Sometimes There Is No Silver Lining
In the Stillness of Suffering, Sometimes There is Only Self-Compassion
Sometimes there is no silver lining. How does one learn to live in a moment of suck? Suck moments are ones that seem so unbearable that your heart just can't take it. I have had my share of these moments, but one in particular rocked me. This happened to me during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our Jules* has struggled with disrupted sleep and extremely debilitating anxiety her entire life. During COVID, her struggles took a cruel turn. She became completely nocturnal, sleeping only 1.5 to 3 hours a day. She couldn't be alone during waking hours, which meant we were up together. Around 4 am, I felt utterly hopeless as she was crying uncontrollably, inconsolably, and her pajamas soaked in tears and blood from her continuous self-injurious behavior.
I've said there's nothing lonelier than the night when the world is asleep around you and you're left alone with your thoughts. In those silent, middle-of-the-night hours, your thoughts can lead you to the darkest of places.
Throughout my life, I've been able to thrive in spite of many sleepless nights. But there's a reason why sleep deprivation is used as a torture tactic—it breaks even the strongest will. I've always had a strong will to live, cherishing the small things in life—spotting a bunny on a hill, witnessing athletes perform unimaginable feats, seeing a sky that resembles a scene from an iconic painting, listening to the sounds of Tokyo, encountering a random friendly cat, catching a lighting bug or stroking my Labrador's soft ears.
Yet, after enduring 18 months of the relentless grip of pure exhaustion and bearing witness to our daughter's severe regression, something within me changed. I had lost my capacity to find silver linings. For the first time in my life, I found myself not caring if I woke up the next morning. This was a drastic departure from my usual ability to find silver linings in even the darkest of clouds. I have a Ph.D. in hunting silver linings. But this time, watching Jules disappear before my very eyes nearly destroyed me. Witnessing every second of her living in so much pain rocked me to my core.
Due to my unconventional life, I am very familiar with suffering, and in my adult life, I do everything I can to avoid it. During COVID-19, I resisted with all my being, embracing the emotions and the suffering I felt in those suck moments. It felt like a flaw to embrace them.
I decided to go back to therapy, and there I learned about self-compassion. On its face, self-compassion sounded like learning to feel sorry for myself. But it was quite the opposite. It was learning to sit with myself, to acknowledge and honor all the pain and misery in a suck moment. I realized it was okay to feel sad, exhausted, defeated, and heartbroken. It was okay to have zero answers.
I was forced to also listen to my thoughts in these suck moments, and I discovered a profound fear—I feared that these suck moments would never end. I discovered that in those suck moments, I was still grieving the life I thought I would have and the life I wanted for Jules. I also learned to allow myself to feel the pain and heartache of witnessing her day in and day out live in excruciating pain.
Self-compassion doesn't make suffering better. Suffering sucks, period. But fighting it, denying my feelings, or ignoring the toll it took on my body and only served to intensify it. The point is, you don't always need to find silver linings amid the suck in those awful moments. Sometimes, you need to do something different. You need to put your hand over your heart, take a deep breath, and truly feel the suck. Allow yourself to feel how painful the moment is and how incredibly difficult it is. And although it feels like it is against all odds, the suck moment ends, and we return to the beauty of life. We break through the darkness and despair to repeat it all over again.
*Jules has Okur-Chung Neurodevelopmental Syndrome (OCNDS), an ultra-rare genetic syndrome. Symptoms of OCNDS can include speech delay or inability to speak, epilepsy, global developmental delay, autism or autism spectrum disorder traits, hypotonia, and difficulty feeding. Symptoms range from mild to severe and affect an individual's ability to perform and engage in basic daily activities.
