Sat, 1 Mar 2025
I have a tattoo on my left wrist. It's not a complicated tattoo. It's a nondescript combination of three simple words in the handwriting of someone I'll never know, someone who would probably be perplexed to learn that a stranger committed their penmanship to his body with indelible ink. Nevertheless, their sardonic declaration is a part of me now:
HELP ISN’T COMING
It’s August 2018. I’m participating in my first fifty-mile event. Mile forty-three is upon me. I’m approaching the final aid station before the finish. Memory of the mileage behind me blurs with awareness of the mileage ahead of me. I’m feeling rough, uncertain whether I’m up to the challenge.
I’m hiking up a forest service road that currently doubles as the approach into this last aid station. Just before the top of this little climb I see the above message written in large capital lettering on some warped orange poster board affixed to the ground with a wooden stake. I snap a photo, amused. The sign serves as something of a Rorschach. Depending on the reader, it might be a mere statement of fact, or it could be a warning, a threat.
For me, it’s a reminder. It may as well say, “No one can finish this race for you. If you are to finish, you will have to do it yourself.”
I leave the aid station after feeble attempts at refueling. Fewer than five miles pass. I’m vomiting on the side of the trail, surrendering what few calories I managed to muscle down just a few miles prior. The lord giveth, and the lord taketh away. With nothing left to cough up, I’m dry heaving now, retching in vain and in agony. In that moment, I understand the truth: help isn’t coming.
As my stomach finally grants me clemency, I return to my feet and resume probationary progress. I’m incapable of taking more than ten or fifteen paces at a time. I repeatedly fall to my knees, struggling for breath; there isn’t enough oxygen in the world, or if there is, my lungs may have simply turned to gills. I recognized once again a simple reality: help isn’t coming.
An older participant catches up with me. He’s in his sixties or seventies and clearly a seasoned veteran of the sport. Compared with me, he’s sprinting. He sees me struggling, but he doesn’t stop, hesitate, or slow down as he passes me.
“Been there, bud,” he says, unflinchingly putting one trekking pole in front of the other as he shuffles on by. “You’ve got it.” And then he leaves me in the dust.
Every step I take during those final seven miles is a new lesson in suffering. As I draw ever nearer the finish line, though, my spirits lift. It’s almost over. But for any of this to end, I must keep moving. No one is going to move for me. Help isn’t coming.
I’m inching toward the final approach, following the course markings, turning into an urban park serving as the race’s ultimate terminus. I can hear the celebratory noise emanating from spectators at the finish. Tears fill my eyes. A few more steps. I’m taking one more turn. There it is. Like a homesick sailor finally calling out, “Land ho!” my eyes mark the immanent fruits of my labor. The finish line is in sight!
As I cross, the tears fall freely, a lacrimal mixture of pain, relief, and pride. No one came to save me. I finished anyway.
---
Later on, I used the image of the sign at mile forty-three as the lock screen on my phone. Every time I picked my phone up, I was reminded that help isn’t coming.
For me, the message was empowering, even inspiring. When others saw my lock screen, though, their reactions often projected negativity into the message. It was a fascinating contrast. Personally, I didn’t ascribe any value to the words, either positively or negatively. For me, “help isn’t coming” just serves the neutral purpose of reminding me that no saviors are on the way, no deus ex machina is forthcoming, no silver bullets or quick fixes exist, neither will there be any worthwhile one-weird-tricks, no hacks or shortcuts or simplistic solutions to complex issues.
If there is to be any amelioration to my present circumstances or suffering, it will necessarily begin with me.
But I noticed that when others saw the message, they read it differently. When others saw “help isn’t coming,” they seemed, instead, to read, “help isn’t available,” or even, “there is no hope.”
This baffled me. I found it utterly perplexing how we could see the same words and one of us could interpret them as “keep going!” while the other interpreted them as “give up!”
The phrase has carried me through mountains of mental health challenges, ranging from depression and anxiety to complex trauma and suicidality. When I’m in the pit of despair, I’ll remind myself that help isn’t coming; no one else is going to do the work for me. If things are to improve, I must be the agent of change. Far from being an excuse to stop trying, it’s an admonishment directed toward the temptation of premature surrender.
“Been there, bud” it says. “You’ve got it.”
---
In our current sociopolitical climate, far too many of us are looking for a savior. Whether on the left or the right, we seem to be looking for an individual who will come in and fix things. On the right, they’ve found their wannabe strongman champion; he’s currently stripping our government and selling it for parts.
On the left, we somehow continuously fall into this trap of pursuing top down solutions to our myriad social ills. At least in my lifetime, progressive leaning voters and parties have fixated on the federal level, usually at the expense of the local. And when we miraculously do find a champion of our own, purity tests and the slightest ideological misalignments torpedo any hope of building an effective coalition.
By contrast, the right has done the opposite. They’ve spent decades building a bottom up infrastructure, and now they’re dividing the spoils. They’ve electorally coopted a plurality of the states and strategically captured enough of the judiciary to insulate themselves from being directly beholden to the popularity (or unpopularity) of a given issue. They understood how the game could be played, and they played that game exceptionally well.
And now we’re seeing the mainstreaming of fascism, we’re watching our system of so-called checks and balances utterly fail us, and we’re realizing just how feckless and absentee Democratic Party leadership really is (looking at you, Mr. Hakeem “What leverage do we have” Jeffries). The whole spectacle is leaving so many of us reeling, desperate for a savior to swoop in and make everything okay again.
But here’s the thing:
HELP ISN’T COMING
Individuals cannot solve systemic issues. Only the collective can repair the collective. The search for individual solutions to social problems is how we ended up here in the first place. We should jettison the idea that someone is going to save us. It’s We the People and not Him the Hero for a reason; the idea that “I alone can fix it” is anathema to a functioning democratic society.
Perhaps we don’t all need to be tattooing our bodies with the words “help isn’t coming”, but we would do well to stop waiting for saviors. In fact, the very notion that salvation is even a worthwhile aspiration should be discarded. Help isn’t coming. Salvation isn’t coming. But community is ours for the building.
We don’t need saving. We need each other.