blurred edges

Brain Strain is fighting to get hold of me after hours of doing [work] admin . . . but I will not give in, I will be strong, because I want to write about this whilst it is still fresh in my mind.

I had an indirect nasty social media moment this morning. A post popped across my screen that highlighted someone publically defaming/berating/slandering/many-more-adjectives- added-here a close friend of mine. It wasn't one of those comments that could be interpreted one way if you were sensitive, or was a vague hint or vague description of possible offence, it was a blatant name-and-shame post. The facts stated were sadly completely fabricated and more than likely will result in a deformation of character law suite, for the person who slandered my friend. It was very damaging. I can't/won't disclose the details but I can tell you that I was extremely angry...like furious angry.

I managed to restrain myself from responding not because I am a good person, nor because I wanted to appear to be the better person in the situation, but simply because of potential legalities. Otherwise I might have let a string of violent words fly from my finger tips across the social media platform. But this morning opened me up to a side thought  ... How much can a wound [emotional] distort the reality of life?

In the midst of the anger I took a moment and realised that this deformation and misrepresentation of the facts was coming from a place of incredibly deep pain. The pain this person had gone through had literally distorted her reality, to the point that she possibly believes her version of events even though her reality doesn't match the facts/truth.

This is something I don't think is considered to much when dealing with people who are deeply wounded and walking through grief or tragedy. We talk about the 5 stages of grief and many aspects like that. How to walk through those stages. How to move on. etc etc We don't, necessarily, consider how that person's reality is forever changed, forever distorted by the event. That who that person is, is forever tainted and distorted by the event. They and their lives are never the same again, this side of eternity. For eg if partner looses their spouse to cancer, that spouse [this side of eternity] is not coming back. That part of their life is gone, changed, and their future reality is forever changed, distorted. Who they are, is changed by the grief.  We often think healing is to bring a person back to the state they were before the tragedy, before the grief, or the incident that caused it. We don't do it with bad intentions, quite the contrary, its usually with the best intentions but the reality is that their life is now distorted.

This person who slandered, not only has grief distorted their life on this side of eternity. They are walking out the journey of this life with the reality of an incident that caused deep grief. Even as the heart heals, they can't go back and make the incident un-happen. This person's future is tinged with distorted vision because of it. Their identity distorted because of it. Their reality distorted because of it. It doesn't make what they did right, it definitely wasn't. It definitely doesn't make what they say true or factual, but its their reality. The grief is so strong that even if they were shown the truth, they wouldn't be able to grasp it within their distorted reality. Amidst my anger, I found a moment to say a prayer for comfort for their grieving soul instead or just raging. It really spoke to something deep within me.

You see, we can put it in a pretty analogy, about how healing is like gluing broken pottery together with gold to create art. but the reality is yes, that pottery now takes on a new form [gold or no gold], it will never be what it originally was before it shattered. It's original image/shape/form is now reshaped/distorted/remolded.

It's almost like people who wear glasses. When you first get glasses, you notice every speck of dust on the glasses and obsessively clean them. The busier you get, the less you remember to clean and the more you adjust to looked through the blurred glass. Grief does that to us, it dirties the glasses of our life, and distorts our vision. We need to be gentle with each other, love each other in the grief and through the grief, not letting our tunnel vision prevent us from seeing the distortion grief has brought to their lives and reality.