I’m friends with a man. We fall out of contact and don’t talk for a few months. It’s nothing personal. He’s busy, I’m busy. It happens.

I talk to a mutual friend of ours. It seems the man has fallen on hard times. He’s lost his business. He’s dabbling in vice again. He is staying out late and wants to leave his wife for a younger woman. This is supposedly a man who has found God.

I decide to let him make the first move. He sends an e-mail and finally calls to tell me he’s been going through a rough time. He has a new number, a new address, a new church. We don’t talk specifics. All he tells me is that he is on the right track and wants me to come see him soon. I make sure to put that future meeting on his shoulders. I make sure that he knows I will come if he calls me and tells me the details. I don’t think it’s rude for me to ask people to be responsible.

I’ve had to be an adult for longer than I’ve been legal. It’s not always fun. It began in high school and reached a pinnacle in college. Sometimes I was just a buzz kill. Other times I was a surrogate father.

When I was 19 I was friends with a guy 11 years older than me. He was a habitual drug user and chronic asshole. Maybe the attraction was that he was streetwise and smart. He had been places I desired to go and had met people that seemed too bizarre to be real. When he came on to me, I simply turned him down. We remained drinking buddies, but after his 50th drunken rant, I began to rethink. He got in trouble, lost a job and seemed hell-bent on destroying his reputation. Every time he fell, I tried to console him and offer advice. By the time we stopped talking, I was pleading with a 33-year-old man to act like an adult. I realized I can’t help people who haven’t bottomed out.

By my junior year in college, I was paying the monthly rent for four of my friends. All the utilities were in my name. After the first of the month, I put up notes with the amount my roommates owed. One tab was well over a grand. I was the youngest person in the house and I was the only one keeping it afloat.

After I graduated, one of those roommates later hired me for an event. When I completed my job, he tried to change the amount owed. I refused and we argued. He cursed me and hung up. When he finally paid, I ended our relationship. For years I watched him spiral out of control. I didn’t want to be involved with a man who didn’t take care of himself.

Years pass. He reaches out to me. He is addicted. His wife took his son and left him. He wants to go to rehab but thinks he can recover without it. He’s on the prowl. He’s looking for people he can call friends. I don’t want to speak with him. Desperate people want sympathy. He hasn’t changed.

This status as a mediator, as a probation officer, as a sponsor, it makes me feel abused. I try to connect the dots. I try to find a pattern. Why the fuck do people I care about keep driving themselves into an early grave? Why the fuck do I become the door between them and six feet under?

Is this common ground? Do other people have multiple associates who self-destruct? An informal survey of my more stable comrades leads to a resounding, “No.”

I believe there is good in people. I believe in that Keltner theory that charity is installed from birth. I want to think that with the right guidance, the right pressure, a person’s internal compass will lead them towards virtue. A guess you could call it faith in mankind. That’s sort of hypocritical for a guy who hasn’t seen a sanctuary in seven years, but fuck it. You need to trust something, right?

Last week I met up with a friend who was headed down the same path as the others. He dabbled in light drugs and eventually moved onto harder ones. This was the first time I kept my distance. During his ordeal, I always asked questions. I judged his judgments and cross-examined his motives. He ignored my conscious and his own. Within a year or so he hit bottom and lost his job. I did nothing but wait. For the record, watching a friend slowly kill themselves ranks among the lowest points in your life. I never got too close, but managed to observe without getting involved. I trusted the system of failure to resuscitate. I trusted faith to awaken new hope.

Seeing him for the first time in two years, there was newfound energy. He was clean. He was happy. He had love and direction and inspiration. Christ, he smiled, and it wasn’t out of pathetic self-reflection. We talked and talked and with every moment I could see there was genuine optimism in his voice. Best of all, it came without disfiguration. My friend had hit the bottom and returned unscarred. It took humiliation and pain, but it resulted in permutation.

I know my history of being involved with foolish people is not over. It happens every few years and on those occasions, I do my best to be supportive. The promise of endorphins and egomania far outweighs my offer of moderation and self-control. This history of negligence has taught me to finally take a supporting role in the balance of comeuppance. It’s impossible to save people unless they understand the severity of their actions. I believe it’s naive to think you alone are capable of changing a one-track mind. Depending on the case, I think it’s good to show people that humanity isn’t limitless. Surely a better writer somewhere has a terrific quote for such an occasion. I guess I would just call it tough love.

I stared at Julie’s little stamp-sized face in the right hand corner of my computer screen. Mine appeared under it, making a silly face like her, as I typed a response. Gmail chat makes it easy to do a lot of things, one of which is keep in touch with my best friend Julie as we both take mental breaks at our full-time jobs.

As I watched our photos alternate during our online conversation, I couldn’t help but smile at our little faces… mine with a huge silly grin and hers blowing a kiss at the camera. I can’t imagine my life without that little face.

I grew up with my two best girls: Julie and Caitlyn. I met Julie first, in third grade gym class. She told me during a game of dodge ball that if I didn’t believe in God, I would go to hell. She may not remember it, and would probably be appalled she said that to someone the first time they met, but I remember it very clearly. It didn’t stop me from desperately wanting to be her friend. She had the funk and fashion of someone way beyond her years (like maybe someone in the seventh grade) and had crazy blonde hair all the way down to her butt.

Once we became friends, we realized we lived very close to each other and used it to our full advantage. Soon, we were in the sixth grade, and were introduced to the new girl, Caitlyn. Caitlyn was the prettiest, most proper girl I had ever met. She had the most beautiful handwriting I had ever seen, and I remember wanting to be her friend just so I could say I had a friend with amazing handwriting. It turned out she lived just between me and Julie on a mile and a half stretch of road.

The three of us were fast friends. They have played a significant role in each season of life, and it’s easy to see them in each season of my life.

As I said, Julie saved my soul in gym class. That should have been my first clue that this girl would be sticking around. In fact, she did more than save my soul. In fourth grade, she saved my tail in our Mental Math exercises. I’ve always been a good student but not a quick thinker on the spot. Thankfully Julie was always on my team and always had the answer right away, almost as if she had memorized the answers. She wasn’t in my class in fifth grade, but I still managed to pass with flying colors.

In sixth grade, things shifted. Caitlyn entered our lives, and the three of us soon become inseparable. We rode our bikes constantly back and forth in the summers, usually meeting at Cait’s house in the middle. We had sleepovers every other Friday night it seemed. We even begged our moms to brave the roads on snow days so we could sled or play in the snow together.

Junior high faced us with some challenges, but luckily, we had many classes together. In fact, people still sometimes switch me and Julie’s names. We were our middle-school-immature selves with each other, not quite on the lookout for boys yet. One night in particular, I remember Cait and Julie were at my house and it was the middle of the night. We were restless from the Mt. Dew and tired of gabbing and had come down with a case of the giggles. We noticed it had finished snowing, and the thickly dusted landscape beckoned outside under a full moon. So…giggling the entire way, with pillows over our faces that didn’t stifle the laughter nearly as much as we probably thought…we headed down the stairs, got past the dog (who, in his excitement, clicked his nails all over the kitchen floor), stumbled into all the winter wear we could dig up, and went out the side door, letting the alarm beep it’s typical chime every time someone entered or left the house.

We so thought we didn’t wake mom and dad. But looking back, I’m sure we woke them up almost every time the girls were over.

As we entered high school, Caitlyn boldly stepped into the world of dating. Julie and I read and laughed at the notes she passed back and forth with her first; making sure to point out that a boy who couldn’t spell algebra correctly had no chance at developing into a legitimate boyfriend. She always managed to have classy boyfriends, who sent her roses in the middle of class and bought her paintings. But soon, Julie and I followed suit. I began dating a tall, lanky kid (now my husband) and Julie dating me dating a tall, lanky boy named Cody (now my husband) and she hanging out with a boy in choir named Phil. The summer before our senior year, Cody and I broke up. I remember telling my mom, dramatically, that I felt like, “something crawled inside of me and died.” I am sure she understood, but what I remember most was Caitlyn belting out Brittany Spears’ “Stronger” as we went shopping together the day after and her reaching over to hold my hand in the car when I still couldn’t hold back the tears. Julie was gone that summer in Florida, but not without leaving me a bag of tiny wrapped packages, each one for a day when everything was too much. I remember there being a sparkly belt, candy, a CD, and new pens.

The evening before I moved to Bloomington, my room cluttered with boxes and bags, Julie and Caitlyn came over. We sat in my room, dazed by the past few months. We had graduated, Cody and I had broken up again (for GOOD…or at least I thought at the time), Julie and Phil had broken up, and Cait had decided to opt out of school in Florida so she could marry the man of her dreams.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” I remember Caitlyn saying, looking around my room. “Your whole life is packed up. You’ll be Bloomington, Julie will be in Anderson. What will we do without each other?” Tears filled her eyes.

That evening, before they left, the three of us huddled together on the driveway, arms around each other, and prayed together. We didn’t know what the next few years held, but we knew we were determined to stay in each other’s lives, come hell or high water…which it did. Family troubles, a big fallout on our spring break trip to Myrtle Beach, and last minute life-altering decisions only tightened our bond.

The three of us have very different lives; we are all married, but Julie lives in Florida, Caitlyn has a toddler, and I try to keep up with both of them. Note-passing has morphed to e-mails, sharing blogs and short visits when we’re all in the same town.

As Julie and I wrap up our gmail chats these days, Julie will usually quip something like, “Let’s have snow cones after work today!! I’ll pick you up at 5:15,” or “Ice cream? You? Me? NOW?” or “Meet me on the beach for margaritas tonight. I’ll swing by and pick up Caitlyn too,” I sometimes get sad that those small moments aren’t within our grasp like they used to be.

It’s been 16 years, and we’ve been through a lot. And while we don’t talk or see each other as much as we would all like, the knowledge that those girls are there if I need them means more to me than having weekly sleepovers. And that’s what I think about when I see Julie’s tiny face on my computer screen or read Caitlyn’s short blog post in the middle of a hectic day.

I gave up my car when I moved to the United Kingdom. I live in the heart of Scotland’s capital city and my own two legs, or buses and trains get me anywhere I need to go. I relish in my walks around the city each day, free from the isolation of metal and machine. I imagine the people who walked these same streets before me. Charles Darwin. Adam Smith. Robert Burns (who would have been my next door neighbor had I been born more than 200 years earlier). Even J.K. Rowling.

I slip on my headphones, program my iPod to shuffle and let the songs that come up be the soundtrack to my journey through this city. I love my walks to and from things so much that some days I wish I had farther to go. Sometimes I find myself taking the long way home, just to have a chance to meander in the streets a little longer.

We have been relatively lucky to have had a somewhat mild winter this year in Edinburgh. Then February came and with it a frosty chill. My walks weren’t so much the pleasure-inducing, ode to the cityscape that they once were. Now I rush down the street, frozen and stiff, in a race against the icy wind and myself.

Last Monday, my patience with the blustery weather reached a pinnacle. It was one of those days that nothing seemed to go right. I was sick. I had a lot on my mind. I was trying to make my way home from the gym. A trek that normally takes 10 minutes took nearly 20. I was sweaty and tired; the frosty Scottish wind blew through my wet clothes and made even my bones shiver.

I was in a rush to get home. I had somewhere else to be and I needed a warm shower. Pronto. I was in such a mood that I almost didn’t realize the delicate snowflakes falling gracefully from the sky. Almost.

I was in my own little world of stress and worrying about things that seemed so important at the time, which seem so silly now. I was walking up the Royal Mile when I suddenly stopped. I looked up toward the top of the street at the castle where King James was born centuries ago. I took a deep breath and began to see the beauty around me.

I stood silently for a few minutes, in the muffled swishing of the pure falling snow as it blanketed the Old Town’s medieval buildings. A heap of snow gathered on the shoulders of a giant statue of Adam Smith on the Mile.

And just like that, a weight lifted from my own heavy shoulders. Suddenly I didn’t notice the cold, because all I could see was how beautiful the snow looked. And all at once, I knew I was exactly where I needed to be at that moment.

Spring will be here before I know it. And then the summer, and with all these things, fresh flowers, football games at the park, hikes up Arthur’s Seat, and sunlight until 10p.m. And then I’ll wish I had all day to take a walk.

“I need to take a break from dating right now.”

I was sitting on my bed downstairs, idly playing with the edge of my blankets, when the words from my boyfriend came over the phone.

My stomach felt hollow. No, you don’t, I thought. You’re not “dating.” You’re in a relationship. With me. You need to take a break from me right now.

And so, in a five-minute phone call, my six-month relationship was over. Happy freakin’ Valentine’s Day.

When the reality of the situation sank in, I cried, I swore, I wandered restlessly around the house, looking for a way to release the energy building up inside me. I would have gone running if it weren’t a dark winter night. I hovered around my housemates in the kitchen, looking for cooking to help with, dishes to clean, something to keep me occupied.

Being broken up with made me realize that all those things we count as relationship clichés only seem cliché until they happen to you. Our ordinary moments aren’t all sunshine and puppies. Breaking up is about as ordinary as life gets, but for all that, it’s no less heart-wrenching.

So, to honor myself and my personal experience, I allowed myself to indulge in some of those clichés. I went out for a margarita. I bought a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. I stared angrily into space for long periods of time. The hollowness, the loneliness of the sudden removal of those phone calls and times together, gnawed at me, and I let it. I needed to.

But I’ve realized — as much as I can in the short period since this happened — that hollowness can also just be considered space. Space to go out with a close friend and know that I can vent and rage and she’ll absorb it and get me to laugh about it. Space to catch up with some friends from college and my volunteer year whom I haven’t talked to in ages. Space to set aside time for myself to finish those applications for graduate school scholarships that have been sitting around.

And I’ve recognized that I don’t feel worthless, or undesirable, or incapable of connecting with another human being. I actually feel… pretty normal. Life is still moving and so am I. Yesterday, Valentine’s Day, I did everything I would have liked to do: I bought a fancy gourmet cupcake for myself (red velvet with cinnamon cream cheese frosting), I settled in to watch the first season of 30 Rock for the first time, and I made an amazing risotto dinner for my housemates and myself. It was a pretty ordinary day: no pressure, no makeup and plenty of space.

I don’t know if it’s sympathy pains or what, but two days after my friend e-mailed me saying he had major ear issues, couldn’t hear and had ringing in his ear, my ear started to act up.

Act up might be sort of an understatement. Two years ago I made a very bad decision and ignored a slight pain in my right ear. I was busy and freaking out about an upcoming state test my first group of students had to take. The decision to ignore that pain turned out to be a very bad idea.

The pain continued.

The pressure built.

Before I knew it, both ears were infected, throbbing and ringing.

After some mighty powerful antibiotics and pain killers the pain and the throbbing went away. The ringing remains.

After many sleepless nights, more tears than I think I cried in the whole of my last break-up and four visits to an amazing Ear Nose and Throat doctor, the results were final. The ear infections were gone. The ringing wasn’t going anywhere.

At that point I was about ready to lose my mind. Lack of sleep and the frustration over my stupid move of ignoring ear pain was getting to me in a major way. My brain was in some type of internal torture mode and I was ready to crack from the pressure.

I burst into tears in the doctor’s office and begged him to do something, anything, to make the ringing stop. My doctor — a stereotypical grandfather type with white hair, bifocals and a steady voice — patted my hand and smiled. Then he told me what I imagine he tells a lot of very tired, frustrated people.

“Keep calm. Tomorrow will be a little better and the day after that will be even better. Nothing gets easier in an instant it’s all about taking the time to adjust.”

I learned a lot of lessons during that period. I learned that you can’t just ignore a problem and expect it to go away. I learned that sometimes taking care of yourself is more important than taking care of others — you can’t do anyone any good when incapacitated by pain. I found out the hard way that tugging on your ear doesn’t actually make any of the pain stop, it just makes your ear lobe hurt. I discovered that deep breaths and warm tea can do a lot of good on bad days. I also found that acceptance goes a long way toward making life more manageable.

Suddenly, I feel like I’m learning my lessons all over again. Out of the blue I have sinus pressure that feels somewhat akin to a jack hammer to the cheek bones, and I’m completely deaf in my right ear. The ringing has gotten so loud that I wake up in the middle of the night to the sounds of church bells in my head. This is not doing wonders for my ability to crowd control a room full of 10-year-olds and the bruises on my hip and elbow would indicate my center of balance is more off than usual.

This morning a co-worker scared me so badly I dropped an arm full of copies all over the hallway. He had been saying my name repeatedly as he walked toward me down the hall. I just hadn’t heard him. He shook his head as I told him about the deafness and the ringing and the total loss of anything resembling balance. “How on earth do you get through a day with all of that and all of your students?”

I smiled. Of all the things I’ve learned, that’s got to be the easiest:

Keep calm and carry on. Oh, and make an appointment with your doctor.

I rarely have to go to the doctor. I have had allergies my whole life (grasses and cats, which is why I have a strong dislike for cats), and I am usually able to put up with a baseline level of congestion, sneezing, etc. I hardly ever have to take medicine, for allergies or otherwise, but I work with elementary-age kids, and I can only imagine the number of germs that I come into contact with each day.

So it came as no surprise when I started having terrible sinus pressure, coupled with a sore throat and a cough about two weeks ago. Several of the kids in my program had been out with strep throat and the flu for a week or so, and I thought it would be best to go to the doctor’s office. At the very least, I thought I had a sinus infection. But I was told that it was viral, and that I just have to let it run its course. Great.

That doctor’s visit was on a Thursday, and I spent that entire weekend on my couch. I think I left my apartment twice. Surely all of this rest would help me get rid of the funk. But Monday was not good. I managed to make it through the day, but by the time I got off I had already decided to call in sick for Tuesday and head back to the doctor. That night I didn’t sleep well at all, and it was mostly because I had developed a stabbing pain in my left ear. It’s always hard to sleep when it feels like the side of your head is going to explode.

This time I got a different diagnosis: sinus infection and ear infection. Really, an ear infection? I never really even thought of an ear infection as something that affected adults. Anyway, I got some oral antibiotics and some antibiotic eardrops, so I thought I was good to go. The sinus infection cleared up quite nicely, but my ear was still completely stopped up and very painful. I couldn’t hear much of anything from my left ear. Imagine a blown-out car speaker underwater, that’s what everything sounds like.

So I scheduled another doctor’s appointment for Friday. At this point, I was taking massive amounts of ibuprofen and Tylenol to alleviate the pain, and I still couldn’t hear anything. This time the doc prescribed a stronger oral antibiotic and some Tylenol with codeine. Sweet mother of Jesus, did I need that. I was advised to keep using the eardrops, but if nothing changed to return again on Monday. That would make visit number four, and that’s exactly what happened.

During that visit, I was told that the capacity for treatment at this office had been reached, and that I would need to go to the ear, nose and throat specialist. This was fine by me, and I got an appointment for the next morning. I was actually very happy, because I thought that I would be able to walk out of that office with some tangible relief. Maybe they had some kind of procedure that only they know, because they are specialists.

The first person I talked to appeared to be a resident. He was very friendly, even as he was poking around in my ear, and using a miniature vacuum to clean a lot of the junk out of there (and there was quite a bit). Then the main doctor came in, and he poked around a little, too. I was OK with it, though, because I thought that I would be getting some answers.

Well, I didn’t exactly get the answer I was hoping for. He told me that I have a tumor (more like a cyst, it’s called a cholesteotoma, and it’s not cancerous) that could cause some problems. It’s possible that it could go away once the inflammation from the infection goes away, which will take two to three weeks. But if it doesn’t, the answers are not quite so simple. At any rate, he said my ear will be stopped up like this for 6-8 weeks. It’s a good thing he was talking to me on my right side, because I probably wouldn’t have heard him otherwise.

While I am very disappointed that I will have to be listening through an underwater-blown-out-speaker filter for two months, this whole incident has helped me to see how much I take for granted. I don’t often take stock of the many blessings in my life, which is something that I should practice regularly. There is so much beauty all around us if we only have eyes to see, and ears to hear. Even if one of those ears isn’t hearing very much at all.