Asking for help doesn’t make you dependent. Refusing it just makes you slower.

Somewhere along the way independence got defined as doing everything with no one, which is a great way to spend three hours on something a two minute question would have solved. Struggling quietly is not more honest than asking. It is only slower, and usually lonelier. Most people who look completely self-reliant are just people who know who to call.

Take the thing you have been stuck on and send one specific question to one person who would know. Specific matters: not I am lost, but here is exactly where it broke. Being asked is rarely the burden you imagine it is.