Like when my mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I couldn't fix that. The doctor couldn't fix that. All we could do was be there for my mom and say goodbye at the end. Recovering from her loss, dealing with the grief--there was no way to fix that either. There was enduring the pain, there was working through the loss, but there wasn't a fix.
I'm also strongly empathic and this makes it doubly tough for me when friends are going through hard things in their lives. I feel the pain with them.
So I understand that I can't do anything except support them the best I can while they struggle through their issues. I've even gotten better about accepting this as I've gotten older. But while my head gets it, my heart still wants to fix things. I want everyone to be okay, even if they can't manage happy.
With my mom, life felt so overwhelming, and to get through, I dropped into something I call triage mode. What do I have to do today? And that's what I would do and everything else was dropped. Some of the things I didn't do ended up being on the top of the list on another day, but some of them simply didn't need to be done at all.
It was shortly after my mom's death that I switched to a daily planner to organize myself. This worked much better for me than a weekly planner. I still use a daily planner and list out my to do list for the day. Back then I did use the top three box on the top of the page because that might be all I finished that day. Now, more than four years later (I can't believe it's been four years!), I rarely use the top priority box because I do have the bandwidth to get through the entire list.
So my advice to my friends, and to anyone else going through tough, overwhelming life stuff, is to try triage mode to survive. Maybe it won't work for everyone, but it's worked for me and a number of other people I've told about it. It might work for others, too.
