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).
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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.
You could consider finding an old cemetery you have a connection to and cleaning it up. Cemeteries slowly decay: the stones get overgrown with moss and lichens, the engraving fades and disappears from weathering, stones fall over and get broken and buried. Groundskeepers and sextons can prevent some of this, but usually their duties don't include repairing anything but the most egregious damage (and sometimes not even then). You'll want to contact the cemetery board and ask for permission first, but they'll probably be happy for the help.
The easiest thing you can do is cleaning off the stones. The stuff you want is called "D/2 Biological Solution"; this is what they use at Arlington to keep the headstones white. The befores-and-afters can be quite striking, particularly for marble stones which can go from greenish-gray to gleaming white. The typical procedure is to spray the stone with water, then with D/2, then scrape the worst of the growth off with a plastic scraper and let it sit (the D/2 will continue to work for weeks). A few hours a week is enough to make a marked improvement over the course of a few months. You can get more involved and get into resetting and repairing stones, but that requires a larger time commitment and more specialized skills.
If you do this you'll begin to develop connections to the people buried there. You'll find the graves of people who lived long and fulfilling lives and people who suffered tragic accidents, people who were very important to the town and people who ended up buried there by happenstance, people who were very wealthy and people who weren't. If you're in America, you'll find graves of people who emigrated from the old world (and may even be written in a foreign language) and people whose families lived in that town for generations. You'll see names you recognize from streets and parks, and maybe even from friends and relatives. You'll get a sense of what it might have been like to live in a time when deadly diseases were more prevalent and every family had a child or two (or more) who died from smallpox or diphtheria. You'll also spend a lot of time around monumental sculpture and may even uncover some sentimental poetry.
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