Friends help friends cope

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Never a truer statement. “Sometimes, you feel like you’re by yourself…” – Erykah Badu. And I’ve been feeling a vastness forming around me for years. But there are some tried and trues that I can always count on to lift me up, take me away, make me be not so hard on myself… or just plain listen.

I gave myself a week. One week not to submerge myself in the misery that is my mother’s situation and all that it entails. Her sickness, her apathy, my uncontrollable reaction to her. One week to detox, remove the excess emotion and maybe… just to be myself for a bit. My brother didn’t take the same sojourn. He has a different motivation than I do, and I can respect that. But I guess that made me harder on myself about it. I had classified myself with the children who don’t love or care about their parents. But in speaking with a few close friends, no one castrated me. No one lashed out and said, “You’re a bad person for doing that, Vic.” On the contrary, they encouraged my rest time; told me I needed to be able to find some normalcy if I was going to buckle down and fight this long term. That it’s HARD to be around someone who is always miserable when your only desire is to be happy. Who reinforced that I had to put MY “mask” on first before helping someone else with theirs. Because what good am I if I’m not sustaining MY life and MY health. It’s very hard for me. It rings of selfishness… but I forced myself to be as normal as I could this past week. Went to a club with some friends. Met folks for dinner. Just chilled a little. In the back of my mind I could hear my subconscious paining me about how much less this will make my mother think of me. And towards the end of the week, I had rebuts for that argument. Not to justify. But simply to be at peace with. But the extraordinary soothing of friends has brought me a step closer.

So to those who have my back, THANK YOU 🙂 You make this friendship a true gift to me.

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