I struggle hearing about people’s pain since my own experience with it. In trying to do my bit to help, I’ve found the world of pain provides endless gifts of empathy, understanding, love and compassion. And the gifts don’t stop there, they keep moving, evolving, they are passed on… around and around…

Excerpt from Sarah Wilson’s blog, Posted on March 14th, 2013

“I have days when I resent blogging. I’ve been blogging now for almost four years, 3-4 posts every week, largely unpaid for my toils, sometimes uprooted by trolls. I wonder why I do it. Some days. I mean, why would any sane person expose their controversial brain farts, their innermost reflections and their ugliest fears to hundreds of thousands of strangers each month who are then free to pull apart such thoughts and farts among their friends and in their own heads? My family ask me this often in their unaffected, un-social-media’d way. But, then, they know I have always been a slightly unhinged personality.

But just as I’m about to throw in the towel, I get reminded of why I blog and why I’m so bloody blessed.

I blog because it allows me to help people. I don’t have dibs on myself. I’m largely a selfish, tight, hard-to-live-with, neurotic human. But I get the biggest kick out of helping other raw, open humans who, too, struggle at times just to get out of bed each day and go through the human experience. Nothing else matters. This is my dharma. And, as I say, just when I doubt myself – working as I do in my isolated, tight, selfish way – I’ll be reminded of said dharma. Someone will come up to me in the supermarket and tell me their story. Or I’ll hear about how a post I wrote connected two strangers on opposite sides of the world, who then helped each other out…generously, openly, lovingly.

This happened a year or so ago when a reader – Gordon – followed my advice to get a VA in a second-world country. Gordon was so touched by the VAs work and life story, he and his wife went to visit him in Thailand and helped him start up his own company, which enabled him to get married. Gordon and his wife went to the wedding, too. He shared this story with Jo and I. It made me weep at the time.

It happened again this week. SMACK BANG as I needed it. Reader Soula contacted me and asked if I’d mind writing to a young family member who was in hospital suffering from depression. She thought a note from me might cheer her up. She likes my blog and book.”

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