I have been incredibly fortunate to have had a fantastic and unfailing support system throughout the various disasters in my life over the last several months. My family, of course, rallied immediately, doing that familial thing they’ve always done so well. Their loyalty and support was never even a question. Other, non-family people, however, have stepped gracefully into my life to help keep the few columns that remain from crashing down on top of me. This phenomenon is what I focus on daily, to remind myself that I have more people who think I’m worth supporting, worth befriending, worth including in their lives, than I ever knew.
Some of these saviors were already established in my life as co-workers, acquaintances, and friends who I saw “once in a while.” They heard about what was going on and took it upon themselves to become more than once-a-month friends, contacting me through various outlets to ask how I was doing, if there was anything they could do to help, if I needed to talk or wanted to hang out. These gestures were not a one-time occurrence; they began happening routinely and continue to this moment. These are busy, busy people, with families and lives and trials of their own, and I can’t imagine when they have the time to think of me—but they do.
Others are people who I was once friends with, perhaps even good friends, but time being what it is, we slipped away from each other. Ironically, the very events conspiring to cause such strife in my life were the same events that led me back to these once-and-future friends. Through the magic of 21st-century social media, they saw that I seemed to be having trouble and decided to reach out to me. As it turns out, several of them were having (or were just coming out of) similar troubles, and could not only sympathize, but empathize. They say pain shared is pain halved, and these wonderful people knew that, and endeavored to show me that I was not alone. These are the voices who stay up with me late into the night when I can’t sleep (which is often), companions to my chronic insomnia. The nights are the worst. These people get me through them.
Still others are good friends who have gone so far above and beyond that I can only hold them up as shining examples of what true friendship is—and hope that I have been as a good a presence in their lives as they have been in mine.
Words cannot express what these people mean to me, or what they’ve done for me. There have been days when a well-timed Facebook message or a random phone call has, quite seriously, been all that stood between my fragile psyche and a padded room. Being reminded that there are people in the world who don’t have to care about me but do anyway, just because I’m me, has done more to help me begin this journey to reinvention than all the inner strength I could ever conjure up. It’s true that most days I do this for myself, because I want to come out of this a better, stronger person, because I refuse to let anything get the best of me. But some days, the ones when I look at myself in the mirror and can’t conjure up the desire to try for myself alone—those are the days I remember all the people who’ve shown me that they think I’m worth keeping around. I lock their faces in my mind, stand up straight, and try anyway.
Lesson of the Day: Pick up the phone, log on to Facebook, send an e-mail, tweet away—the message you send may have more of an impact than you could possibly imagine.
Oddly enough, it's a line from Forrest Gump that always sticks in my head when I think about this very thing, and I mean it:
ReplyDeleteI'm gonna lean up against you, and you just lean right back against me. This way, we don't have to sleep with our heads in the mud.