Sorrow

“Sorrow absorbs everything and magnifies it,” says Eva María Rodríguez in a text published in La Mente es Maravillosa. This idea is essential when trying to understand someone in their darkest moments.

If you take literally what your friend says during those moments when he sees “everything in black,” he may seem exaggerated to you, like someone seeing ghosts where there are none. But if you can, for a moment, put yourself in his shoes and understand that he is hurt, wounded, speaking from a place of raw pain, you may be able to let go of the most intense or exaggerated parts of what he says and reach the heart of the matter, where there is often a great deal of truth.

The truth of what the other person is experiencing may be there, beyond the exact content of their words and beyond the way they are able to express them in that moment of pain.

Sorrow magnifies everything. That is why, in the middle of a crisis, words such as never, always, ever, everyone… may appear. Taken literally, they are not necessarily valid or true. But they are often an exaggeration of something that is true and genuinely present: a feeling of abandonment, lack of love, neglect, or loneliness that the person may be experiencing at that moment.

Sorrow also absorbs everything because, when someone is suffering, they may stop seeing what is still there, everything good that continues to exist in their present situation. Pain can, for a time, sweep away everything that took so much effort to build. And that is understandable. That is how sorrow works.

But if you keep this idea in mind, perhaps you can be there in a different way: be a shoulder without judging, offer support without feeling that you have to solve everything, and remain a friend even when, today, some doors may seem closed.

Because accompanying someone in their pain does not always mean agreeing with everything they say. Sometimes it simply means being able to hear what lies behind their words.