I'm Sorry For How I Refused Their Help

A couple gentlemen offered to help me carry heavy things last week, and I responded as if I thought they were saying I was weak.  They weren't saying that all--my strength was evident--they were simply being nice and wanting to use their cool carts they'd acquired for carrying heavy things.  Nothing wrong with that at all, and I could've so easily obliged. 

 They probably don't remember the passing moment, certainly not with any bad feelings.  But I consider it a sad moment I want to avoid repeating.

Here's why I care about nothings like this.  In fact, it's not the single nothing I care about, it's an accumulation of many nothings.  I believe our nothings add up to a huge influence in our culture.  Over time, to be sure, but strongly.  Like a glacier's movement.  Or like piling dust.

Dust.  Collects from seemingly nowhere.  As if our castaway shadows gradually accumulate, from Nothing into Something.  

Robert Fulghum wrote about dust in All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten (An obnoxious title for a good book).  Dust is "particles of wool, cotton, and paper, bug chunks , food, plants, tree leaves, ash, microscopic spores of fungi and single-celled animals, and a lot of unidentifiable odds and ends, mostly natural and organic.  But that's just the miscellaneous list.  The majority of Stuff comes from just two sources: people--exfoliated skin and hair; and meteorites--disintegrated as they hit the earth's atmosphere . . . So, in other words, what's behind my bed and bookcase and dresser are mostly me and stardust."

I believe each one of us influences culture like our dust that keeps accumulating in unreachable places.   Just as surely as we leave dust trails, we also leave a mark in culture in tiny, but very real, ways.

This is why I'm sorry for how I refused their help.   My actual words were, "No thanks... I'm good... I'm the emancipated woman, har har."  That was in fact a copout to save explaining that it was too much trouble to stop, and I was already almost to my destination, so why bother, but thanks anyway.  It would've been better to be honest, if I'm going to take my dust particles of influence seriously.  Sure, I'm very very grateful for my rights and freedoms.  Very much so.  But I'm also very very grateful for the fundamental differences between man and woman, in this case, physical strength.

The extreme "emancipated woman" doesn't need men.  Doesn't need their help, their strength, their brains, their ability to creatively solve problems, any of that.  And I've seen a scary cultural trend where men are responding like, "Okay, fine, if you want so badly to do it on your own, we're not going to stop you.  We never said it was FUN to take the brunt of things."  To respond to an offer of help, "No thanks, I'm emancipated," pretty much says, "how dare you notice that I am female?"

Well, I want guys to know they are needed, they are awesome, they are smart (I'm almost certain guys are quicker at picking up languages, and that's kind of annoying, but hey, whatever.); they are strong, they are valuable.  I want guys to know that when they do gentlemanly things, I'm grateful and I remember.

That's why I'm sorry I said what I said.  I don't want to help a cultural glacier go the wrong way.

side note...

Women want friendship with men--fair audience-- respect--recognition, appreciation, interaction.  I don't think I'm the only one who has tried to gain those by mimicking how men earn respect from each other.  And hey, there's nothing wrong with being a woman who is strong and independent.  It's just that asserting strength and independence in a context that conflicts with a guy's strength and independence probably isn't exactly going to impress him.