Brian Wright

About

People generally contact me once the sympathy has run out. There is a window during which everybody asks how you are doing, and then the window closes, and the difficulty carries on for a lot longer than the attention did. That is usually when help becomes really useful. A transition outlasts other people's interest in it by a wide margin, and one of the more isolating parts is discovering that everyone assumes you have settled when you have not. We provide the attention that has stopped arriving from elsewhere. That alone changes a surprising amount of it. Working in hospital and intensive outpatient programs taught me that the difficult stretch often comes after the acute phase, once everyone else has moved on. I have never forgotten it. If the sympathy has run out and the difficulty has not, get in touch. Attention that arrives late is still worth having, and it is often more useful than the early kind.