Some years ago, my husband and I visited old friends who were preparing to move house. When we were leaving, we told them to let us know if they needed any help. A few weeks later, we were surprised when they called us and asked if we could help on the day of the move. We didn’t mind, but just had not expected our vague offer of help to be taken up. “Shout if you need anything,” is just something you say, isn’t it?

A few years later, in 2016, I went from being a pregnant mother of a toddler to a cancer patient overnight. I did things that seem, looking back, unthinkable, such as undergoing surgery while pregnant and starting chemotherapy when my daughter was one week old and still in intensive care in a hospital 60 miles from home. My husband, son and I had moved from London to Leicestershire a few months before, and we didn’t know many people in our new village. Friends from afar, all with young families of their own, sent flowers, chocolates and books, all of which helped. But what we lacked was on-the-ground support.

Perhaps oddly, it wasn’t surgery or chemo that broke me in the end. It was about 18 months later, when my husband was in hospital because of his Crohn’s disease. I was looking after our two young children on my own, and my daughter fell down the stairs from top to bottom. She was unharmed, but I started crying and couldn’t stop. It became clear to me, in that moment, that I needed help.

Why is asking for help so hard? Are we afraid of showing weakness, preferring to keep up our social media image of picture-perfect lives? Or is it that we don’t feel we deserve it, that everyone else is busy and overwhelmed too, and why should they put all of that to one side to give us a hand? The way we live now, so many of us settled far from our extended family, with both parents working as we try to juggle an array of childcare, hoping against hope that our children don’t get ill on the day of our big deadline/meeting/presentation, leaves so much space for help. And yet we chat at the school gate or nursery pickup, never asking for or offering it.

I had been documenting my breast cancer experience in a blog and had built up a following of local friends and associates. So on the day of my daughter’s fall, I wrote a post asking for help. The responses flooded in immediately. People want to help, I realised. They’re just not always sure how, or what to offer. If you reach out, they reach back.

Within a couple of days, I had a new WhatsApp group with about 20 people to call on in tough times. And that I did. Once, when I was stuck at a hospital and thought I might need someone to pick up my daughter from nursery. Another time just to ask advice about a minor injury. Or when I needed a lift to an appointment. It is usually enough to know it is there, quite honestly.

Two months ago, I had my biggest operation yet: breast reconstruction using tissue from my tummy. I was under anaesthetic for 11 hours and told to expect to be out of action for up to 12 weeks. A little more practised now, I asked my network for help. They came forward offering playdates, pickups and meals. One friend who doesn’t have children said she didn’t feel able to offer childcare but really wanted to cook us some meals. I thanked her, thinking she might drop round a cottage pie at some point. But when I didn’t organise anything, she pressed me on it. For the first six weeks post-surgery, a home-cooked meal was delivered almost every night, and it meant that my husband, who was trying to manage work and the kids, had one less thing to think about.

I still don’t find it easy to say I am struggling. But I am now an advocate for getting over yourself and asking for help. We live busy, difficult, complicated lives. I have friends who work late into the night because that’s the only way to make it all fit. I have friends who are single parents, with all the weight of that responsibility resting solely with them. I have friends who coparent after a split, who manage their own hurt and anger to do what is best for the children. None of it is easy.

Now I look for ways to help others. I know the difficulty of asking, so I try to see that need and offer, when I can. I hope that one of the things cancer has given me is the ability to be a better friend. Because, trite as it sounds, sometimes a tiny bit of help really does go a long way. And sometimes we are bending over backwards to make something work when a friend could have stepped in and lightened the load without it really having much impact on their own day. I urge you to try it for someone. Do it today.

• I Wanted You to Know by Laura Pearson is published by Agora Books (RRP £9.99). Buy a copy for £8.39 from guardianbookshop.com