Dear Amy: I am a 25-year-old woman. I have dealt with a lot of loss in my life.
I have lost more friends, family, co-workers and classmates than I can even remember, through accidents, drunken driving and gun violence.
I’ve learned how to suck it up and just go on. I show others I am doing OK, but in reality I’m an emotional wreck who hides my feelings.
My father always taught us to suck it up and not cry.
On the five-year anniversary of my best friend’s murder, I sat in my room for a long time on the floor holding a picture of the two of us together.
Then I got dressed and went to a birthday party, showing everyone I was OK.
I never really dealt with losing him. How do I deal with all this loss?
I am not depressed, suicidal or anything like that. I would like to face this without the help of a shrink. I see no sense in paying someone to hear me talk, and I refuse to take depression medicine because I am not depressed. — Missing Loved Ones
Dear Missing: First let me educate you about “shrinks.” Refusing to “pay someone to hear you talk” is like refusing to visit a physician to set your broken bone. The right therapist leads you toward healing through insight.
It isn’t enough to be strong. To be a healthy survivor, you also have to be resilient to face your most fearsome feelings, actually feel them, and be brave enough to have relationships even when you know that all love is accentuated by loss.
You would definitely benefit from talking about this, if not with an individual therapist, then with a group of people also wrestling with the pain of loss.
You could start by contacting Compassionate Friends, to see if attending a meeting of this grief group would be right for you: .
Dear Amy: Recently a co-worker asked to borrow my cellphone to make a long-distance call because she had forgotten hers. It caught me off guard, and if I hadn’t been charging it I would have lent it to her.
I got the impression she intended to take it to another location and make the call.
I began to feel uncomfortable with the idea and realized I would not ask this of any of my co-workers.
The more I think about it, a cellphone is a very personal thing. It has a contact list, text messages and photos stored in it. My co-worker is very forgetful. She has a tendency to lose her own things — what if she lost mine?
A cellphone can be expensive to replace, not to mention inconvenient. If she asks again, I am tempted to simply refuse.
Is that harsh? Or should I claim that my phone has just run out of battery power? — Not Into Sharing
Dear Not: You have the right to keep your property to yourself.
However, I don’t really see the harm in lending your device to someone you know who’s in a jam and needs to make a quick call.
I’ve borrowed and lent phones and have never had a problem. (If a good Samaritan hadn’t been willing to lend me his phone last year, I’d be living in the Cincinnati airport.)
If you don’t want to lend out your phone, don’t lie about it; just say, “I’m sorry, but I never lend out my phone.”
Just remember that when you refuse a favor, you remove someone else’s motivation to grant a favor to you.
Dear Amy: I’m another dissatisfied reader, complaining about your answer to “Irritated Uncle.”
The poor man just wanted to give gifts that would be appreciated — and you jumped all over him!
Dear Also: You’ll have to get in line to spank me on this one. I alone seem to have found this “Uncle” not only irritated but also irritating. — Also Irritated
Send questions via e-mail to askamy@tribune.com or by mail to Ask Amy, Chicago Tribune, TT500, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611.
