I hope this doesn’t come off belittling but my only reaction to reading this is that some people can find a reason to get upset over anything.

> Your willingness to help is nulled by your lack of initiative.

I understand your point and i know it's a difficult question to deal with sometimes, especially during depression.

But remember that you're not those people's top priority. That sentence means you are allowed to ask them for stuff, but it doesn't mean they're going to drop everything and take you into their care right now without you taking a few steps on your own. They consider that you have enough of your own agency.

Your willingness to be helped is nulled by that same lack of initiative on your part.

A trick is to find something easy to ask for, as a go-to response to that. For example, the next time someone says that to you, you could answer:

"Actually, life has been tough lately, a beer would be nice".

Different strokes. I just told a friend that they should let me know if there's anything I can do to help, which I've never done before (for this friend). His mother is having surgery this week. I've known this person my whole life and he's a lot like me, so I know that taking your advice wouldn't be the right path for this.

I would like to be told by a friend that they care about me and would like to help in some way if they can. What I wouldn't like is if they said "OK, I'm going to choose a thing that I think I would want in your situation and do it for you, and you have no choice because I'm going to do it anyway." Chances are, what you thought was helpful is NOT what I need in a difficult moment and I don't want to be subjected to another person's choices being superimposed on my situation. Lucky for me I know that my friend feels the same way, and we have different ways of approaching these things with each other because of it.

"I'm at Costco. What do you need? And don't say 'nothing'. I'm going to bring you something, and that's that" seems incredibly aggressive to me, and if I had many friends who behaved that way I would be endlessly frustrated.