Your Saving Grace Is To Be Your Own Hero

Can you imagine this conversation between two people looking out over the water and seeing a hand reach up out of the water?

Can’t you see she is drowning?

She’s just doing that for attention.

Someone should help her.

If we acknowledge her, then she’ll never stop.

I think she is in danger.

She’s just feeling sorry for herself.

It’s too late now.  She is gone.

Why didn’t she ask for help?

This conversation plays out in all of our lives at some time.  For me it was my daughter was close to two years old,.  She wasn’t talking.  Literally no words.  She had sounds, so she wasn’t mute.  She just didn’t say mama or dada or anything.  I had taken her to doctors and they determined that physically there was nothing wrong.  She could hear fine.  She understood what you were saying, she just couldn’t communicate back.  So they said I should force her to talk. That she wasn’t talking because I gave her want she was trying to ask for.  They said, “When she was indicating that she wanted something, don’t give it to her unless she says the word”.  So we had a painful few months of following the doctors directions.  Then I took her back and demanded to see some specialist.  This issue was not that she didn’t want to say the words, the issue was that something wasn’t connecting correctly.

So we saw the specialist, and they couldn’t figure out anything that was wrong.  So they told us to put her in daycare.  They felt she wasn’t around enough children.  Even though she had an older brother, cousins and friends her age from church – that wasn’t sufficient.  So we put her in daycare,  Another bad decision as it made her stand out.  When they were sharing in circle time and she couldn’t verbalize her sounds into real words, she became even more withdrawn.  So again, back to the doctors.  Finally they authorized speech therapy.,  The area we lived in had a school she attended for four hours a day.  They had a two to one ratio of speech therapist teachers who worked with her and the other children, who all had some sort of speech disability.  Within 6 months she had a 100 word vocabulary and she was finally able to express herself.  It took me one whole year to get her the help she needed.

I felt like I was having that conversation with those doctors, that I typed above  I knew she had a problem and they were not listening or helping.  They were just making things worse.  Fortunately I kept after them until she got the help she needed.  She had delayed speech, and it was an inherited condition.  I discovered later that one of my grandfathers daughters from his first marriage had the same thing happen with one of her grandchildren.  And my daughter had the same thing happen with a couple of her own children.  It was not that she was doing it for attention.  It was not that trying to help her get what she wanted but couldn’t tell us, was just encouraging bad behavior.  She was asking for help.

Ships don’t sink because of the water around them; ships sink because of the water that gets in them.  Don’t let what’s happening around you get inside you and weigh you down.

  – Unknown

Have you ever been the person asking for help?  Did it feel like people were watching and talking, but no one could hear you through the water?  This happened to me when I was 28 years old.  I had been diagnosed with Glaucoma.  They didn’t want to do surgery because I was so young.  A lot of times when you are young and healthy, when they do laser surgery on your eyes, your eyes think that the surgery is a problem and “repair” the surgery back to what it thinks is the normal way for the eye to be.  So we were trying out three different drugs.  The first on didn’t work at all.  The second one had a side effect of making me suicidal.  I could tell it was making me depressed and giving me dark thoughts.  I was struggling with it, but it was making me afraid to talk about it.  I finally was able to tell the doctor what was happening and he put me on the third drug.  Due to different side effects I ended up doing the surgery.

I was talking to my husband about the second drug and asking him if he couldn’t see what was happening.  He said, that he could see it, but was so afraid of putting me over the edge I was balanced on that he did nothing.  We talked about it for some time.  I explained, that what that did was to make me feel like he didn’t care.  That even if what he said or did was not the perfect thing, at least I would have known that he was trying, that he cared.  Instead I felt abandoned and that he didn’t care about me.  Like the woman in the story, I felt like I was reaching for help and he was just watching me drown.

We all have bad days.  We all witness others having bad days.  Sometimes those bad days turns into weeks and months and years.  We are crying out for help.  We feel abandoned.  We all watch it happening to someone we know or love, and we don’t know what to do.  So we do nothing, or we get bad advice from experts and do the wrong thing.  What we need to do is go to divine source.  The divine source speaks to us in our hearts.  When we reach out to others from that space, even if what we do is not the perfect thing to do, they see that we are trying from a space of love and compassion. Not from a space of judgment, or making someone be wrong. 

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water.  When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do, you will sink and drown.  Instead you relax, and float.

  – Alan Watts

We need to realize when we are drowning and ask for help.  We need seek deep within to find what it is that is currently trying to be exposed and released from our life.  A wrong belief that is holding us hostage.  A drug or alcohol addiction.  A relationship that is killing us, but we won’t let go of.  That we are trying to save someone, who is just taking us down with them.  When we try to save broken people, we need to take care that we don’t cut ourselves on their broken pieces.  So many patterns, addictions, issues of self sabotage.  They need to be released so that we can again relax and float.  Life sometimes takes us to the edge, but it is always within our control, it is our choice to be a victim, or we can decide that this life can and will be better and we are a thriver. 

Life sometimes takes you into troubled waters not to drown you but to cleanse you.

  – Unknown

 So when we find ourselves in deep water.  Relax and float.  Reach out for help, but always remember it really comes down to being our own hero.  No one else can fix us, and we can fix anyone else.  It is always an inside job.