Sometimes it’s difficult to remember that taking care of yourself is equally as important as taking care of others, if not more so. While you don’t actually have the ability to force someone into good habits and a healthy frame of mind, you do have the ability to lead yourself in that direction. It isn’t a matter of abandoning ship when someone you love starts to sink – it’s finding a way off the boat until you can find some kind of flotation device. Once you’re not halfway underwater yourself, you can find a way to shore and help them along with you. Your will alone is not going to keep them from sinking, no matter how long you tread. All you’re going to achieve is the weight of the both of you pulling you underwater, and then there are two drowned people instead of one. That’s never going to be the desired outcome. You don’t want either of you to sink, and if your goal in the beginning was to save, what was the point of the wasted effort?

It might sound harsh, but that’s only because we are told that to value ourselves and our own mental and physical health is in some way selfish or wrong. It isn’t. Before you help anyone else, you need to be in a place where helping is feasible. If you are the one trapped in the burning building, you don’t have the ability or the obligation to throw off the debris and save the burning children. Of course you want to save the children, and no one would argue that to do so would be a poor decision – but what good will it do to martyr yourself for a cause you can’t actually fight to the end for? If you can’t handle the weight of yourself, there’s no way you’re going to be able to carry another, especially not out of flames. To make the attempt is to say that you as a person are worth fundamentally less than whoever it is you’re running into those flames, burning yourself, to save.

And that’s never going to be true, no matter how much you may believe it.

But more often than not, it’s not an equal situation. What people don’t realize about jeopardizing their own health to benefit another’s is that, almost always, the other person isn’t putting in the same amount of effort. If you have the strength and the will, it’s absolutely fine to lend someone a shoulder to lean on through a difficult time, or even to support most of their weight. But if you’re dragging someone’s body up the mountain and falling backwards yourself, there’s a problem. In order for you to help someone, they have to want to be helped. They have to move their own feet to get forward, because chances are their weight is too heavy for you to keep lifting unassisted.

You aren’t anyone’s savior. You can be their friend, their mentor, and their guide. But it is never going to be your obligation to raise someone from ashes. That is something only they can achieve. Don’t carry someone burning and bruised and drowning through life when you know it’s going to end in you getting crushed yourself. Offer a hand. Ultimately, they have to be the one to pull themselves up with it.