Identifying details and some non-essential circumstances have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.
A couple of days later, my friend messaged me.
She had worked out what had shaken her so badly.
It wasn’t any one thing she had heard.
It was the shock of realising how much she didn’t know.
She hated it.
The feeling that she had been asleep.
Then shocked awake.
Now she was scared witless because she didn’t know what to believe.
The world she thought she was living in no longer felt solid.
But she didn’t know if this new picture was true either.
That was the real problem.
She said keeping it simple had helped.
I hadn’t solved anything.
I had asked what she needed right then.
Then we had slowed it all down and done a bit of sorting.
What did she know?
What didn’t she know?
What needed checking?
That gave her somewhere to stand.
She realised she had been spinning.
She needed enough calm to think.
Then she saw that her fear had ramped up as fact, allegation and possibility blurred together.
Everything had felt urgent.
Every question seemed to demand an immediate answer.
And certainty.
She knew there would be more she couldn’t make sense of straight away.
A whole bloody world could land on her phone before she had finished breakfast.
She couldn’t make the world predictable.
Nor could she keep up with everything.
Her next step wasn’t to know everything.
It was to catch the spin earlier.
Then ask herself:
What had actually happened?
What was being claimed?
Did any of it require a decision today?
The rest could wait.
She wasn’t going to let shock do her thinking for her.
And she started to wonder whether she had been asleep at all.
Maybe she hadn’t dismissed anything.
Maybe she had simply been living her life.
Working.
Caring for people.
Running a home.
Getting children where they needed to be.
None of us can keep watch over everything that’s going on.
We can’t answer every call to action.
My friend knew some things.
She didn’t know others.
Same as the rest of us.
She still didn’t have answers to everything she had raised over coffee.
But now she understood what had knocked her sideways.