Hi WritingDamsel
While I feel I'm not in a position to offer advice, as my mum is still present in my life, I can not help but feel so incredibly deeply for you. My heart goes out to you so much, with your mum having passed and with you having suffered so much through this. Perhaps you could offer me advice in how to manage to make it through so much initial grief, based on your own experience. With my mum being 85 years old and in poor health, it's gotten to a stage in her life where I cannot help but wonder how I will manage to live without her when she passes.
With my mum being one of my greatest and most supportive guides in my life and one of my closest friends, we have open conversations about who I'll find as a guide in the future when she's no longer physically here. Because her guidance stretches over so many areas of expertise (financial guidance, soulful guidance, psychological guidance, guidance with elements of humour etc), there may need to be a number of people to fill her shoes. With the mini crisises you mention, I'm wondering whether you've had any supportive and constructive guides through these or if it's largely been about trying to guide yourself.
Given my experience with depression over the years, there are a number of things I've discovered when it comes to the nature of a really good guide. 1)They'll create some sense of direction, 2)they can create a vision of the solution and/or the way forward (in our imagination) for us to see, 3)they can shed light on what appears as a dark part of our path, making things much clearer and 4)they can raise us up and sometimes out of what can feel like a depression or incredibly stressful time. Without them, the challenges can involve developing a sense of direction on our own, developing some sort of constructive vision when all we can see is the worst case scenario or a blank screen, seeking forms of enlightenment in the dark and raising our self through and beyond the challenges we face. In the process of guiding our self, there can be so many incredibly tough learning curves as we're learning how to do it. We will get things wrong but we will also get things right. The challenge can also involve learning through experience and practice, while remaining proud of our self in the the learning process.
As a practitioner of meditation, I've mentioned to my mum before about how I will try and manage to gain a sense of connection to her (through meditation) after she's passed. My challenge will involve gaining a sense of what she would say or show me in a particular challenge, regarding the way forward. Can you gain a sense of what your mum would say about the people at work who are upsetting you with their conversation?
