Other people's sad

I'm still thinking about the encounter with the neighbor moving out. It hits a particular part of my personality, the one where I think (1) I should somehow share in another person's sadness, (2) that I can handle it better than they can and so (3) by sharing it I can take some of it away. Okay, now that I've written that poorly worded sentence, there is a sense in which I think it is true. That sharing sadness helps others. But my brain takes is a little (too) farther, in thinking I can take on the person's sadness for them.

I've felt this about a lot of adults in my life, especially when I was younger - that I could bear their sadness more easily than they could. Really? Seriously? That's one I need to practice not believing. As if my own life doesn't have its own sadnesses for me to deal with. I somehow forget all that I've been through with A and living in a new place and M and the dog and my depression, and think that somehow I should have had time and energy for this other person, while I was busy trying to keep myself above water. Or for this other person's sad. To take it on on top of my own.

And it leads to a nasty side-effect, that I am uncomfortable sitting with someone, in silence, and just being there, letting them have their sadness. Or, at least, I'm not good at doing that. And in the end, that is what I regret most about Tuesday morning with the neighbor. I quickly jumped in when she said she was going to a home, that it might be easier, to have all that help. And she agreed. Because, as her daughters told me later, she's a brave woman. But I wish what I had been able to do for her, and which I was able to do with her daughters later, was to ask how she felt about the move. And to let her tell me.

Because not broaching a topic, that both people in a conversation kind of know the answer to, doesn't make it disappear, or become a non-issue. It is still there. That sadness, the nervousness about a new place after living here 30 years (also learned from her daughters). All the ways I might have actually made the connection I was so regretting having missed with her, had I just listened, and asked, and not pretended that all was okay so we could smile together.

I can't take on another person's sadness. But I can just sit and listen and let them be sad.

(Note: I realize this neighbor might not have been all that sad, but I've mixed together two topics here - my lost opportunity to connect with her and my tendency to want to take on other people's sadness).

I do, however, need to learn more about how to do that last part with boundaries. Because part of the difficulty I have is that I drown in other people's sadness. It overtakes me, again, maybe because I think (mistakenly) that if I can just feel sad enough for them, they won't have to? I'm not sure, but it makes me very cautious about interactions with people who are sad. That said, not everyone, but some people, who have a lot of sad, constantly, in their lives. Or who feel and project a lot of it. It overwhelms me to the point I feel like I can't breathe. And that just doesn't work, now does it?