I was reminded recently by another bereaved mother that my child loss experience is not universal.
I appreciate her honesty and bravery.
And I would just like to take a moment to say:
“I hear you. I see you. I acknowledge that you have a unique perspective that I do not share by experience.”
It’s hard to put myself in someone else’s shoes when I’ve never had to wear them myself.
We are all limited in many ways by the trials, temptations, joys and triumphs we have known in our lives.
But I don’t want to sit satisfied in the silo of my own experience.
I want to enlarge my understanding of what others are going through, how they are coping, how they are hurting.
So I begin by sharing MY story because it’s the only one I know from the inside.
But it is not the only one I want to know.
Tell me your story.
I promise to listen.
We buy tickets to movies, purchase books and cruise the Internet gobbling up other people’s stories. Yet we often make it difficult for those we know to tell us theirs.
We jockey for attention at gatherings, or worse, give all our attention to electronic devices. We think we KNOW other people’s stories so we don’t want to bore ourselves with listening again.
The truth is, we know less than we think about the folks we rub shoulders with every day.
Read more here: Tell Me Your Story
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