What can I send to say I'm sorry the past few years have been shit?
I'm looking around this room trying to pick something out. It's no easy task, and the more I consider it, the more the job seems to overwhelm me. It occurs to me, often, that if they'd told me caring for people was gonna be this hard, I might've checked out long ago. I suppose that option is still drastically available to me.
If I could choose anyone, I would pick me. I think I would handle things better. Not that she is handling it worse, but that she doesn't deserve. But then, none of the people we love ever do. As they say, when it rains, it fucking pours.
I am, of course, wrong. I would handle it much worse. It's a possibility I refuse to even imagine. And so.
What can I send that says I'm sorry the past few years have been shit?
A dug-up photo of me sending a Christmas something to her during better times. Rocking lipstick way too red for my pasty-faced ass. Six years ago. I didn't know at 20 things could become so strange. Also, check out my eyes so carelessly betraying my provenance.
I ended up with sexy lipstick and a very honest card. The lipstick is supposed to say things can still turn around. The card - and to a lesser extent, the make-up - says I won't accept that someone so beautiful I fell in love with so much will end up this way. But it's been dark a very long time, and the American medical system is a particularly murky one. The sort I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. I haven't known a single person who benefited from it. I'm sure they exist. But from all I've known, it seems to be an unending pit of doom. Not that it's isolated, of course. People have been left to die quite merrily pretty much across the world.
I miss her a lot, you know. I miss how she was before they got her hooked on the wrong kind of meds. I miss when we were both young enough to pretend that a little bit of lagging behind could still just count as a slow start.
One of the most frightening things about getting older is witnessing the people I love coming to less than I'd hoped for them, and suffering tremendously as a result. See, the artsy side of me always intuited there'd be suffering in my own life (and perhaps, to an extent, invited it). But I don't know what to do with my loved ones hurting.
I expect life to play rough, but never foul, which leads to needless taking it on the chin, I suppose.
When I was small, I understood life to be like this:
It mostly is. It's how I translate my life inside my own head to a great extent. Most of the shitty situations you'll go through will serve as lessons in one way or another, so that you hopefully 'level up' as you go and don't keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over.
But sometimes, it also translates to,
"How can this be happening?"
I genuinely would like to understand better the mechanics of "shit happens", so that perhaps one day I'd be better equipped for it. For now, I'm just making little packages for people with lipstick picked by AI that says this will make things right (just to be clear, the AI just suggested a shade, not the moral or emotional undertakings of lifting someone out of Hell).
Not that I am so conceited as to imagine I have any power to do so. But I can do everything that's available to me. And I'm learning increasingly that that's what maturity is.
Maybe. Then again, what do I know. I'm only a kid with tired eyes and nice smelling hair. Is red lipstick salvation? Always, always an answer. Now, if only the universe could start asking the right questions, you know?
How do you show up for the people who matter most to you? is a question I ask of myself a lot lately, and one that no one ever prepared me for. I admit I'm a bit sore on that point. See, they fill your head with Prince Charmings and bold career moves, but they don't warn you that's gonna be one of the hardest questions you'll ever have to answer, nor that it will challenge you constantly as you live.
Might I ask, how do you tackle it? And have you found some answer for it, at your given point in time?
Pain, I guess is how we can learn new things. That's sharp. That's hot. That's uncomfortable. That's interesting.
I have always felt that there is never a perfect gift for anyone. Nothing that can say sorry, thank you, happy birthday, get well soon. Some companies try to market cards that say it, but I have found that there's nothing better than saying it with my own voice, and saying it to the person's face.
Though, I will confess, I often buy "sorry" cards for people, no matter the occasion.
Wedding: "Sorry, you have to call that person a husband / wife now".
Birthday: "Sorry that you had to suffer my friendship this year, and the next"
Funeral: "Sorry that they suffered / Sorry that they were gone so soon"
I try to avoid the very need to say sorry by not doing things that I will regret, but usually, it ends with "my intention was not to make you feel this way, it was to blah blah blah blah".
In response to the question, because I am rambling a little bit here (hey, what's new) - "How do I show up?"
"Have you done a shit today?" - because if you don't shit, you die. And I want my friends to live for as long as possible.
That's an interesting approach to caring. As I get older, I think more and more of all the little ways in which we show someone we care - did you eat? - without it being a grand gesture or anything. The foundations of love are interesting business. Thanks for the ramble, as always :)
I'm really sorry about your friend! I can attest to how bad the American healthcare system is. Sometimes I think, aside from urgent injuries or life-threatening medical problems it might be best to steer clear of it altogether. There are great, well-intentioned, people working within the system but the system is compromised by Big Pharma and completely broken. It's become much more about extracting as much money as they can than it is about healing.
I try my very best to show up for those in my life I care about who are in need but I'm, shall we say, very selective in how I do that. There are so many people in the world today who are habitually in need or in trouble because of their own actions/decisions. Has it always been this way? Helping these kinds of people monetarily or bailing them out in other ways is like applying a band-aid to try to hold back a raging river. A lot of people are caught in toxic loops and are addicted to the help and the sympathy. It's so tough because you can't help but feel as though you're judging. Sometimes withholding the help they're asking for is so counterintuitive, especially when they know you have the means. I have a very tough phone call to make this weekend to a friend who was just diagnosed with metastatic bladder cancer. I'm not looking forward to it.
Thanks! Yes, it's difficult at times remembering there's good people at every tier of what has become a terrible institution.
And I am so so sorry to hear about your friend. And that you have to shoulder this thing over the weekend. I hope you find some space for yourself - it's so easy to get lost in someone's tragedy when we love them. Hugs to you, Eric <3
Our primary care physician is a good example. She's young, a go-getter, works through her lunches most days (we've heard that from some of the nurses) and you can tell she really cares.
Thank you! As you will experience, there are a lot more opportunities show up in middle age. This particular friend was one of my best friends in high school. He has led a very tough life and made many bad decisions. Your fifties are around the age when the ways in which you've chosen to live your life, for better or worse, become super apparent. Ironically, I just posted about his son a few weeks ago. Hugs to you. I hope you enjoy your weekend!
Just being there for them is what people who are going through a hard time need most. Between the lines I'm reading that you're underestimating how much of this you're already doing.
I'm not good at this, I'm better at giving a stranger a helping hand and moving on. Everyone does what they can. I do regret not making more of an effort to get in touch with my more autistic neighbor, who died alone.
When my most masculine and talkative nephew had a mental health crisis, he'd regularly visit my sister and just sit next to her partner without saying a word. About growing up in a big house with boarders he wrote: "It taught me that I never needed to be afraid to be vulnerable."
It sounds like he found a wisdom is the suffering. I'm glad.
I don't know if underestimating necessarily, just fearful of not being able to do all that's needed. Which isn't up to me anyway, I know. But still. I hope you and your nephew are both well :)
Sometimes I send a card or write a letter. Sometimes I bring food, if the occasion calls for it. Sometimes I just show up to be available as needed, even if it's just to listen. The older I get, and the more people I know, the more hurting people are within my circle. I can't be there for everybody, but I do what I can. Sometimes a prayer is the best I can do...and that never hurts!