Bearing the brokenness of loss, fatigue, trauma, overwhelm, and grief

BEARING is the word I’d use for someone who holds a weight stoically enough to live despite one’s pain.  The best of this bearing is the humility that says, “Though this grief smashes me, and though it pushes me to the brink at times, I will continue to live hopefully and joyously when I can.”

Loss, fatigue, trauma, overwhelm, and grief invite us into a journey of truth.

It’s easy to lose ourselves in the drink or drugs or some other way of assuaging the pain.

It’s easy to give ourselves to the hardening of cynicism that makes us ineffective to others.

It’s harder by far to stand in that pain resolving neither to resent it or escape from it.

Inevitably loss, fatigue, trauma, overwhelm, and grief wear us down.  Inevitably they force us into a way of life that relegates our way of life null and void.  We’re forced to come up with different plans and modes of operation.

There’s something that these experiences do to us that softens us and makes us more compassionate and available for others, if only we don’t deny our pain or become cynical because of it.

The only way we ward against the escape of denial and the attack of cynicism is to let the pain have its way in breaking us down, so much so that we reach out for the support we truly need.

That’s right, it’s a process of facing, or of staying there in it, that we realise that:

§     for starters, we CAN do it

§     we learn that we can overcome our fears and our sadness that way

§     in brokenness, we discover that there are even fewer things in life that can break us

§     we find we increase our confidence in life and in our ability to tackle hardship

§     we’re equipped to help others through their brokenness

Loss, fatigue, trauma, overwhelm, and grief don’t have to comprehensively defeat us, even if they do feel like they’re defeating us for a time.  Even when we’re down and out, if we can find a moment of poise, even in being down and out we get the feeling that we have more, including the capacity to conquer more than we ever have.

It takes time.  Recovery from loss, fatigue, trauma, overwhelm, and grief demands of us what we never had before.  It’s character building so pain grows us through the pain.