Dear Elais:

Thank you! About your family checking on you, you wrote: “they didn’t and they don’t. I know that they love me“- they don’t love you enough to check on you 🥹

“And by the way yeah, some part of me feels like I have to join others in suffering.. Some part of me is like afraid that my friends or family will do some extreme action in pain, like suicide, if I don’t keep track on them. It’s extreme I know.”- it amazes me how much we have in common. I was terribly afraid as a child, a teenager, and onward that my mother will commit suicide (she said she will). I used to pray to the stars in the night sky: please keep my mother alive!

I believed that I was one of the people causing her so much pain, so much pain that she wanted to kill herself (well, she said it), so I felt that I had to suffer because I was a bad person (and maybe if I suffer enough.. I’ll become a good person..?)

I was always focused on her, my life taken hostage by the fear that she will die any day, any time. What a waste of my life!

These days, whenever I find myself suffering because someone else is suffering, I say to myself: (1) my suffering is not helping the other person, there’s no benefit to anyone that I suffer, and (2) I want the other person to not suffer: why not wanting myself to not suffer? I mean, I matter too, I am as important as the other person, not less!

anita