I REALLY like this girl, and I don’t want my feelings to ruin my relationship with HER by making it awkward between us if she knows. And I really don’t want my feelings to ruin my relationship with my best friend if he’s not OK with me liking this girl (that is, when I tell him, if she likes me?). I really can’t tell anybody about this because everyone I know isn’t trustworthy besides her and my best friend, but they can’t know because it involves them. I feel like I’m going crazy. So I guess my real question to you is do I tell her about my feelings and risk ruining my relationship with her? Or do I keep it to myself and forever regret it?

Sincerely,

High School Guy

Dear High School Guy,

I think the right thing to do is to tell her. But tell her in a way that doesn’t ruin the relationship. In fact, you can tell her in a way that makes it possible for the relationship to grow stronger, no matter what happens.

The friendship doesn’t have to end. Whatever she says, you and she can go through this episode in your friendship together.

Before you say anything to her, you will want to think it through. You might want to write some things down and say them out loud beforehand, to see how it feels to say these things. You might even read out loud what you want to say to her. You decide. Decide how you want to tell her. Then find a good time and place where you and she can be alone for a while.

Then say something like this:

I have something I want to tell you, but before I do, I want you to know that I value our friendship a great deal, and no matter what happens, I want our friendship to continue. OK?

Don’t blurt it out. Make sure she understands that you really mean it, that her friendship means a lot to you and that you are serious and don’t want to screw this up. Be straight with her:

I know that you value me as a friend. I value you for a friend. But my feelings for you have grown into more than just friendship. I have feelings for you like for a girlfriend.

Pause to see what she says. If she says nothing, you might ask her: Are you surprised? Did you have an idea I might feel this way?

She might say that she’s had some clues, or has thought it might be going on. She might be relieved to be able to talk about it. Or she might not know what to say.

Since you already know that she doesn’t like “clingy” guys, reassure her that you are not “clingy.” But tell her that you really do have  feelings for her, and ask her what her feelings are for you. Ask her directly. Ask her to be honest.

Then just listen.

If she doesn’t feel that way, she may want to spare your feelings by saying what a great guy you are, and she really likes you, etc. If the words coming out of her mouth sound kind and sweet but you feel let down, then she’s telling you she really doesn’t feel that way.

I don’t mean to insult your intelligence, but our wishes can sometimes distort what we hear. If you’re at all unclear, ask her to tell you point blank, yes or no, does she want to be your girlfriend. It’s important that you know where you stand.

She might say she isn’t sure, or can’t explain how she feels. If she says anything other than she wants to be your girlfriend, she probably doesn’t, and you should accept that she doesn’t feel that way toward you.

Now here is the other part of it. If she does not want to be your girlfriend, that’s OK. But you really do want a girlfriend. If it’s not going to be her, then it’s going to be someone else.

So sooner or later, you might want to ask her how she would feel if she saw you going out with someone. Ask her if she would still be your friend then. Ask her if she thinks if you had a girlfriend that your girlfriend might get jealous of your friendship.

Again, tell her that no matter what happens, she will still be your friend.

As to your guy friend, well, I’m not sure what the rules are. The important thing is to be honest and upfront with him. If she becomes your girlfriend, he will obviously know. He may not like it but one hopes you and he could still be friends. Being honest with him doesn’t mean telling him everything that might hurt his feelings. For instance, it doesn’t mean telling him she thought he was “clingy.” Know what I mean? Follow your best judgment on this.

I have high hopes for you, for her, and for your friend. Friendship is precious. You can work it out.

We were together from teenagers, and went to college together, same degrees, same professors. Learned all the same languages. Read all the same books. Watched all the same movies.

We achieved real academic success that led to financial success. We lived in a lovely, lovely Midwestern town, and enjoyed a very, very high status of living.

But the children we had dreamed of — it is such a long and painful story. He had cancer as a youth. His father threw his sperm away. True story. I do not want to revisit it in any more detail. I have re-told it once in the last year and I cannot again. Anyway, the children we dreamed of for so many years will never exist.

We did get one child from our 22-year union — after much agony and expense.

I am now 41. Still desperate for more children. My pain at our infertility was so extreme that it led to the end of my marriage — my ex hated me for wanting things he could not give me.

I was desperate to hang onto my great love for this man whom I had loved since a teenager and my dreams of my children.

I am a walking Buddhist parable: in trying to hold two things, I lost them both. My husband is gone. I will likely never have more children. The pain of this kept me sobbing on the floor for nearly a year, wondering how I could prevent my own suicide. All my most cherished dreams — dreams of over two-decades — snatched from me.

So, I fled. I fled to a European capital with my 6-year-old son. He is in school here and now perfectly bilingual.  I should mention that my child is extraordinarily bright — he started talking at 3 months — no lie — and reading English at 2 years. His math skills are breathtaking. I do credit this to my parenting — I have been a stay-at-home mom. He now reads in two languages. He can draw up the schematic for an arduino of his own design and explain it in two languages. Yep, just turned 6.

My divorce will soon be final.

Just two months ago, living in my posh furnished apartment in a glittering European capital, I was in so much agony, I wondered how I would get my son back to the USA safely if I killed myself.

And then. Love shined its face. I met someone. It was like being renewed, reborn. Like every cliché in the world. Ecstasy. Walking on sunshine.

So, my problem? I can’t quit drinking.

My new lover does not drink. He is not contemptuous but deeply worried. And he has no experience — he is not American or European — his culture has no narrative or experience with addiction.

We discuss making a life together — on another continent, actually, and it is exciting and I have two doctorates and I know exactly how I could make the whole thing work. And it would be a vindication, actually, this adventurous new life, which all my past education seems to point me toward. We are actively trying to make a baby.

But, I can’t quit drinking. Where I am living, it is normal to drink with lunch and dinner and all the time.

And I cannot “just go to a meeting.” The school my son is in is only for three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, four days a week. This is the normal schedule for his age group. My language skills here are not good enough for me to go to anything but an English-language meeting, which are only at night — I have no caregiver for him here.

Also, I am still at the phase where “I like drinking.” I know this is a lie — that drinking does not make me more fun or creative — but I am still at that place where it feels true. Let me be clear, also, I am no casual drinker. Three bottles of wine over the course of the day seems normal. I am never falling-down drunk, but I am never sober, either.

In the early stages of my new love affair, after my lover asked me, I abstained and was happy, etc.

But you know how it is — one glass of wine at dinner leads to a glass of wine at lunch the next day and then the whole thing is a wreck again.

How do I find the will to quit, when, as I said, where I am living it is so normal?

OK, so what I am asking is help in quitting drinking. My life was an utter disaster and I had lost all.  The loss of the children — I cannot even describe the pain. I numbed the pain drinking.

I escaped, I have remade a life. New vistas are open.

But the drinking remains.

How do I quit drinking and take advantage of all the shimmering opportunities for happiness in front of me? In a foreign capital when I have 24/7 responsibility for a child and baby sitters are not an option?

Desperate

Dear Desperate,

I recently had occasion to re-read the “Doctor’s Opinion” in the book Alcoholics Anonymous.

What struck me afresh in these words published over 70 years ago — and I am always struck freshly by something — was Dr. William D. Silkworth’s clear, measured but inescapable conclusions about alcoholism, reached after  years of clinical observation and treatment of alcoholics in a hospital setting.

On page xxviii, he spends two paragraphs roughly classifying several types of alcoholics he has observed.

“Then,” he says, “there are types entirely normal in every respect except in the effect alcohol has upon them. They are often able, intelligent, friendly people. All these, and many others,” he says,  “have one symptom in common: they cannot start drinking without developing the phenomenon of craving. This phenomenon, as we have suggested, may be the manifestation of an allergy which differentiates these people, and sets them apart as a distinct entity. It has never been, by any treatment with which we are familiar, permanently eradicated. The only relief we have to suggest is entire abstinence.”

And there you have it. What he observed in the 1930s continues to be observed today: Some people just can’t drink. It goes across all social classes and body types and personalities. Some people are just this way.  As you have noted, you can stop for a time, but then you have one little drink and one thing leads to another and there you go. It seems as if this would be a noncontroversial matter, but still people go on television and write books and write to me suggesting that abstinence is nonsense and unnecessary and that anyone can learn to drink in moderation. As Dr. Silkworth noted, the suggestion of complete abstinence “immediately precipitates us into a seething caldron of debate. Much has been written pro and con, but among physicians, the general opinion seems to be that most chronic alcoholics are doomed.”

Boom. Does that not strike you with some force? It does me.

The remaining pages of the book Alcoholics Anonymous go on to explain how one can stop, and how one then goes about living while abstaining from alcohol. It turns out to be a fairly simple process, requiring only a willingness to try what is suggested.

I understand your difficulty in getting out to a meeting. So why don’t you do this: Why don’t you get a copy of the book and just read it. You don’t have to go anywhere.  You need not make your case to anyone in person. Just read the book.

I predict it will strike you with sufficient force that you will find the next steps easy to take. And if not, no harm done. You will at least have examined the primary source material and will have had a chance to make up your own mind.

Two years ago I entered an extremely challenging graduate program, which also wreaked havoc on our lives, and therefore, our relationship. Though I knew that all last summer and fall was an especially low point in our communication and in our overall happiness with each other, I’m still shocked and gutted whenever I “remember” that I cheated. Which is several times a day.

There was this other man, I’ll call him X, whom I had been acquainted with for several months. One night, while out with a group of 10 or so other friends (my husband went home early that night, the rest of us were celebrating exams being over), he paid special attention to me. At the end of the evening I acknowledged to myself that X was maybe more interesting and intelligent of a person that I’d formerly noticed. Still, I was extremely surprised later that night to receive a borderline flirtatious text from him.

I kind of hate myself for returning the attention. Looking back, I realize that I was just so flattered. No one tells you when you get married that you become invisible to other men, and it’s not that I think I’ve been out there looking for inappropriate attention …  but I found it surprisingly welcome when it came. And that’s how it all began. I’m so ashamed that it took so little, so very, very little, to tempt me into cheating on my husband.

Looking back at last year, I know now that there was something really wrong with me, for awhile. I was at least depressed, and actually I have begun to wonder if I even might have had a manic episode.  I suddenly was drinking often, and a lot (which I no longer am). I know that the pressure of my schoolwork has been affecting me in all sorts of ways that I don’t seem able to recognize in myself until that “phase” is over and I’m in the next one. However, even though I know this is a factor, I just don’t think any amount of stress is an excuse for what I did. Though my husband and I were having trouble connecting last year, and we were seriously considering a trial separation, that shouldn’t and doesn’t matter.

Because my husband and I are really open-minded people, each with friends from both genders, and neither of us prone to jealousy, I never even told one lie. There were a couple of lies of omission, but I think I was able to live in a little bit of denial for awhile just because I really never had to be sneaky, or make up stories. I just kind of detached from him, for a few weeks. Since I’ve been living in the library and so preoccupied with school the last couple of years, he didn’t notice.

The affair really only lasted a month and was much more of an emotional affair than a physical one, although the relationship was consummated, once. I have not confided any of this experience to anyone.  After sleeping with X (it makes me nauseated just to type this), even during, I knew that I really wasn’t attracted to him at all, and I just immediately realized what a mistake it all was. I got myself out of there, and began the process of ending it. Which is when I of course finally realized that X’s own mental and emotional stability was, well, compromised.

I just can’t believe how stupid I was, from the beginning. It’s hard to believe I deserve any credibility, but please know that I am usually a very perceptive, very self-aware and intentional person. How was I able to just take leave of my senses, for weeks? It is legitimately scary.

When I broke things off with X, firmly, he actually tried to physically keep me from leaving his house. Of course, nothing could have convinced me further that I wanted nothing to do with him EVER again.

Even though it all ended months ago now, there are still some things that keep me up at night. First of all, the clarity that comes with the regret of doing such a despicable thing is kind of a gift. I was able to wholeheartedly throw myself into my marriage again, and this year, 2012, my husband and I have felt closer than maybe ever. But of course, he doesn’t “know.”  We had actually discussed adultery a couple of times over the years, when we’ve seen friends or friends’ parents go through it, and we decided, each of us, that we did not want to ever know if the other had cheated on them! I know now that neither of us ever believed it would actually happen, but just by having those talks, I’m pretty sure he really doesn’t want to know.

In the beginning, I wanted to confess. Now I really don’t, and instead live in fear that he’ll hear it through the grapevine. As I hinted, X has done some things that made me realize, way later than I should have, that he is manipulative, needy and self-centered. Since he still asks me to meet him out socially on occasion, and often expresses his disapproval when I decline, I know he is not as “over” me as I pray for him to be. He can be a bit delusional. I am afraid that he will someday find justification for spilling the story to one of our common friends. I don’t know for sure that this hasn’t happened already.

What is worse is that he has a number of really incriminating and embarrassing texts from me on his phone, that he could show to anyone, at any time he felt like it. Sometimes I think I’m being paranoid when I play this scenario out in my mind, but at the same time, this is a man who pursued a married woman, the husband of whom he professes to like and respect, ensured she got drunk any time he was around her, and balked when she ended it after a few weeks. He is no saint.

Here are the issues that might be slowly killing me. How can I live with myself? My husband really is a great person, and the love of my life, and just because we were going through some doubts and hard times, I did something that would absolutely break his heart into a thousand pieces. One of the things that also stops me from confessing to him is that, if telling him destroyed our relationship, I’m scared it would also prevent him from ever trusting anyone else. I know he thinks I’m this great moral person and if I were able to betray him like that, then there’s no one who wouldn’t.

And it’s not just that I cheated on him that is so disturbing, it’s that I didn’t even choose someone, for lack of a better term, more worthy. X is just not a person I would even date, if I were single. I just feel pathetic. How can I call him needy, when I was so taken with the first person to pay me a compliment?

Sometimes I struggle with all of this even being real. Even though I might not have earned any credibility here, please believe me that this is very out-of-character for me. Now that the fog has lifted, so to speak, my memories from this affair seem like a movie that I watched, instead of a time that I lived through. There is another time in my life that feels that way, when my mother almost died after a terrible accident, and was in the hospital for months. So I know that in a way, it’s kind of a protective mechanism, but how do I make sure nothing like this ever happens again? Right now, nothing repulses me more than the thought of doing something like this again, but . . . I know now that I’m capable of really terrible things. I never knew that before.

Mostly, I’m just sick that I can’t undo this. I’ll always know. I’ll always know that I “ruined” our marriage, even though my husband (hopefully) won’t ever have an inkling. There was just this pure thing, this devotion, that we had, that we had promised to each other, and I was so ready to throw it away. And he never would. I don’t deserve him.  Living with this regret is just so unbelievably harsh. I’m pretty sure time is making it worse. It’s like the longer I “get away with it” the worse I feel. Is my whole experience just a total cliché anyway? Does everyone who cheats on their partner end up feeling this way?

I’m realizing that it’s taken me this long to even write this letter, to reach out to someone, because deep down, I still need to punish myself, and prolonging the bad feelings is the worst punishment I can inflict, that doesn’t also hurt my husband.

What do I do? How do I try to let this go? I’ve never, ever had such a low opinion of myself.

Hindsight is 20/20

Dear Hindsight,

It will take time for you to forgive yourself. It will take time for you to sort out what kinds of unhappiness led you to make this mistake.

But that’s fine. You have time. You have a pretty good life in most ways. There is just some unhappiness in your life that you have tried to ignore. This affair was the result. Once you begin looking at your unhappiness, things will start to make sense, and you will find some compassion for yourself and will begin to forgive yourself.

It just takes time.

You can begin by contacting a marriage and family counselor.

If you do nothing, it’s likely that over time the severity of this event’s impact on your emotional life will lessen. But your marriage will probably end badly.

It will end badly because as you withhold your emotions the marriage will offer less and less satisfaction until it is practically worthless as a life-supporting partnership. It will become just another burden to maintain, just another life-sucking routine.

But it doesn’t have to end badly.

A decent marriage and family counselor can help you.

Your main hurdle may be in shedding your current frame of reference long enough to begin to look at what actually happened. For instance, you express amazement that this happened, and yet empirical evidence is that it happens a lot. So, in rational terms, your error was in excluding yourself from the set of people capable of having an affair. Every married person is capable of having an affair. There was really no basis for excluding yourself. You are human like everyone else. The intensity of your desire to stay true to your husband is obviously not a guarantee of success. It is only a wish. You just made a common human error in thinking: With no basis for doing so, you excluded yourself from the set of people capable of having affairs. Similarly, I excluded myself from the set of people capable of having cancer until I got cancer. It’s a common mental error. If you go back and examine your life to find the basis for your belief that you would not cheat on your husband, you will probably find the same kinds of baseless beliefs that millions of other people have also had. So I suggest you bring some academic rigor to your examination of your own life. But don’t try that on your own. It’s too painful and destabilizing. Do this only under the care of a therapist. Because you may make a second mistake: You may blame yourself. You have to do the opposite of blaming yourself. You need to forgive yourself. That may take some time. You haven’t been taught how to forgive yourself. You will have to learn. A therapist can help you with that.

This is not a puzzle or theorem but a wound. You can put off the actual work of recovering for quite some time. But eventually, you will have to begin.

Why not begin now, while you are still in fresh pain, while you are still motivated, while you still feel that it is an intolerable moral burden to live with? Emotional pain is a great motivator.

This can be fixed. Your marriage can survive. You can forgive yourself. But you need to begin.

After this, nothing was the same. My aunt was very cold to me and even rude. I wanted to yell at her, “What are you doing, don’t you love me anymore?! I’m doing what I think is best for me!” But nothing happened. (I think there might be more to the sudden change in how she treats me but I do not know for sure.) This family chaos has really affected me because we were all so close. Being a member of a small family I loved our Sunday night dinners and conversations.

Other than aunt/uncle drama, I really miss being home. All of my best friends from high school go to the state school my aunt and uncle wanted me to go to and we still talk, but I miss them, but at the same time I do not — or maybe I just refuse  to — regret my college decision. I did what was best for me. I wanted to do something new and unexpected so I could grow and become a better person.

I am a good student, I study all of the time and I do not party, drink or do drugs, and I am doing pre-med, which I know is taking a toll. It is very competitive, but I feel like I have to make it work. To be honest, I do not know if becoming a doctor is what I really want to do, but I feel like I don’t have any other choice. I know people say it is easy to switch majors, but it really isn’t. There are so many classes to take that if I switched, I would be a year behind for most majors.

I sometimes wonder if medicine is my plan B pretending to be my plan A, and that my actual purpose in life is hiding from me. I just don’t know where or how to find it. I love traveling but I would not call myself adventurous. I am scared of falling and being alone. I am also passionate about volunteering and helping others, hence why I think I would be a good doctor. But I am absolutely terrified to think that my plan, which sounds awesome but might not be right for me, is crumbling before me and I can’t do anything about it. (I should probably mention that I am a perfectionist and I am very organized, analytical and anxious, though I am not diagnosed with anything, yet.) I freak out over everything even though I know it is not healthy. I am also a stress eater and I have tried to work on this but it is hard! I was an athlete in high school but my coaches hated me because I willingly admitted that my schoolwork would always come first, no matter what. And it still does, but everything is so much more difficult now.

I thought that once I pushed myself outside my boundary and went to a school that I chose, going without anyone I knew, it would finally help me find myself. I had to start over, make completely new friends and figure out a new city, but I find myself more lost in the sea of confusion and I don’t know what to do.

To make things even more confusing, my dad, whom I haven’t talked to or heard from — absolutely nothing — decided now would be a good time to friend-request me with no message or anything (on Facebook). Worst. Timing. Ever. Especially since I have finals for the next two weeks. Part of me wants absolutely nothing to do with him, to just block him and never think of him ever again, but at the same time … I just don’t know. He probably just wants something, maybe money, which I don’t have. I am lucky I am even able to go to college thanks to scholarships, and the rest is coming out of my mom’s savings, which is not much and from the little I earned being a swim instructor at a local camp.

I am trying to take charge of my life. I am becoming more involved in things outside of studying, which I do all of the time. For example, I was just elected to my school’s Pre-med Society and our science and engineering Student Council board. And I tried to get a position shadowing or working in a lab this summer, but no response. I called three times, but nothing and do not want to harass anyone, but I could really use some experience, plus I really think it would be beneficial to see if it is something I want to do with the rest of my life. I mean, I only have one life and don’t want to mess it up! Which is a problem: I can’t imagine messing up or making the wrong decision. I know I over-think everything, but … I just do not know what to do, or how to fix my life so I can be happy, or at least not as sad as I am now.

I feel absolutely terrible because my mom tries so hard to help me. She lost her job and has been unemployed, but she still does so much for me. She sends me wonderful college survival packages and gifts and I know she loves me so much. She is the person I trust the most; she is not only my mom, she is also my best friend, so she hears the worst of everything, and the worst of me. There have been too many times that I just blew up because of how frustrated, sad and confused I get about life and school and she is the one who gets all of it and I just feel so terrible! I always apologize, but it is not enough and I know it. I know that it kills her to see her only child so upset and unhappy and it just drives me crazy. I don’t know who else to talk to. I have a small group of friends at school, but I am very closed-off and can’t tell everyone everything. I am not that trusting and it is not for them to know or worry about (that’s why I have never had a boyfriend or anything close to that, I guess).

I know life could be much worse, but for me, this year has been … not good. I am close to my heaviest weight I have ever been (I think I might have lost a couple pounds in the past few weeks because I started counting calories), and this is the saddest I have ever been. I kind of wonder sometimes if I have a case of depression, because there are some nights (more than I would like to admit to) that all I do is cry in my dorm’s stairwell.

Random thought: If I do decide to do medicine I think it might be nice to take a year off and travel and do volunteer work. And now that I think about that more, it sounds amazing, but I don’t think I would ever be able to do that. If I took time off, I don’t know if I would be able to go back to all of the stress and sadness, especially if it just gets worse from here.

I am not desperate enough to do anything drastic, and I never want to get to that point and that is why I am asking for some advice or anything. Please. What can I do about my aunt and uncle? What should I do about the guy who does not deserve the title of dad? And how do I find my purpose, the one thing that I am amazing at and enjoy, where I can help people and travel and volunteer before I collapse under the pressure? How can I become happy and satisfied with my life and myself?

Sincerely,

Completely Lost in a Sea of Sadness and Uncertainty

Dear Completely Lost,

Take a year off and travel and do volunteer work. Do it. Make a plan.

You know that it would make you happy to take a year off and travel and do volunteer work. So that is now your job. Not next year but the following year — the year between your sophomore and junior years — you need to travel and do volunteer work. Find where you want to go. Look at programs that can help. Perhaps you can do a work-study program, or be an exchange student. Or perhaps you could just travel without any set program.

You can do it. But this is interesting: Right on the heels of your discovery of what you really, really want comes heavy doubt: “I don’t think I would ever be able to do that. If I took time off, I don’t know if I would be able to go back to all of the stress and sadness, especially if it just gets worse from here.”

So your job is to accept that you have this doubt and fear. Sure, it’s possible that there will be difficulties. Difficult does not mean impossible. There will be a price but there is always a price. You have some control over what the price is. You have some control over the details of where you go and for how long. But do not let this automatic thought of, “Oh, I don’t know …” stop you in your tracks. That’s all it is — an automatic, unexamined, negative, defeating thought, the kind that practitioners of cognitive therapy teach us to identify and deconstruct. You can deconstruct it by noting that it is not based on any clear facts, that it is global and not specific, that not knowing the future is a normal thing, that when problems are broken down into their parts we can find solutions for them. That is, what you are really saying is that there would be a certain increase in the stress, which you don’t yet know how you would handle. That’s a manageable problem: You can estimate just how much stress this would create and come up with a plan for dealing with that increased stress. So I really hope you do that.

About your dad: I suggest you let your mom know he contacted you and ask her what you should do. About your aunt and uncle, here is an idea: Reach out to them. Send them cards. Tell them how you are doing. Just reach out to them, without asking for explanations or anything, but just sending them positive energy. Even if it doesn’t change their minds or feelings, it will make you feel better about the situation. As to finding your purpose, that will come through experience; you follow your instincts and talents, and learn from what happens, and that eventually comes together as a sense of purpose. That is, your sense of purpose develops from action in the world; it doesn’t simply appear to you in your mind like a vision.

Before finishing, I also want to say something about the process of writing a long letter. It is like you wrote your way through all this gloom to a glimmer of hope. All of a sudden — this “random thought” comes to you. This “random thought” is the most important thought that you have in the letter. It reinforces what I have observed and hypothesized about human interactions, and also my sense of why psychotherapy is so useful: Because we get to tell the whole story. We get to stay on the topic long enough for some sunshine to emerge. We cruise along in the gloom until almost exhausted and then: What was that? Look! Is that a ray of sunshine? This is yet another reason why we run letters at such length: It affords us the chance to observe an individual mind in the process of problem-solving through writing.

I might also note that one reason you miss the Sunday dinners is that during long dinners people get a chance to talk at length. Stuff develops. Which makes me think that at school, in your studying, it might not be just the sheer volume of work but how you divide the work up and the intervals at which you switch subjects, so you’re not able to spend enough time on any one subject, that is leading to anxiety. So try changing your study habits so you go more deeply into each subject before turning to the next. You may find that if you stick with a reading, right on the edge of exhaustion is where you begin to solve problems.

But mainly, to give you some hope about the future, I suggest you commit to this plan of taking time off to travel and do volunteer work. If you plan and work toward this, you will always have this little light of hope to think about. Before you go to sleep you can think about it. When you are stressed or unhappy you can think about it. It can be your private little guiding light.

Through my own searching  I’ve come to realize in these years one important way his death has changed me. It has enabled me to value the days more, and fear living less. This is a wonderful thing. Having been visited by the experience of the death of someone close to me, I feel like I am now much better at understanding what matters and what does not. That’s helped me to become a more relaxed person, and more adventurous too.

The problem is that I’ve changed in ways that make the relationship between my wife and me increasingly fraught. So much so that if it weren’t for the kids I feel like we might contemplate leaving one another. I don’t want to run away and see the world or be with other people. It’s rather that I find myself intolerant of my wife’s anxieties because they get in the way of doing what I think really matters, which is enjoying the time we have on this earth. That may mean curling up in bed all afternoon with a book, or walking, or whatever. But what it does not mean is worrying over small things. We’ve talked about this. For me this internal shift feels too big to change, and besides I don’t want to. She doesn’t feel it’s fair for me to expect her to change to match the new me, which is true, and thinks her way of doing things is just fine.

So we’ve reached an impasse, and I don’t know what to do about it. I suppose that our values are now different, where once they were not.

I’d appreciate your thoughts.

Found and Lost

Dear Found and Lost,

Through this death, you received a gift. It was like an inheritance. It’s something to bring into your marriage and share. It may not be apparent to your wife what this gift is, exactly, or how she is to use it, because you received it. But it is a gift that can be shared in the marriage.

The way you share it is simply to embody it and be faithful to it. The way you do not share it is by insisting that your wife all of a sudden change. She can’t do that. She doesn’t have to. Part of this gift is realizing that your wife is who she is, and she doesn’t have to change in order for you to enjoy this gift.

Simply the way it has changed you is a gift that can be shared. You share it by living in your new way. You share it just by being who you are. When you fail to join her in her worries, that is a gift to her. Eventually, it may have an effect, but its effect on her is not the point. The point is in how you now go forward, bearing this new way of being. Please try to think of it this way. If you think of it the other way, as if now that you’ve changed now your wife has to change too or else, then it is not a gift, it is more like a curse. If it tears you and her apart then it is not a gift.

Also if you hoard it then it will tear you apart. If you move farther away from her out of scorn and disappointment, then it will not be a gift but a curse and it will tear you two apart. You need to share this gift you received, this gift of knowledge of how precious life is. Share it not by setting up an obstacle course for your wife; not by testing her, but by opening your hands and sharing this knowledge with her. If she doesn’t seem to get it, don’t worry about it. Don’t get on her case. She doesn’t have to get it. That’s not the point. The point is now there is someone in her life who has learned something profound. One day she may value that. Relax and laugh and share with her how you are no longer worried about what’s going to happen. Let this gift suffuse your body and mind so that you walk around and radiate it. Radiate this new feeling that life is precious and everything is going to be OK. Let this gift radiate out from you and she may pick it up after a time.

It won’t cure her or make her a different person. That’s OK. She may be thinking at times, what the hell is this? She has her own problems and her own nightmares. You can’t fix that.

But you can fully embody the gift of grief and loss yourself. That’s all you have to do.