Holding My Hand Through the Darkness: The Kindness of Strangers

I have started writing and then deleted this first paragraph a handful of times tonight. Not happy with anything I decided to write on a whim. I came into today much like I do most days: with no plan. As you know, and as I’ve written in the past, this is either a huge blessing to me when the words are flowing, or a bit of a curse, when the brain is locked up, the word rivers running dry.

Sweet Charles, who sat down next to me while I wrote this post to keep me company, blurted out “spaghetti!” when I told him I was stuck. Oftentimes in the past, he’d give me a random word that would trigger me to write something. Once, it was “oboe” where I proceeded to tell the tale of how I ended up playing the oboe in middle and high school. Another time, he chose “iron,” which led to stories about my dad, who almost never goes a day without ironing (or at least he didn’t when I was growing up). Those prompts usually jiggle my brain and something flies out, quickly, effortlessly. “Spaghetti” is not doing it for me tonight, so instead, I’m just going to brain dump until I feel like my fingers want to stop writing. Deal?

You know when you have a thought plaguing your mind for days or weeks on end? That was me recently. I had a reader reach out to me back in April to share something with me — mysterious symptoms that very much mirrored mine in some ways, and the path she took to try to get to the other side of them. That reader had been on my mind for a while. “Send her a note. See how she is. Is she fully healed? Can she help you further?” My brain berated me with questions nearly every day about her. Her note, still all these months later, pops into my mind when I’m having a particularly crummy physical day. She was further along in her healing journey than I was, and had a lot of advice to share. She was a beacon of hope for me on dark days. We corresponded very briefly back then but I never forgot all she said to me.

Being that I’ve had a rough few weeks physically (aching, pained, heavy, tired…things I’ve felt prior to pregnancy but no doubt exacerbated by it now), my old rival “fear” and “I’ll never get better” started to creep in. Just as it did, that reader shined through like a flashlight through fog, and finally, a few days ago, I opened up my email and sent her a note. I’m not entirely sure if she even still reads the blog. It’s fine if she doesn’t, but I needed to know how she had progressed. How she was on her healing path. Was she better? Was she the same? I was nervous to hear that maybe she hadn’t continued to get better. That she had stalled out or, even worse, digressed. Another part of my brain envisioned her telling me that someone finally figured out the root cause of what she was feeling, and maybe it would end up being the same for me, and YAY! We can finally move forward.

In my check-in, I asked her about herself, I told her about myself. About the baby. About how hard it can be sometimes to balance the joy of a very wanted pregnancy with the suffering of chronic pain and discomfort. Truth is, I was half expecting the email to go unanswered. Perhaps I needed to write it more as a therapy to myself. But lo and behold, at 6:30 the next morning, there was a reply sitting in my inbox. And it was all the good news I was hoping to hear from her. She was herself again. She was better. She had invested an immense amount of time and energy into her healing in a variety of ways, and she was on the other side. She was generous with listing out all the things she tried and did. What worked for her, but in a way that wasn’t “this worked for me so obviously it’ll work for you.” More “this worked for me, look into it, it could be something.” Soft. Helpful.

But mostly, she reminded me of the hardest part of the healing journey: believing, truly, that you will get better, whether that means physically, symptomatically getting better or emotionally, so it’s easier to deal with the symptoms. I was talking to Charles about this on a walk the other morning before work as I told him about the email response. It can feel nearly impossible to believe fully and wholly that things will get better when you are in the thick of it. So many people can tell you “it’ll get better” but it’s always half-hearted, because they aren’t the ones who have to wait it out, put in the work. But when someone who’s been through it tells you firmly, in earnest, it holds a lot more power. At least for me. “No wonder those who have been healed so often become healers themselves,” she said to me in her first set of emails, and she’s right. One day, when I’m over this hump of struggle and pain, I will be able to speak firmly, in earnest, to the next person who needs to hear it. To give them hope and hold their hand through the darkness.

Thank you, dear reader, for holding my hand. A complete stranger, so generous with her words and care. I’m lucky to have her. I’m lucky to have all of you.

See you tomorrow, FOAS.