She wears a Brisingamen

I am surrounded by grief.

I have lost count of the people I know who have lost spouses. I have a few friends dealing with the grief of losing a parent or parent type person. Several others have lost siblings. And, I have a friend who just lost their child.

I am not even counting those who have lost friends, or who are dealing with the fallout from murder or suicide. And yes, that's trickling through my friends right now. (I have a lot of SCA friends.)

Perhaps this is normal? I honestly don't know anymore. I can demarcate the day where everything changed: a friend lost their spouse very suddenly, several years ago. And for whatever reason, the ripples from that included me. (Not that I lost someone, but that my friend let me be one of the people they leaned on.)

I count myself fortunate to have been able to be a comfort to them. I didn't know what the hell I was doing, but I wanted to be there for my friend, so I was. When it was uncomfortable, I listened, said little, and then processed my feelings later. I learned so much from them.

I learned how universal grief is, and how hard. I learned how to comfort the grieving without ever mentioning my own feelings unless it was to let them know I understood their feelings. I learned how close grief is to anger, and that the anger isn't about you. I learned how to be water, to buoy the grieving up and let their emotions flow through me.

I learned how to cry without ever letting it show in my voice, because my tears were just empathy leaking from my eyes. I learned how important the words "I'm here" are, and how sometimes that's all you have to say.

I also learned that grief can make people crazy, and that flare of crazy usually isn't who they are. But the flip side of that is how grief makes people more of what they really are. The empathic grow more empathic, more kind, more compassionate.

And the assholes become worse, harder, and sometimes cruel.

I have honed my skills at comforting the grieving over the last few years. Some of these losses are old-- but some are fresh and new, and I am doing my best to pass on the knowledge I've gained from helping friends and family through their losses, and the things I have learned from handling my own griefs, my own losses over the last few years.

Not going to lie: this is so hard.

But the other side of that is how you notice how everything you learn while grieving can apply to other situations. The first time I saw this, I thought I was fooling myself. I thought I was doing the "nail" thing: my new tools to help my friends were a hammer, and this was a nail!

But, it wasn't. The discussion I had with my friend, where I used my grief-stricken friend as an example of how to handle pressure with grace, led to another discussion, and another. And suddenly I was helping my friends handle all their different situations with aplomb and kindness. All because I'd been determined not to abandon my grieving friend when they needed me.

Perhaps everything looks like a nail to me lately because now I have a hammer for just about every different situation. When I mentioned this to a friend, he reminded me of my delight with the deadblow hammer the first time I'd ever seen one. And it is true that I have learned a lot about hammers from my extremely handy husbeast, who has at least three different types.

But mostly, grief feels a little like a solvent. It strips us down to our bare bones. How we rebuild often depends on what resources we have.

I'll bring the hammers.

I was diagnosed with fibro in the 90s, before I knew what WebMD was. When I did a search for it (on my then-much-beloved AOL account!) I got a few results. Nothing that really told me what it was, or how much it would destroy my life.

Living with the disease taught me more than any website. Which is both sad and good, I suppose, given some of the insane things written about fibro.

When I lost my last job because of absenteeism, when I finally admitted that there was no way I could continue living the way I was, I got deeply depressed. I felt like my life was some very unfunny joke. I spent weeks in bed, trying to figure out what I could possibly do to 'fix' it.

Then I got Bell's Palsy. It was one of the most painful illnesses I've ever experienced. The cluster headaches I got before my facial nerve seized up were so bad I would lie in a dark room with a cold cloth on my head and cry as quietly as I could, because any movement added to the pain. It was a relief when the diagnosis came, because the horrific pain had finally stopped.

It also led me to a crystallizing thought: I could let this mess kick my butt or I could laugh at it and live.

The Bell's Palsy attack was demoralizing. It opened my eyes to exactly how vain I am, to how important your face is in this world, and to how crippling a "mild" illness really can be. But it also showed me that I matter to people (my in-laws and husband helped me immeasurably during the worst of it) and that I could recover. I swore if my face got better, I'd take my life back.

Once I was better, I kept that promise to myself. I searched for things that I had wanted to do. I started going out. I found a weekly drum circle and joined. I made friends there, and they connected me to awesome things. I joined a pagan group, I met more people. I even rode a horse for the first time in ages. I dove head-first into having a life again. I learned I had new limits, but I still managed to work around them.

To my surprise, my new friends didn't mind my limits. They helped me work around them, or understood when I had to cancel. It didn't occur to me then that these new friends had never known me pre-fibro; to them, this was how I was and they loved me anyway.

Their acceptance helped even more. I started accepting myself, my limitations, even that the fibro wasn't going away.

It stopped seeming like an evil joke and seemed more like a poorly told one, one I could laugh at despite myself. I have my moments, times where I get angry all over again, where I resent the limitations, or where I am frustrated because I pushed too far and my body failed me. But fortunately, these incidences are fewer than they used to be. I am better at working with the fibro, pushing to a point and then resting, and listening when my body says "oh hell no."

I laugh a lot more often than I cry. And that's a good thing.

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This is week one's therealljidol entry. The topic is Jayus. If you enjoyed this entry, please vote for me here. Thanks!