“We don’t build trust by offering help. We build trust by asking for it.” ~Simon Sinek
I have always been the strong sister, partner, and friend.
I didn’t make a conscious decision one day to be the strong one and stuck to it. It became who it was from a very young age, being the firstborn daughter. I was used to carrying a larger load than my siblings. Being the strong and responsible one was rewarded by my parents, and it’s what kept people close.
I am the friend you call when you can’t think straight. I am the friend who celebrates your wins. The therapy friend. The inspiration friend. The one who will sit with you for six hours, pour everything she has into that conversation, and then go home and need three days of silence to fill herself back up. And then I’ll send you a text to check in. Because that’s what I do.
I’ve never sat and thought about whether I am a good friend or what it is I want out of my friendships.
The Question Nobody Was Asking…
Simon Sinek has an exercise he calls the Friends Exercise. He suggests calling your closest friends and asking them one simple question: Why are you my friend?
Simon says the first answers you’ll get may be surface things like you’re loyal, fun, and a good listener. But you’re looking for answers with more depth. What you’re really listening for, Sinek explains, is what comes after, when your friend stops describing you and starts describing how they feel when they’re around you. That shift is where your real impact lives.
So I called. I texted. All four of my closest friends.
Here is what came back: great friend, always ready to listen, heart of gold, someone to bounce ideas off of, understanding, fun, spunky, authentic, inspiring, motivating. I love the positive things my friends mentioned. I had a sense of pride hearing it.
And then, almost immediately, I felt something else.
Why aren’t any of my friendships emotional?
I started to reflect on how vulnerable I am with my close friends. Do I feel comfortable asking for help? How vulnerable could my friends be with me? Do they feel comfortable asking me for help? The feedback from my friends was beautiful, but I wondered what else they thought about me. So I reflected on the question of how my friends showed up for me as well.
That was information I wasn’t ready for.
The Pattern Hiding Behind the Strength
Here’s what I know about myself now that I didn’t have words for then.
Outside of anger and frustration, I don’t bring my emotions into my friendships. Not really. When something hard comes up, we smooth it over fast. We tap straight into problem-solving mode. We say it’s going to be alright before the other person has even finished their sentence.
My friendships looked a lot like my romantic relationships had. We were all, in our own ways, emotionally unavailable. Or at least I was. And I had built a circle that matched that frequency without realizing it.
After reading a book on friendship recently, I realized I was delaying platonic intimacy rather than building it. I was the person who always shows up, always has the answer, always holds the space, but I wasn’t creating closeness. I created a role. And a role is not the same thing as a relationship.
My friendships started to orbit around who I am and what I provide. I wasn’t vulnerable, showing the frustrated, angry, or sad side to some of my friends, even though we have years of friendship under our belts. I was consistently showing up and performing a role. That distinction landed in me slowly, then all at once.
Where It Actually Came From
I was the girl who didn’t have friends growing up. Not in the way other girls seemed to. Not the sleepovers, trips to the mall, and the person who was always someone’s person. I spent a lot of time alone during my youth. So I learned early to be self-sufficient about connection. To not need too much. To be valuable enough to keep around without requiring maintenance.
This is why I believe emotional bonding never came naturally to me. It felt foreign. Like a language I understood intellectually but had never actually spoken out loud.
By the time I was an adult, I had become someone people leaned on. Someone who gave freely and received carefully. And I told myself that was just who I was, that not everyone needs to be emotionally open to have good friendships.
I also made a conscious choice, somewhere in there, that I didn’t want a solo best friend. One person who was my everything felt like too much weight in both directions. I didn’t want to carry it. I didn’t want someone carrying it for me.
What I didn’t see was how that decision was quietly shaping everything else. The help I never asked for. The vulnerability I kept just out of reach. The version of me that only arrived once I’d cleaned myself up a little.
What the Audit Revealed
As I thought about what actually creates closeness in friendship, three things stood out to me: support, symmetry, and trust. Support is being there for each other when life gets messy. Symmetry is the sense that the relationship flows both ways—not just one person giving and the other receiving. And trust is the quiet understanding that some conversations live safely between you.
I had the support piece. I had the secrecy piece. Symmetry was the one I’d been quietly avoiding. Because real symmetry means you also need things. You have to let yourself be the one who calls at 2 a.m. instead of only being the one who answers. You have to bring your actual, unpolished life into the friendship—not just the version of you that already has it figured out.
Two of my closest friends are local. Two live further away. Across all four, the feedback was the same: I am inspiring. I am motivating. I am safe to come to.
What wasn’t in any of that? A single moment where I showed up needing something.
That was data, too.
The Thing About Asking
Simon Sinek said something that stopped me cold.
“We don’t build trust by offering help. We build trust by asking for it.”
I had it completely backward. I thought that being the strong friend—the one who never needed anything—was what made me trustworthy. What made me worth keeping? What made the friendship real?
But what Sinek is pointing 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-directional without meaning to. And one-directional relationships, no matter how loving, eventually create distance.
Asking for help is not a weakness. It is not a burden. It is, in fact, one of the most intimate things you can offer someone—the trust that they can hold you too.
What Changed for Me
I started small.
Instead of “How are you?” I started asking my friends, “How are you feeling emotionally?” Specific, intentional, a little clunky at first. Our friendships had always lived on the bright side of things. Naming the emotional layer out loud felt strange for all of us.
But I kept doing it. And I started letting myself say when things weren’t good for me. When I felt low. When I was struggling. Not as performance, not as an overshare—but as an act of leading by example. The more vulnerable I was willing to be, the safer it became for them to be vulnerable too.
It worked. Slowly, in the small ways that real things shift.
My friend of over twenty years told me recently, quietly, in the middle of an ordinary conversation, that I am too hard on myself. I acknowledged it. I said I needed to show myself more grace.
It was a short moment. It wasn’t dramatic. But I sat with it for days.
Because it meant she was paying attention. It meant she was finally saying the thing instead of smoothing it over. It meant we were, after all this time, finally choosing each other instead of the easier, smoother version of the friendship.
Now It’s Your Turn…
If you are the strong friend, the therapy friend, the one everyone leans on, this is for you.
Try the Simon Sinek exercise. Call the people who matter most and ask them why they’re your friend. Then sit with what the feedback tells you—and what it doesn’t.
Notice whether your strength has quietly become a wall. Notice whether the people around you know the parts of you that are still being put together. Notice whether you’ve ever let someone carry something for you.
Asking for help is not the end of being strong. It might actually be where your strength finally gets to rest.
And the friendships that can hold that? Those are the ones worth building.
About Siedah Johnson
Siedah Johnson is a writer and the author of I Am Love: Learn to Love Yourself and Tap Into Your Power. Through her publication, The Author’s Alchemy, she writes about self-love, healing generational patterns, and the relationships we build with ourselves and others.
