[ Home | Contents | Archive | Post | Reply | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: AL G.
Date: 03 Apr 2004
Time: 17:23:21 -0600
Remote Name: 216.192.40.5
Ahhh spiny. How can you be manipulated when it is your heart which responds? Do you seek to cancel your compassion like a letter dropped into a mailbox? Do you seek to pull it back to you with thoughts of string and bubble gum? . . . . . . She may have faked her own abduction, but she revealed how much she needs your compassion. But instead of throwing herself in front of a bus or off a rooftop, she hide herself away and probably wondered if anyone would notice or care. . . . . . How many of us does she represent? How much of ourselves does she reflect? What would it take for you to take the same action? How unhappy, lonely, and desperate would you have to be to do what she did? You may see this as an attempt to cry wolf when there is no one at the door. But, crying wolf is a cry for help. Would you rather treat the lonely and desperate after they are lying broken and beyond repair? Or catch them before they hit bottom and bounce a few times? . . . . . Now, all over NA people have a brief moment to wake up and look around and see if their daughters are in trouble. Across a million households parents may hug their teenagers a few seconds longer, listen a bit more to what their kids are not saying, and talk about what to do if they ever feel that unloved and unwanted by the world. For it will happen to all of us a some point in time - feeling that low and desperate. (We just never talk about it and how to cope with it.) She is just is the one who got caught in the media spotlight and becomes a spark for a conversation we all need to have . . . If anything, she needs more of our compassion than less. For now her life is up for grabs with talking heads to gaggle over it without knowing her or her life. In addition to whatever else may be going on, now she and her family and friends have to deal with the media as well. Is it 15 minutes of fame when 30 news vans stake out your apartment and help you identify which of your friends is going to sell you out? . . . . . Or am I being too cynical? If you had this happen to you, your sister, your daughter, your cousin . . . would you welcome the 15 minutes of fame with open arms or be closing the window shades waiting for the media storm to blow over? . . . . . She faces enormous pressure when it seems she already lacks a basic support network. . . . College sophomores in college should be thinking about who they can chip in with to buy pizza on Friday night and how to bump into the cute guy in math class and moaning about why they have write a five page paper about on what Dovechivesky (sp) ate for lunch before he wrote his third novel. (he wrote three, didnt he?) Not thinking about how to buy duct tape and disappear. Where was her posse, helping her evaluate the different colored rolls, joking about which was a more dramatic color? The posse of friends who at the end of the night would be telling her in no uncertain terms there was no way any of them were going to let her go through with it? The ones convincing here to forget the duct tape and go buy pizza instead and strategies about the guy in math class. . . . . We had someone jump from the dorms just about every year. The ones who jumped usually seemed normal enough and hid their pain and sorrow well. But their roommates never seemed to recover. And all anyone could ask each other was why the person had not reached at to someone, anyone to ask for help or show how much trouble they were in. The widespread counseling on handling stress only began after they realized students were going to keep dying and they either could provide grief counseling afterwards or stress management before. . . . . So I look at what she did differently - as a courageous act. She tested the people in her world to see if anyone would notice. She challenged them to see who would really care. . . . For whatever reason, the world noticed this one out of thousands. Maybe it was a slow news day. Maybe it was the media looking for a college story not about spring break and girls gone wild. . . . Now she has the media spotlight turned on her for a few seconds. The circle will grow wider and quarter screen heads will speculate. Awareness will be raised. . . . Can she rise above this like the mother who started MADD (mothers against drunk drivers) and Adam Walsh who searches for criminals - - finding a way to give this issue a voice as well as a face? Or will this leave her feeling more stranded, more isolated, more alone? . . . . The ones who can harness the media wave are few and far between. I suspect most get swamped by it and tossed up on shore, soaked and gasping for some solid ground. . . . Of course, I could be wrong. But do you really want to be in her shoes right now? If not, let the compassion flow and talk with your kids about exactly how desperate life can make us feel and what are all the ways to deal with it. The good and the bad, the ones you tried and the ones you only thought about. Knowing your parents had to eat Mac & Cheese to pay their bills and struggled in some of their college classes opens up avenues to talk about it years later when they are in trouble and need to call home and hear a friendly voice at 2 am in the morning. To get that call with the wobbly voice asking if you remember once sharing once how bad it got - are you willing to show your kids that you are all too human? What is the price you would be willing to pay to have a child call you before they act out of desperation? Before they jump? Before they run away? Before they decide to drink their way into oblivion? . . . .It is strange how we would be willing to pay just about any price to have one more day with someone we loved who had died. But let that person just scare us - and we get angry and feel manipulated. Why do we not see that a testing of the strength of the connections that bind all of us together is just that. And only if the string is weak do we get angry. Like a muscle, if you have to test it - it means you do not know how strong it is - and if it is strong enough to get you through life. Testing to failure should make it grow stronger, in response to the need of that life, just like a muscle. Do muscles feel manipulated, used? Or are they just doing what they were meant to do? We are all just a bag of bones with muscles holding us together and keeping us from falling apart. Muscles and compassion must be used or they shrivel and waste away. If nothing makes your heart race, what good is it to you? If nothing makes your heart grow, what is the sense of filling it with blood a thousand times a day. . . . To whom does Audrey belong, that when she walked out that door she had no where else to go except out into the loneliness of a dark, cold night? Hmmmm. Perhaps I have just seen too many chalk outlines on campus walkways to not be very grateful that she signaled she was in trouble before it was too late. You can regret not taking the time to put the leftover fish in the outside trash can. You can regret ordering that third helping. But regretting letting your compassion flow to someone in need would mean you regret having a heart and knowing how to use it. - - There, feel better now? P. S. To feel truly manipulated, I suggest going to a chiropractor. Your spine would be a dream come true and a snap to tease back into balance and alignment. (opps. That made you sound entirely too much like a tire. Or is it a strut? Perhaps a rack and opinion steering system? ) Obviously this is where that white space belongs.