Messier than karma

All right; now for things coming back to me.

This is a much messier story.

The short version is that a girl that I had helped several years ago saw something I tweeted and she messaged me that I had helped her and she was there for me.

It gets longer because of many different factors.

One is that the reason I was tweeting is that when I had recently posted about my sadness and frustration on Facebook, I had set off a lot of alarms and had people checking on me in various ways to make sure I wasn't suicidal. It is good to be cared for, but it felt like a lot of pressure.

Twitter would normally feel safer for things like that anyway. There are fewer people who know me personally on there, and it is easier to not be noticed. However, because of that period where I was spending a lot of time encouraging and shoring up teenage girls, it makes me reluctant to be the voice of discouragement. Maybe it's good for people to see that we all struggle, but maybe it would be taken as "If she is this down, what hope is there?"

But I need to be able to feel sad and express it. As much as people don't like seeing problems they can't solve, that happens sometimes. I am going to be sad for as long as my mother is alive, and then I am going to be a different kind of sad. It's not the only thing I feel, and none of it is forever, but it's there.

So I called out into the void, and someone answered back, and she cared about me because I had cared about her. It came back.

The other tricky thing about it is that I have recently seen some concern expressed in an adjacent Twitter group about adults encouraging teens to open up to them, when kids are so vulnerable and and it is so easy to mess them up, even without bad intentions.

I see their point. I have seen plenty of arrogance and plenty of bad intentions. I totally agree that having local, in person sources of help is better when possible.

But also, I was trying to do what's right, and responding to intuition and circumstances, and it usually wasn't in private messages. It would be easy to be insecure about it. I was then. It was hard to believe that I could ever be enough against so much pain.

Except, of course, that I was not healing their pain; I was just witnessing it and caring about it. Sometimes there was advice, or links to articles, but mainly it was just a reminder that you are not alone, and not the only person who has these feelings.

Sometimes it made a difference, and at different times people have come back and told me it mattered. It is probably good that has been spaced out, because I may have needed that more now, but I am sure there were times when I needed it before.

About a week before that, another girl did message me, asking if she could vent. Of course she could, and a lot of her issues dealt with feeling guilt about needing to put some needs of her own over those of her difficult mother (though it was not dementia).

It landed close to home, but then neither of us are alone. We related to each other.

Twitter has been out a lot lately, I am sure because of more people with less to do. I am not on top of things, and that had been pretty true before the virus, just because of Mom needing more attention.

But every now and then I still notice something and have something to contribute: validation or encouragement or a link to an article or a cat picture. I have told enough stories about homeless people now that I understand if you are wondering if I go looking for them. I don't, but they have found me enough that I probably am more alert now, and sometimes that helps.

I believe that staying open to it, we can do a lot of good.

But often that good is mainly only caring. Lamed-vov, but if there are enough of us, it will be enough.