It is hard to be with another's pain if we cannot be with our own. Since I was a child I have always felt a deep sense of responsibility to ease others' pain. But I have discovered that often, beneath this genuine and admirable desire, lies an inability to be with my own sorrow. Several years ago, watching a close friend suffer when a brain aneurysm took away her life as she knew it, I wrote in my journal, "I won't ask much. But if you would just let me save your life, perhaps it will not hurt so much to know I cannot save my own.
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