One of the most difficult things about sadness and chronic illness is the isolation they bring. I’ve felt it before. You feel like you bring everyone down when you talk about how you’re feeling and what you’re going through, but it’s too hard to just smile and pretend like everything is ok. Or maybe it’s the really obvious elephant in the room that no one dares to bring up. So it’s easier to just avoid interacting with others in order to avoid having to bring it up.
As a result, the world can feel like a big lonely place when going through loss, sadness, or a mental or physical health condition, or something that is just hard. Either through physical isolation or through feeling isolated by the idea of being a burden on everyone else. But the reality is that community and feeling connected is a crucial aspect to health and healing.
Several years ago at a Buddhist meditation retreat, we were told a story about loss and grief. It’s the story of a woman who loses a son to illness. She is overwhelmed by sadness and feels hopeless, so she goes to see the Buddha and asks him to bring her son back. The Buddha responds to her that he can only bring her son back if she brings him rice that is given to her by a family that has never lost anyone.
The woman feels hopeful and eagerly goes knocking on doors to find this rice from a special family, the only thing she needs to be reunited with her son. She goes from door to door asking for this rice, her eyes sparkling as she tells the families she meets that if they can give her this rice, the Buddha will bring her son back to life. House after house, she gets the same response. The door closes after telling her that they have lost a child, a sister, a parent, an uncle, or a best friend, and she walks away losing hope with every closed door.
The woman then returns to the Buddha, feeling sad and frustrated that she wasn’t able to get this special rice he asked for, and feeling cheated that he had given her this false hope. As she tells him that she hasn’t been able to find the rice, her desperation begins to lift and she begins to accept the fact that her son cannot be brought back. It hits her that she is not alone in her suffering, but that everyone around her has also felt this sadness and grief she is feeling now. She accepts that her son cannot be brought back to life and that she must grieve him and learn to live holding on to only the memory of him.
The moral of this story isn’t that death is an inevitable part of life, but that we are not alone in our suffering. In a world where only the highlights of our lives are shared either through conversation or social media, it is easy to feel isolated in suffering, as everyone else seems to have a perfectly successful and happy life except us. But the truth is that we are not alone. Everyone is living with something difficult even through it doesn’t seem that way.
If you are going through something difficult, reach out to someone you trust and open up with as much or as little as you feel comfortable in doing. Or reach out to a support group or trusted professional healthcare provider. Share your story. Not because you will receive the magical words that will heal you, but because the act of doing so and being heard, connecting with others through this shared human experience, you will feel a little bit less alone and begin an important process of healing, even if it is one little tiny step at a time. And in doing that process, you may also be able to help someone else heal.