Хватит ныть. Начни просить

But I also explored other enlightening forms of employment in my early twenties: I was an ice cream and coffee barista working for $ 9.50 an hour (plus tips); an unlicensed massage therapist working out of my college dorm room (no happy endings, $ 35 per hour); a naming and branding consultant for dot-com companies ($ 2,000 per list of domain-cleared names); a playwright and director (usually unpaid: in fact, I usually lost my own money, buying props); a waitress in a German beer garden (about 75 deutsche marks a night, with tips); a vendor of clothes recycled from thrift shops and resold to my college campus center (I could make $ 50 a day); an assistant in a picture-framing shop ($ 14 per hour); an actress in experimental films (paid in joy, wine, and pizza); a nude drawing/ painting model for art schools ($ 12 to $ 18 per hour); an organizer and hostess of donation-only underground salons (paid enough money to cover the liquor and event space); a clothes-check girl for illegal sex-fetish loft parties ($ 100 per party), and, through that job, a sewing assistant for a bespoke leather-handcuff manufacturer ($ 20 per hour); a stripper (about $ 50 per hour, but it really depended on the night); and— briefly— a dominatrix ($ 350 per hour— but there were, obviously, very necessary clothing and accessory expenses).

It was about the value coming from the taker of the flower, the hearer of the song, the heart of the beholder. Being painted white and standing on a box, the crowdsurfing, the Kickstarter, ringing a stranger's doorbell in the middle of the night; I no longer see these things as risk. I see them as acts of trust.

I think the real risk is the choice to disconnect. To be afraid of one another.

We make countless choices every day whether to ask or to turn away from one another. Wondering whether it's too much to ask the neighbor to feed the cat. The decision to turn away from a partner, to turn off the light instead of asking what's wrong.

Asking for help requires authenticity, and vulnerability.