I have experienced a lot of loss in my life. A mixture of personal life and my job means I have seen how fragile life is. As such, I try to live my life with kindness. I try to live in a way that means, if someone in my life were to die tomorrow, I could move on knowing I had no regrets at all. I also have a very real fear that something I do will lead to someone’s death.
Both of these things are actually causing me a lot of distress. There is one relationship in my life that is causing me so much upset. Going NC is not an option (family and children involved). But the impact on my mental health is horrendous. However, even though I know we have been treated badly, I cannot shake the fear that if something awful were to happen tomorrow, I would feel so sad and so guilty that the situation had come to this. But equally, my fear of this has also meant I haven’t stood up for myself at times. Telling myself to let things go because life is too short seems to have actually just led to certain people repeatedly taking advantage.
So how do you get that balance? Life is so short and, in the grand scheme of things, certain unkind behaviours maybe don’t matter. But, over time, they build up and up and have led to some real tension and upset. But the thought of raising it makes me feel so anxious in case one of them dies that I convince myself to let it go.