On Watching Archives - Page 3 of 4

How to write about Chronic Illness (Watchers, we are not Biographers)

Are you ever tempted to sit down and try and order the pieces of your life?

As you love and care for your sick Loved Ones, do you ever wish you could straighten your hardships out into a coherent narrative, one with a tidy moral and neat conclusion?

Do you feel that if only you had a polished version of your life, it would be a enough to redeem your suffering, because then it would have a purpose?

In short, do you ever neglect your role as a Watcher in order to become ‘Biographer’?

This is what it looks like:

You are often on the look-out for a purpose or a theme behind your Loved One’s suffering, or in day to day occurrences

You have a yearning desire to put each new experience into words so that others can learn

You are tempted to dismiss parts of life which don’t lend themselves to ‘story’

You are drawn to those areas of life which seems just a little bit more dramatic, heroic or exciting

You feel that your life and experiences are wasted if nobody reads about it and learns

I’m going to switch to ‘we’ now, because this is something I am guilty of at times…

Continue reading “How to write about Chronic Illness (Watchers, we are not Biographers)”

Friends, we are not doctors. (Is it wrong to want your chronically ill Loved One cured?)

When I was little I toyed with the idea of becoming a doctor. Not because I had an undying desire to see sick people healed, but because there was one ill person I wanted to cure. I longed to take away my mum’s pain with a single flick of a pen on a prescription pad.

While my career aspirations soon headed off down a different track, I think this desire is something we can all sympathise with. To some extent it never does away.

As care-givers and support-bearers and Watchers we would love to see our Loved Ones healed. Yet it can become dangerous when this simple desire begins to morph into something subtly different: a belief that it is our responsibility to cure them.
When this happens we swap our role as a Watcher for that of a “doctor”.

Watchers we are not… doctors

Do you ever feel the need to cure your chronically ill loved one?

Have you accidentally become a “doctor”? Do you ever:

Feel your goal in the relationship is to bring healing?
Spend time collecting remedies (via Google, word of mouth etc) and offering them to your Loved One?
Feel better when you can diagnose the cause of your Loved One’s distress that day. Does being able to rate it on a scale of 1-10 and use the appropriate words to describe and understand it, reassure you?
Feel like a failure when you are unable to reduce your Loved One’s suffering, or bring them relief?

“Watchers, we are not doctors. We have a higher calling.” Tweet @calledtowatch

Continue reading “Friends, we are not doctors. (Is it wrong to want your chronically ill Loved One cured?)”

How to love your wider supporters

It’s easy for us, whose lives are so embroiled with the pain of our Loved One, to forget those around us who aren’t Watchers.

We should not overlook the lives of our wider supporters and focus exclusively on our sick Loved One. So far, so obvious, but how do we put it into practice?

How do we love our wider supporters (and why do we need a post on this?)

Surely, if we all just act like civilised human beings there’s no need for a specific address on how to ‘love’ those who are not watching as we are.

On one hand that’s true, and on another it’s not. You see, Watching means that we are used to having the pain of one person impact our life. We are used to focusing inward, towards them. We know what it is like to relate to people who are suffering.

And we might, in the process, discover we have a lot less patience for those who are not.

This, my friends, is somewhat natural.

It is also a problem.

Continue reading “How to love your wider supporters”

What to do when our wider supporters hurt us

Wider supporters will hurt us at times

I think it’s important to acknowledge that either directly or inadvertently, wider supporters can sometimes make life harder rather than easier. It’s part of being human and living in a broken world.

They may:

Brush away your complaints or concerns. “Ah well, sickness is part of life, isn’t it? We all have burdens.”
Ask you to take up ministry opportunities when your life is full of caring for your Loved One
Compare your suffering to theirs, “Oh I know exactly how you feel”
Tell you exactly how they feel – without asking how you are
Assume they know what you need, or what you ought to do
Treat you differently because you are a Watcher
Treat you exactly the same, as if being a Watcher has not affected you.
Treat you as a walking newsletter, rather than an individual in your own right

Continue reading “What to do when our wider supporters hurt us”

Why do our ‘wider supporters’ matter?

We’ve talked about Loved Ones, those of us who suffer day in and day out from either physical or mental illness.
We’ve talked about Watchers, us whose lives are directly affected by their illness, and are called to love them, yet are unable to help them.
But what about those who fit into neither category?

We all like to use labels.

And they are necessary, and useful. Sometimes, however, they miss the mark. They cause us to overlook questions that need to be asked, and they paint the entire situation with broad sweeps, when actually, life is a lot more intricate.

When they leave us talking about ‘them’ and ‘those people’, it’s easy to forget that some of the time, in some circumstances, those people are ‘us’.

We are all wider supporters

It doesn’t matter if we are also individuals suffering with chronic illnesses or caregivers. It doesn’t matter if we’ve never met anyone with a chronic illness or we work in a hospital and it’s all we see.

Continue reading “Why do our ‘wider supporters’ matter?”

The moral benefits of “being there” for someone with a chronic illness

Last weeks post was about the dangers of Watching… and yet, Watching also has many saving graces.

Being there for someone who is struggling can bring it’s own particular temptations. We can begin to feel entitled or special, because we are doing something that is hard. We may be inclined towards bitterness or envy.

Yet it’s important to remember the flip side of the equation. While Watching can present us with temptation, it can also be a huge benefit!

Watching benefits us like an electric fence.

Watching, like every circumstance, narrows our experience of life. Let me give an example:

The man who is happily married may be less tempted to cheat on his spouse. His marriage is a fence.

Yet the same man, because he is happily married, may be tempted to rip off his company to get more money to build a desirable lifestyle.

His fence, while keeping certain ‘dangers’ in, keeps other temptations out.

So how can Watching benefit us personally?

Continue reading “The moral benefits of “being there” for someone with a chronic illness”

This is what it looks like:

This is what I’ve learnt:

1. I have everything to gain and nothing to lose