matter to you, it wouldn't feel vulnerable. The chest-pinching is the evidence of value, not the absence of it.
Now, this doesn’t have to be about radical oversharing. You don't have to dump your entire interior world on someone over coffee.
It might be as small as honestly saying "I've been having a hard week" when someone asks how you are.
It might be letting a friend bring you dinner when you're sick instead of insisting you're fine.
It might be telling someone the thing you're excited about — the half-baked idea, the thing you're afraid to want — before you've figured out if it's "worth" mentioning.
What if we thought of each one of those moments is a small act of generosity? Because each one is you offering a piece of your actual life to another person and trusting them to receive it with grace.
And here's the quiet miracle of it: when you do it, something shifts. Not just in the relationship — in you. Every time you offer yourself and are received with care, you get a little more evidence that you are, in fact, worth receiving.
So, I’ll leave you with this:
Think about someone you love. Think about how much you want to know her — the real version, not the capable-and-handling-it version. Think about how it feels when she trusts you with something real.
Now imagine she's been holding back to protect you from the "burden" of her.
I’d wager you’d want to tell that her life is not a burden. It’s a gift. (and please let me have some of it)
She might need to hear that. And so might you.
