Greetings!

My life has become (seemingly) too much to bear. We moved to Portland 5 months ago starting a new life here, I will have a robotic total prostatectomy at the start of March, and last week my best friend from college died quite suddenly.

My friend, Michelle, penned this guest article that seemed fitting for me. Enjoy. (Responses, as with all guest articles, go to the author, not me.) And, taking this advice, I took a day off from work last week.

-Rb

Flu of the Soul

We don’t always deal with heartache so well. Don’t get me wrong, heartache is no fun, it’s no more fun than dealing with the flu, but that’s kind of the point. When we have the flu, what do we do? We might lay on the couch and watch The Price is Right, we might work our way up to slowly sipping some Seven Up or eating a piece of plain toast, but basically we do a whole lot of nothing. We let our body, our marvelous, miraculous body take over and do the work of healing itself.  

Yet, when we do catch a bout of heartache, what do we do? If you’re anything like me, you go into a panic searching for something to do, anything to take away the dreary ache. Sometimes we forget that our emotional illnesses are not all that different from our physical ones, and the only thing we need to do to “fix” it is… nothing but mourning. 

I hope that you don’t catch heartache or the flu anytime soon, but if you do, consider this recommendation for the former bug: Lay down on the couch, watch tv, work your way up to eating some chocolate, and then let your beautiful, intelligent body do what it was designed to do – heal.