“We don’t build trust by offering help. We build trust by asking for it.” ~ Simon Sinek
I have always been a strong sister, partner and friend.
I didn’t make a conscious decision to get stronger one day and stick to it. It turned out that it was from a very young age, being the first-born daughter. I was used to carrying a bigger load than my siblings. My parents were rewarded for being strong and responsible, and that’s what keeps people close.
I’m the friend you call when you can’t think straight. I am the friend who celebrates your victory. Therapy buddy. A friend of inspiration. Someone who sits with you for six hours, pours everything into that conversation, and then goes home and needs three days of silence to recover. And then I’ll send you a text to check in. Because that’s what I do.
I never sat down and thought about whether I was a good friend or what I wanted from my friendships.
The question no one asked…
Simon Sinek has an exercise he calls exercise friends. He suggests calling your closest friends and asking them a simple question: why are you my friend
Simon says the first answers you get may be superficial things like you’re loyal, funny and a good listener. But you are looking for answers in more depth. What you’re actually hearing, Sinek explains, is when your friend stops describing you and starts describing how they feeling When they are around you. That transition is where your true influence lives.
So I called. I texted. My four closest friends.
Here’s what it comes back to: great friend, always ready to listen, heart of gold, someone to bounce ideas off of, understanding, funny, spunky, authentic, inspirational, inspiring. I love the positive things my friends mention. I felt proud after hearing that.
And then, almost immediately, I felt something else.
Why are none of my friendships passionate?
I began to reflect on how vulnerable I was with my closest friends. Do I feel comfortable asking for help? How vulnerable can my friends be with me? Do they feel comfortable asking me for help? The response from my friends was nice, but I wondered what else they thought about me. So I reflected on the question of how my friends look out for me.
Information I wasn’t prepared for.
Behind the power lies the pattern
What I know about myself now is that I had no words then.
Outside of anger and frustration, I don’t bring my emotions into my friendships. not really When something difficult comes up, we smooth it out quickly. We tap directly into the troubleshooting mode. we say It’s going to be okay Before the other person has even finished their sentence.
My friendships looked a lot like my romantic relationships. We were all, in our own ways, emotionally unavailable. Or at least I was. And I created a circle that matched that frequency without realizing it.
After recently reading a book on friendship, I realized that I was delaying platonic intimacy instead of creating it. I was the person who always showed up, always had the answer, always held space, but I didn’t create intimacy. I have created an introduction. And a role is not the same thing as a relationship.
My friendships began to revolve around who I was and what I had to offer. I wasn’t weak, showing the depressed, angry or sad side of some of my friends, even though we had years of friendship under our belts. I was consistently showing up and playing a role. That difference dawned on me slowly, then all at once.
Where did it actually come from?
I was the girl who didn’t have friends growing up. Not the way other girls look. Not sleepovers, trips to the mall, and that person who was always someone’s person. I spent a lot of time alone in my youth. So I learned early to be self-sufficient about connections. So that not too much is needed. Must be valuable enough to keep around without requiring maintenance.
This is why I believe emotional bonding didn’t come naturally to me. It felt foreign. Like a language I understand intellectually but have never actually spoken out loud.
When I was an adult, I became someone people leaned on. Someone who gave freely and received with care. And I told myself that I was, not everyone needs to be emotionally open to have a good friendship.
I also made a conscious choice, somewhere along the line, that I didn’t want a single best friend. A man who was my everything felt like too much weight on both sides. I didn’t want to carry it. I didn’t want anyone to carry it for me.
What I didn’t see was how that decision was quietly shaping everything else. The help I never asked for. Weakness I put out of reach. My version of that came only once I wanted to clean myself up a bit.
What the audit revealed
When I thought about what really creates intimacy in a friendship, three things stood out to me: support, symmetry, and trust. There is support for each other when life gets messy. Symmetry is the sense that the relationship flows both ways—only one person gives and the other does not receive. And faith is the calm understanding that some conversation resides safely within you.
I had the support piece. I had pieces of privacy. Symmetry was something I quietly avoided. Because real symmetry means you need things too. You have to allow yourself to be the person who calls at 2 a.m. instead of just answering. You have to bring your real, unadulterated life into the friendship—not just the version of you that has already found it.
My two closest friends are local. Two live further apart. Across all four, the response was the same: I’m inspirational. I’m motivated. I am safe to come.
What wasn’t any of that? A single moment where I showed some need.
It was also data.
The thing about asking
Simon Sinek said something that gave me chills.
“We don’t build trust by offering help. We build trust by asking for it.”
I had it completely backwards. I thought that being a steadfast friend—one who never needed anything—was what made me trustworthy. What makes me worth keeping? Is friendship real?
But what Sinek is hinting at is something deeper. When you never ask for help, you deny the people who love you the honor of showing up for you. You make the relationship one-sided with no meaning. And a one-way relationship, no matter how loving, eventually creates distance.
Asking for help is not weakness. It is not a burden. In fact, it’s one of the most intimate things you can offer someone – the faith that they can hold you too.
What a change for me
I started small.
instead of “How are you?” I started asking my friends, “How are you feeling??” specific, deliberate, a little clunky at first. Our friendship always lived on the bright side of things. Naming the emotional layer out loud felt strange to all of us.
But I kept doing it. And I started telling myself when things weren’t going well for me. When I felt low. When I was struggling. Not as a performance, not as an overshare – but as an act of leading by example. The more I was willing to be vulnerable, the safer it became for them to be vulnerable as well.
It worked. Little by little, real things shift.
A friend of mine of over twenty years recently, in the middle of a casual conversation, calmly told me that I was too hard on myself. I admit it. I told myself I needed to show myself more mercy.
It was a short moment. It was not dramatic. But I sat on it for a few days.
Because it meant he was paying attention. It means that he ends up saying the thing instead of smoothing it over. It means we’re finally choosing each other, after so long, over the easy, smooth version of friendship.
Now it’s your turn…
If you’re the staunch friend, the therapy friend, that everyone leans on, this is for you.
Try the Simon Sinek exercise. Call the people who matter most and ask them why they are your friends. Then sit with what the feedback tells you—and what it doesn’t.
Notice if your energy is quietly walled off. Notice if the people around you know the parts of you that are still being put together. Notice if you ever let someone carry something for you.
Asking for help is never ending. This may actually be where your energy finally rests.
And that friendship can hold? Those are worth the building.
about Sidah Johnson
Sydah Johnson is a writer and author I Am Love: Learn to Love Yourself and Tap into Your Power. Through his publication, Author’s AlchemyShe writes about self-love, healing generational patterns, and the relationships we create with ourselves and others.
