“My only child overdosed, now has a traumatic brain injury, and will permanently live in a nursing home. I’m divorced and have no family other than addicts. The father has been out of the picture for years.”
—Anonymous
I want to start this reframe by holding space in my heart for you and holding space on this page for you—for your grief, for your pain, for what you’re going through, for what you've gone through.
It’s a lot.
I’m not sure if you have support of any kind, but I get it’s definitely not coming from any family. And I imagine that going through circumstances as difficult as these all alone has got to feel brutal at times.
And yet, I imagine that muscling through alone without support is something you’ve had to get used to, out of necessity, just to survive.
I can imagine that you’ve had to built up a fortress within yourself, to protect yourself from not only what’s happened with your child, but to protect yourself from having to deal with the toxic behavior of your family of origin, and also from having to deal with other people’s reactions to your situation.
I know from personal experience that a well-crafted fortress can sometimes seem like the only thing we can count on for our safety and comfort. And bc of that, it can be really difficult to venture out.
But bc you’ve submitted here, I’m guessing that you could use some support, something to help you step outside of your fortress and onto a path that might lead you to the next chapter of your life.
I’m not suggesting that you detach from your current chapter, only suggesting that you allow yourself and your circumstances to evolve.
Yes, it’s beyond awful that this happened. It’s beyond awful that your only child is in this situation.
But if we want to venture out of our fortresses, we need to be willing to look at a bigger picture of what’s currently happening.
I like to think of the ground floor as where we survive the circumstances of our life—those things that can be unfathomably difficult and out of our control.
But if we we’re willing to climb the ladder up, to see a bigger picture, we can see these same circumstances from up there, still harsh, but we can also see some other things: that’s it’s not just us—it’s our society at large that’s pretty fucking harsh too.
From up there, we can see that our society is almost like a Petri dish—all of us growing in this larger environment of dysfunction, that we may or may not have the resources to thrive in.
But from up there, if we’re willing, we can also see ourselves down there on the ground floor.
And if we really look, we will see ourselves down there doing the best we fucking can, mustering every drop of grace we can scrounge and surviving all this stuff—our collection of healed and unhealed parts, our resources and lack of resources—so much of which is pretty much out of our control.
And if we look even deeper still, there’s something else you will notice very clearly down there: your heart. Your huge heart that still longs to connect, to give itself, to share its gifts, its interests, its passions, its wisdom, and its humor.
And why should we thwart our heart’s purpose just bc we are suffering?
To me, in difficult times especially, I believe one way to leave our fortresses is to make a commitment to work for our hearts.
Literally, to be an employee of our heart.
To serve our heart’s interests.
So that even when our business of surviving on the ground floor of life has gone bankrupt, even when everything we had has been destroyed by one kind of disaster or another, we can still ask our hearts what we can do today to add warmth to the cold.
When you’re working for your heart, you wear the lenses of the heart’s mission. You look around the moments of your day like a land surveyor, reading spaces and reading faces, until you find a tiny little barren space where your heart could make a difference—for yourself or another.
We no longer need to go into our fortress and stay there bc we believe we don’t deserve or have what it takes to venture out. We go there for refuge and to give our heart to ourselves.
And then we take baby steps outside of our fortress and we look around and we listen carefully for our heart’s calling to give itself.
Maybe it’s saying hi to a cashier. Maybe it’s sending a note to someone who was kind.
Maybe it’s creating a coffee event for others who are grieving similar circumstances. Maybe it’s taking a day-trip someplace you’ve never been, and sharing yourself in some way, shape or form.
Even if the gift of who you are isn’t reciprocated, keep giving. If it isn’t received, it’s just an indication that the place where you’ve given yourself just isn’t available for receiving your gift.
But if you keep sharing your heart, what will begin to happen is that people will start receiving your gifts—those things that you heart is calling you to give, those parts of yourself that represent what’s most meaningful to you.
And we all know what it’s like when someone receives a gift that we’ve given. It’s a wonderful feeling. And that’s bc in some way, the best gift in life is being received.
I’m not suggesting that working for your heart needs to be your full-time job. I’m only suggesting you try it out part-time, and see if being received warms your heart and the rest of your body.
See if the path your heart guides you towards is one where you will meet people, non-toxic people, who will walk next to you sometimes on this path, people whose presence will soothe you. People who will share with you the gifts of their heart.
-JLK
(Just a reminder, that while reframes can be extremely useful and valuable, they are not a substitute for therapy or medical care. Reframes are suggestions that may or may not be appropriate for one's particular context.)