Well, hello there. My name is Morgan Harper-Nichols. I'm an artist and a writer, and this is a space where I share

words that I hope can make a little room for you to slow down and take a few deep breaths as you prepare for

whatever lies ahead. Thanks for being here today. And now on to today's episode. A few years ago, I was walking when someone asked me

for directions and I gave them directions only to end up sending them the wrong way. I was still

close enough to see that they were confused, but not close enough to help them because they were

able to figure out that I sent them the wrong way in a matter of seconds.

They didn't seem to upset, and it seemed to only be a temporary minor inconvenience for them,

but I dwelled on this for hours. I later on figure out why this bothered me so much.

The thing is, is I have a deep attachment to feeling useful. I like to be useful to other people.

It energizes me to know that I've helped someone along the way. But in that moment,

I proved to be completely useless to this person asking for directions and I felt terrible about it.

This experience taught me that it is okay to be honest about how I like to feel. Helping people can definitely be a selfless act,

but it can also be something that we just enjoy doing. But as one of my favorite authors,

Ann Lamott once said, help is the sunny side of control. The full context of this quote can be heard in her

TED Talk, which is called 12 truths I learned from life in writing, and I'll definitely put that

in the show notes. But what I believe these words can help us see is that sometimes we want to help

people, and we just don't get to, and that's okay. Sometimes we don't get to do something we enjoy,

something that makes us happy, and that's all right. And the reason why I think this is so

important is because when we're able to say, I just like helping people, I just like being

useful, or I just like to know that someone likes me

and I like that I was able to help them go in a particular direction. When we're able to be

honest with ourselves in that way, when we're not able to help, when it falls through, we can say, oh, okay, yeah, that was hard.

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