CARLOS MICHAEL ONLINE

  "Everything Will Be Okay!" This is more of rhetorical question. I am not really seeking an answer. Why is it when someone is hurting, depressed, angry, or just plain broken, we say to that person, “It will be okay. Everything will turn out okay in the end. You just gotta have faith.”   Don’t get me wrong, I understand the person expressing the words care, otherwise they wouldn’t waste their time attempting to console the individual in question. First, just because one is as I described above, especially a person of faith who has suddenly lost their faith because of how they are feeling. Faith is still within them. Sure, they may buckle under the weight of the event, experience, or tragedy. They might even be angry with God, I know I was yesterday, but in the end, most of us who are people of faith will return or hang onto that faith.   I responded the same way when it came to my son.   There were days when the episodes he experienced due to ASD, Intellectua...

  I know I have spoken about this before, but given what is happening today, I believe it bears repeating. There was a time when my mother was angry with me—or perhaps deeply hurt by me. It was a difficult season for both of us. Looking back now and remembering the commandment to “Honor thy father and thy mother,” I wish I had never caused her pain.  On that day, she said to me, “One day you will know what this pain feels like—the pain a parent carries for their child, and how deeply it hurts when that child is hurting, or when that child hurts you.” I believe she was speaking of mental and emotional pain, not physical pain.  At the time, I could not understand what she meant. Today, I do.  Since June 2024—and in some ways even earlier, beginning in 2021, before I understood what mental illness my son was living with—I have been walking alongside him through Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Intellectual Disability, and Schizophrenia. These past two years have be...