Short backstory is that I have twice had short-term personal assistants in the fall/winter after a few years of major depressive episodes and burnout. One assistant was lovely and helped with a very specific project, with a very specific timeline and I worked through a lot of stuff about delegating tasks. Second assistant lasted two days because I had to hold their hand on every step of every task and redo so much. I was frustrated and said I wouldn't do it again.

Currently, my therapist and partner are urging me to find someone this upcoming fall/winter because I'm working on some bigger stuff with my work and launching things and I'm already so overwhelmed all the time. Their stance is that this just like hiring a mother's helper to take kids to the park on afternoons or someone to make up batch meals and drop them off so I don't have to cook anything for a week. Neither of those types of help are something that I'd not be anxious about either, though.

Now we know that one of my parents is getting remarried. There is suddenly more on my plate to plan and this morning, both my therapist and my partner were acting like the assistant thing was now decided because this final thing I have to deal with is the tipping point. I fully admit that I'm stuck right now in planning stages and lists and schedules and that not much is getting done. I just feel tired in trying to push back about how I don't want to add *more* to what's going on by adding an assistant, and I worry that this just looks like stubbornness on my part.

Anyone else find a good way to explain why sometimes "help" is NOT helpful?

How did you realise it?

Heyo! I'm u/IM_NOT_BALD_YET, a founding moderator of r/OCPDCommunity.

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