The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
What's a way I can volunteer where I can be near or acquainted with death? Stuff like suicide hotlines, or doing some work around a funeral home, or something. Not anything like a job, but some thankless work I can do on the odd weekend where everyone around is sad or somber. Honestly I can probably only spare a few hours a week.
I want the burden of mourning, or the heaviness. I want to do something necessary and generally unpleasant, because I think I'm particularly well-suited for emotional lows or even tragedy (but maybe not necessarily trauma). When my 19-year-old sister-in-law overdosed, I experienced plenty of serious faces and serious conversations, and I was slightly intoxicated by it, like the places we were going and the things people were saying mattered very much.
Suicide hotlines, funeral homes. If you want something really goddamn heavy - try to find a way to volunteer in a pediatric cancer ward. Hospice is second - but in a pediatric cancer ward you'll see families that are more or less broken by grief. If an old man with a pack-a-day cigarette habit he's had for 60 years is dying of lung cancer, few people are surprised. Even the old man himself often shrugs and says something like "I knew the smoking was gonna catch up to me". When it's a twelve-year-old, it is different. I was a medical student in a cancer ward for a month. I don't have the words to describe it: if we could resurrect Wilfred Owen and have him walk those halls, he might be able to write poetry sufficient for the task.
Daniel Abse and Dante might be sufficient too.
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