07/24/2014

   I realize now that in addition to learning how to take things one step at a time, in the early days literally sometimes taking things one breath at a time, there were other things that helped me overcome the various fears that threatened to engulf me.
   I learned that much of the time my feelings and emotions were transitory and that what I might be experiencing at a certain moment would soon be changing. I realized that what I often needed to do was actually the exact opposite of what my emotions were tempting me to do. For example, there were many times when what I really wanted to do was to curl up into a little ball, find an isolated corner in which to hide myself, and wait for the storm to pass. What I discovered I needed to do was to lean more heavily than ever on the people closest to me, especially my wife and children. In this case, I don't mean leaning on them in a sense of dragging them down at such a horrible time, but rather to mean keeping myself available to them, leaning on each other, supporting each other as much as we possibly could to survive together. If we could not stick together and find ways to help each other through something so absolutely horrible, who else was going to help us?
   Unfortunately, we did discover during those early days that some people we thought would always be there for us, could not find it within themselves to do so. We came to realize that many people just felt so uncomfortable around us that they fell by the wayside, some early on in our journey, and others as time went by. Whether it was because they felt helpless not knowing what to say or do or how to comfort us, or because our situation brought the fear and anxiety that if something this awful could happen to a family like ours it could also happen to them, the fact remained that these people were not able to be there for us.
   Conversely, there were other people who actually surprised us with the level of on-going, consistent support they gave to us. In many cases, these people are still with us today. Of course, there is another group of people who we believed would always be there for us, and indeed they have been, every moment of every day and every step of the way. Besides holding on to my wife and children for support, I learned to let these other people who were so concerned about us all, help us in whatever ways they could. Their timing wasn't always perfectly corresponding to what I might have been feeling at a given moment, but I learned to accept that everything they were doing was done out of true love and concern for us. I discovered again that the moments when I most felt like isolating myself from the entire world were often actually the moments when I most needed to allow people to simply love me.