Starting from the bottom
When I was 26 years old, I watched a young woman pick up a phone and in a few minutes solve a problem that had defeated and humiliated me for eight years.
In my country, you are required to have health insurance. Until the age of eighteen, you are included automatically in your parents' insurance, but after that you are supposed to make your own arrangements.
This I had utterly failed to do.
When I was about to turn eighteen, my father gave me a terrifying speech about how I should arrange my own health insurance, because if I didn't, I would inevitably break a leg, the hospital bills would be ruinous, and if I wasn't insured then this cost would somehow be borne by him.
Even at the time, with my limited understanding, I realised the anxiety was pouring off him. With hindsight, I realise that he was showing his own insecurities about money. Somehow in his mind I had been given the power to cause massive trouble, and the thought of it triggered his profound unease. In his mind, the idea of me uninsuredly crossing the road on my upcoming birthday and immediately being hit by a car was a near certainty. It was just how he expected life to treat him.
The problem he ignored, or felt unable to openly address, was of course that I was not eighteen years old and had no practical or social skills whatever, because I had never been taught any. Even now, some three decades later, I am not particularly keen on picking up a telephone to call an institution. As an awkward, depressed teenager it was a complete impossibility. Not only did I not have a clue of how to go about it, I had no idea how to ask for help, or even that doing so was an option.
Children are quick learners. They understand exactly what they can and cannot say based on how you react, and they will not make the same mistake twice.
I had grown up with a long laundry list of taboo subjects and forbidden questions. Why are we different from other families? Why do my parents act like they hate each other, but stay married and get angry if you hint at any problems? Why do I always feel bad? Why am I not like the other kids at school?
Why is everything wrong ?
That last one of course was the biggest one of all. Under no circumstances were we to acknowledge that anything was wrong at all, because any such inquiry might ultimately lead to the acknowledgment that my parents' lives weren't going the way they had hoped, and that they had failed to do anything about it, and now they had ended up in a terrible marriage with these useless children.
And so I found myself in an impossible situation. I was severely depressed but I could not even go to a doctor because I had no insurance, and I did not have the social skills to do anything about it, and I could not ask anyone for advice because that would mean having to admit to someone that I fucked up, which I had been taught from birth was the one thing you can never ever do.
It took eight long years before I finally decided that this was no way to live. I dragged myself to some kind of institute -- what exactly it was and how I found it I couldn't tell you -- and believe you me, that was the highest barrier I ever had to climb over. It was a genuine out of body experience, seeing myself walk through the door and calmly talk to the receptionist. Every other difficulty in my life, and there have been many, has been nothing compared to it.
I only managed to do it because I had to admit that nothing could be possibly worse than going on as I was.
Once inside, I explained the situation to a sympathetic young lady, and I watched as she quickly and matter-of-factly picked up a phone, called an insurance company, and solved my impossible problem with a short conversation.
The whole thing could not have taken more than five minutes. I doubt she even remembered the whole thing an hour later, but she saved my life that day.