04/24/2025
I think you have to truly be in a certain situation to understand the ramifications of what someone is going through. For instance, losing a spouse or a parent is no way the same as losing a child! I know this for a fact. Is it really perception? NO! When you lose a spouse or a parent, life goes on and you can recover if you choose to by getting remarried or learning to live as a single and finding new things to make you happy which takes time. You can find a new friend if your parent was your best friend, but losing a child you never recover. The hole in the heart never heals. You get used to living in grief and feeling that deep loss, but you never recover.
Another scenario is finding out that you have an illness that has no cure. You can learn to live with it. You can even make friends with it but you can never look at life the same way you did prior to finding out that you have an incurable illness. You don't forget it's there so if you want to live some kind of normal life moving forward, you have to make that illness your friend and that friend living in you can really p*ss you off sometimes. As you move on living with this new illness, people will forget that you have it but it doesn't take away from the fact that you do.
I think what happens is that we want people to see the upside of life rather than the downside of life so it feels nicer to downplay whatever a person is going through not only to try to make them feel better but to make ourselves feel better but sometimes it makes them feel worse. Saying things like, I know how you feel, when I lost my brother or sister, after you lost a child...no comparison. It's true, grief is grief, but the kind of grief a person feels losing a child is no way the same. This is a fact.
Or how about this with an illness, you are lucky they caught it so soon, you could be stage 4. You want to say you're right...and I could be...5 years from now! These people mean well. It's not their fault that they don't know what to say. I've probably done it at some point in my life.
Don't you think that if we could manifest our lives away in positive, glorious, healthy, wealthy utopia, we all would do that? Reality is reality...period. We can make the very best of it which is the healing part, but that doesn't mean P**F it's going to go away or we are going to feel great tomorrow. There is a TON of emotions to process and in the meantime, people think you are supposed to bounce back and be fine, just like you were, but you aren't fine and you are not the person you used to be. That's reality.
