It is very popular to say that a way to make your life better is the get the negative people out of your life. Well what if the negative person is someone who is dependent on you for care and is someone you love. And what if they have very substantial reasons to be negative.
I have a dear, long lasting friendship with someone who has had a more than triple play of tragedy. She has a debilitating, painful chronic illness, She lost her marriage over that illness, she recently lost her mom and couldn’t attend the funeral because of the illness, she is dealing with medical PTSD from the trauma of a series of hospital treatments and setbacks. and she has developed clinical anxiety as well from the stress of these traumas. She is still looking at a series a series of surgeries, one of which could be life threatening. All of which has caused her to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by bitterness and depression. And with this, I could never live with myself if I didn’t give her what ever help I can.
My struggle is to give her the day to day care she needs, learning and relearning the limits of what I can and cannot do, while not succumbing to anxiety, and keeping at bay that same bitterness and depression.
So my task is to insulate myself from the negativity without removing the person. For this I’ve been looking to what a psychologist told me many decades ago: that no one can make you happy, but you. If you are looking for someone to make you happy you will always eventually be frustrated.
I am learning that for things such as happiness, optimism, hope and faith, one first needs to find these things in themself before they can have them with anyone. And yes, when you finds these things and put them out into the world, you may still get kicked, demeaned and bruised. But because you have found these things in yourself, you don’t give up or surrender. You can still carry on.
I think also that the inverse of what the psychologist said is true. That no one can make us unhappy but ourselves. We all tend to look for sources of unhappiness outside of ourselves. True we will find an immense amount of unhappiness out there. And we may try to make that some kind of justification for our own unhappiness. But how is that helpful? It will just allow us to continue to be unhappy and frustrated.
I am painfully learning that because of the world around me, it can be a struggle to carry on. But in that struggle if I look to myself and find my own happiness, faith and hope. I have a way forward. Because I, am who I can do something about, I can have something to give to those I care about.
I am writing this as a kind of self therapy to find the inner resources and tools to keep myself going and to continue to be valuable and useful to myself to those who need my help. Hopefully this can help some others as well.