Recently I joined a group of friends for a fun adventure. As they chatted about wristlets, I could not connect. My world is full of acronyms and enormous Latin based medical terms. I live in a world complicated by insurance battles, pediatric specialists, and ongoing educational wars. These are things that the average person doesn't deal with every day, day in and day out.
I've learned to put on that mask with the fake smile. My head nods when I answer questions and state that everything is fine. It's just fine because people don't want to hear about how my sons skull was removed surgically. Or how I'm paralyzed with fear on a daily basis now that a second son faces the same surgery our first son had this summer.
People don't want to hear about how I have to figure out how to get the boys into physical therapy and how to prove that therapy is educationally necessary. It would be awkward to remove my feet from the surface so I simply say that we are fine.
We aren't fine at all. I have a difficult time relating to a regular world with normal stressors. I can be surrounded by people or those who are my friends and yet feel all alone. I am drowning in solitude when I keep my feet on the surface.
I also don't want to bother anyone with our ongoing trauma. It's difficult to be friends with someone who experiences ongoing trauma. We are needy. We can't give back much to other people. It isn't that we aren't interested, we are tapped out. We can barely see beyond our day, let alone make a committed plan with a friend.
There it is - what it's like to be an unrelatable We are here and we are screaming silently. Love us. Relate to us. But instead we will nod and say we are fine because even in our solitude, we want our friends
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