HAVE A NICE DEATH. SLOWLY FREE

Don’t sit with those overwhelming feelings. Text if you don’t feel comfortable calling. Call your therapist to schedule an appointment. Check the facts, am I really dying? Find ways to prove that you are still alive and not actually dying. If you feel like you are dying, get yourself to a safe place, quickly. So that’s what I would recommend as someone who has been there. But this is going to help me, isn’t it? Going to work will stave off the tears until I can enter my safe space at home later to cry. All I want to do is go home and sit with Samuel, my spoiled and faithful Emotional Support Animal (ESA). Unfortunately, I have scheduled to return to work this afternoon. It is a heavy topic by itself and compounded with the fact that I experienced losing my father to death at the age of three and a half, this makes the training experience all that more difficult. I need to focus on something else to get my mind off of bereavement. So I took the day off work, unpaid, to educate myself in the realm of mental health, my passion.

HAVE A NICE DEATH. SLOWLY FREE

They are a great organization and they offer free trainings to their volunteers and staff. I had either bravely or stupidly just put myself through six hours of a Helping Grieving Children Bereavement training with San Diego Youth Services where I volunteer. It’s not something I could hear but it’s something I could feel in my mind and in my body. The alarm bells in my head were ringing nonstop. But inside, it felt like I was literally dying. Everything looked normal from the outside.

My body did not have any of the traditional symptoms of anxiety: no sweaty palms, no rapid breathing, no trembling of my body. And if you do, excuse yourself and walk away for the time being. Please don’t become frustrated with the individual. Listen to the story as if it’s the first time you are hearing it.

If they have a mental illness it’s likely they have forgotten that they have told you this before, at least as is true in my case. Sometimes they will need to tell you this same narrative more than once. They want help, even if that help is only to have an empathetic, non-judgmental listening ear. If someone says they are feeling depressed but they are not diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder, don’t discount that they are opening up themselves to you, putting their trust in you and being vulnerable in sharing this information with you for a tangible reason. Some people think that a person labelling themselves with a diagnosis or prognosis without actually being diagnosed as such is stigmatizing that diagnosis.

The person telling you this is trying to communicate with you that they are in severe pain, whether emotionally, physically, or both. So don’t hate on the next person who tells you they think they are dying. After death, there exists nothing earthly for that being.

And what is more extreme than dying? Dying is the ultimate loss of life. The best way that person can think of to describe their emotions when they are unbearable is to go to the extreme. It doesn’t capture the rawness of the emotion. When things in their mind seem overwhelming, describing the symptoms of anxiety just doesn’t cut it. So, why would a person say they are dying when they are not? It’s About Communication Those are all examples of what it feels like when a person says they are dying but aren’t. What is it like when you feel like you’re dying but you’re not actually dying? Well, you may have heart palpitations, your stomach in a knot or your head is about to explode.

Have a nice death. slowly