Thursday, March 17, 2016

Letting go of people

I'll share more about this later and I've already shared about isolation in other posts but I wanted to write about it, because honestly, that's why I started this blog in the first place. I'm not the first mom, nor am I the first mom to blog, and I'm still not the first mom to tell the truth on a blog. And telling the truth is the most important part of being a mom to me. At least, telling "a" truth.

My family and community lost a dear, dear friend to suicide this week. I don't know the details but from the snippets I've heard there was some PTSD, depression, and extreme financial strain that probably contributed to this lovely, beautiful woman choosing to end her life.

We don't like to talk about suicide in our culture. We often want to separate out those who commit suicide from those who...well...didn't. "Those people over there" couldn't find a way out. They were sick. They didn't want help. We can tell ourselves a lot of things. We can also flip it and go to self-blame. I wasn't there for her, I didn't do enough, I should've called, I should've, could've, would've.

But it's too complex for those absolute fix it thoughts, too. Life is a conversation, not a mere question and answer session. We toil, we test, we triumph, we try, and we think some more. We roll it around in our heads. We say it out loud to see how it sounds.

What I want to say tonight, and what I will continue to talk about, is that we all have a responsibility to ourselves and each other, to learn about isolation and how it can wreak havoc. We can start talking about it. We can start recognizing it in ourselves and others. It's not just a mental illness thing. Media has a part, consumerism has a part, groupthink has a part, etc. We repeat what we hear and don't even think about how it might be isolating, to us OR others.

Many a person experiences isolation in their lives. If we have lived a life at all, we have experienced it. I just hope we can start talking more about it.

More later.

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Kalev

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