A friend of mine keeps posting regularly on FB and brings up in conversation a lot regarding her sense of being all on her own. She feels alone struggling through her current situation in life since she has no partner, few close friends nearby, no family around and her beloved pet not with her. As she moans about her lot in life, I draw comparisons to my own life and recent circumstances.
Despite my general dislike for social interactions and trying to fit in to what is deemed 'normal', I have to say that I have never truly felt alone. Even with the past year being one of the darkest of my life, I have known that I have friends and family both near and far on whom I could count on. Never have I thought to myself that I am alone.
With that said, at the same time, I have been very much on my own throughout our most recent ordeal. In fact, I am still processing it and have only just begun being able to journal about it. It has taken me into depression, isolation and a sense of hiding back into the "womb" to recover and heal. Only in the past few days have I been able to inch my way towards taking baby steps out of the dark hole I have burrowed into for safety. Even still, I am not quite ready to fully embrace the outside world, but I sense my courage returning.
What I have come to understand is that we are only alone if we push everyone away. I cannot express enough the true gratitude I feel towards those who offered to help in whatever way they could and to those who dropped everything to be at my side when I asked or even when I did not. The love and support I felt without pressure or questions, but just concern for me helped me to maintain the precarious balance of sanity I needed to survive. If I had been alone, I would have never eaten and lost far more than the 5 kilos I lost in two weeks. If I had been alone, I would have probably collapsed into a nervous breakdown or who knows what else.
Yet still, while I was definitely not alone, I was most assuredly on my own to deal with everything and to live the experience I was meant to live. The support of those around me allowed me to take care of what needed to be on my own. No one else could or would do it. No one else answered my constant prayer of having someone say to me, "Don't worry, I'll take care of everything for you."
In the end, this was okay because I was not alone.
My take-away from this whole experience is that no one can experience my life for me. This means that instead of wishing that someone else would come along and take control of it, I can only do my best to get through the experience with integrity, honor, love, compassion and as much success as possible. If I survive, then I can share the story to perhaps help others go through similar experiences a little bit easier or faster than I did.
The saying that what doesn't kill us only makes us stronger has some truth. Though it is often used as a consoling or trite phrase, the reality is that through the growth, I can not only say I survived, but also do my best to help others do the same. In this way, we are never alone, but left to survive on our own.
~T π
