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Archives For February 2012

Death Defying Gratitude

February 24, 2012 — 7 Comments

This may sound a little melodramatic, but I feel like I died on July 26, 2011.

It was a Tuesday afternoon, the second day of our annual beach vacation. I hopped out of the car at my favorite beach-side coffee shop, and without a hint of forewarning, a ball of pain hummed at the base of my spine and a sharp ripple made its way down my left leg. I stopped abruptly, stood up straight, startled. Within seconds, though, the pain subsided. “It’s nothing,” I told myself, “Nothing to be concerned about.”

Denial. This is what we tend to do first when dying is on the doorstep—we deny it.* Dying begins with denying, so I bought my coffee, plugged in my ear-buds, and settled into a good book. When I arose to leave the coffee shop, I stood slowly, not consciously thinking about my back, but moving gingerly (is any kind of denial ever complete?). Then I went home and plopped down on the couch, anticipating an evening of fun with my kids at the boardwalk carnival.

When I stood up this time, though, my plans changed for good.

Something exploded in my lower back, and burning waves of pain crashed down both legs. I only remember looking at my wife, and I know there was fear in my eyes, because that kind of pain does violence to denial. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t sit. I couldn’t lie down. For a year, I had anticipated the boardwalk bumper cars with my eight-year-old son, digging holes and building sandcastles with my four-year-old son, and lifting my two-year-old daughter through the waves on my shoulders. All of it gone in an instant.

Anger usually comes next in the grieving, and come it did, boiling up inside. The anger of a man with expectations that have been shattered, the why-me-I-don’t-deserve-this (as if someone else does) kind of anger that tantrums until the world is the way I want it. I knew that my vacation, as I had planned it, had just ended, and I was furious. Then…

Bargaining. The third stage of grief, and it feels a lot like anxiety. The call to the chiropractor, the beseeching for any idea that might turn this thing around. The dedicated, hoping-against-hope cycle of ice on and ice off, gentle stretching of knees to the chest, fixated on the idea that if I do the right things my reality will be returned to me. But then, the waking at three in the morning, pain lighting up everything below my belly button like a screaming siren, sinking deeper into the realization that it is what it is, and no amount of bartering or effort is going to fix it.

Depression. When something is dying, depression usually comes after the anger and the bargaining. It is dark and hopeless, it says that this pain is all there is, that this moment contains nothing but loss and fear and injustice and shattered hope. It is a deep, dark canyon from which the sun cannot be glimpsed. The depression of grief is a lie of omission, but at the time, the loss is all you can feel, and its totality seems like the truest thing you have ever felt.

Like I said, I’m guessing this all may seem a little melodramatic. After all, people deal with back pain and herniated disks (that was the ultimate diagnosis) every day. So, why all this talk of death and grief? I think it’s because, although my back would ultimately survive the ordeal, there are a number of things inside of me that couldn’t survive it. I like to be in control of my world. I like to think that if I work hard enough and play all the right cards, I can fix everything. Despite all my experience to the contrary, deep down I wish to believe that good things happen to good people, and I wish to believe that I’m one of the good ones. I like to be in my kids’ memories, not sitting on the sidelines watching them make memories with others. I like to be healthy enough to push the lawnmower in the summer and the snow blower in the winter and assure myself that I’m a man. I like to think that I don’t have limits, that with a little more coffee and a little more determination, I can accomplish whatever I want. I guess what I’m saying is, there is physical death and all of its grief, but life also ushers us through a series of psychological and emotional deaths. And we need to know how to grieve them, as well.

We come to therapy, oftentimes, in the midst of a dying that we don’t fully understand. Sometimes we are literally grieving the loss of a life. Sometimes we are reeling from a lost relationship: a girlfriend who became disinterested or a husband who was unfaithful. But sometimes the dying is even more subtle. You pushed a kid too hard, and your façade of self-control is finally cracking. Or, you have always believed that your father loved you and that those things your mother said were harmless, but those ideas are no longer holding water, and it is time to let those parental images die. Or, you inherited a faith from your parents, but while your doubts have increased you have refused to think about it and stubbornly insisted on believing what they told you; now, that time is coming to an end, but before you can find your own belief, you have to burn down the old beliefs. Or, you demand attention and you want to be adored, but you begin to realize the kind of affirmation you are looking for is the kind that only a kid can receive from a parent, and your opportunity to get what you want has passed, and it is time to move on and start seeking something else in life. Can you imagine the courage of someone who is willing to choose this kind of grief, willing to sit with another person and have so much of the old self stripped away, willing to slough off the skin of a lifetime, in order to find something new, and strong, and lasting that they can believe in? How does it work? And what can possibly transport us from this place of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression?

By Friday evening of that beach week, the pain in my back continued mostly unabated, and laying in the fetal position was the only way to get some relief from the agony. However, although the pain had persisted, somewhere in the midst of the anger and depression, I had decided to fight, not for a healthy back, but for a way to salvage the vacation in the midst of the pain. Late that Friday evening, after a final trip to the beach, I wrote these words:

We elected to go to the beach in the early evening, the beach emptying for the day, the noise leaving with the people, individual laughs becoming more distinct in the salty air, the sound of waves taking center stage. And the light, oh the light, slanting with a warm glow around everyone, shadows long. Me, laying on the beach towel on my side in the only painless position, forced to be still and to watch, to exist at the level of my children. And I watch as time stands still, slowing down and enveloping my family: Caitlin playing quietly in a small hole, repeatedly running her hands through the sand and letting it drop on her feet; Quinn playing with his army men in a sand fort, completely consumed by the strategy of battle; Aidan in the water, the ultimate beach bum, making friends as waves crash against his spindly knees, somehow closer to college than the crib; and my wife, easing back and forth between each of them. Me, laying there, incapable of more, doing nothing, absolutely nothing, to deserve any of it, not yet ready to admit that all things are gifts, but knowing for certain that the most important things are.

Acceptance is usually considered to be the final stage of grief, but I wonder if it should be gratitude.** You see, somewhere in the midst of that excruciating week, it occurred to me that, unless I could be grateful in the middle of the pain, I couldn’t really be grateful at all. What I mean is: if I can only be thankful in the midst of pristine vacations with long hours of sleep, stacks of novels to read, laughing children, and just-the-right-amount-of-salt margaritas, I am not really experiencing gratitude. Happiness maybe, but gratitude is something different. It is a defiant insistence that no matter how bad it is, no matter how eviscerating the pain, no matter how deep the agony, there is something more. Gratitude is not just the discovery of a gift, it is the determined insistence that a gift is present, that it can be found, and that it can be received, regardless of what else is happening. It is the hopeful seeking for the rest of what is going on, right here, right now.

Gratitude is what makes it possible to be bowed low by grief and pain, to be brought to one’s knees by the agony, and yet to defiantly raise our eyes, look around, and believe that the view from this angle could become a gift. Gratitude is pain’s redemption. Gratitude makes you aware of gifts that have always been there, but that you couldn’t perceive when you were strong, confident, and upright. Sometimes, for instance, pain lays you out on the sand, and gives you a different vision of life, and you become grateful for the reminder that your frantic efforts to take control, fix the world, be a man, and keep it all together are causing you to miss out on an incredible gift. In the end, you may even look back into the pain and the grief, and you will never want to do it again, but being grateful for the vision it gave, you might find it hard to imagine your life without it.

You might not even want to.

 

*Few psychological models are able to withstand the eroding influences of empirical research, subjective experience, and time. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s “Stages of Grief,” presented in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying, is one of the exceptions. Over the years, her model of grief has been an important guide for many who are dealing with death and loss, in their many forms. For more information, click here.

 **For a compelling account of courageous and defiant gratitude, read another blog post, “Finding the Grace,” by mindfullyhealing.

In Mindfulness & Gratitude, Psychology , , , ,
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Angry Kids, Angry Parents

February 18, 2012 — 12 Comments

Last week, we were all invited into a particularly nasty father-daughter dispute, via Facebook and various social media. As many of you know by now, a fifteen year-old, North Carolina girl posted a rebellious rant on Facebook, essentially a public tantrum, lamenting the way she feels she is mistreated by her parents. She thought her parents were blocked from her Facebook page. She was wrong. Her father, Tommy Jordan, discovered the post, and retaliated with one of his own, a video in which he recites her post, and then shoots nine “exploding hollow point” rounds into her computer.

Within a week, the YouTube video had been viewed over twenty-four million times and debates ensued about Facebook, wayward children, and the best ways to parent in the age of social media. But I think most of the debate missed the mark. This episode was not ultimately about unruly kids and parenting decisions. No, it was entirely about anger: the deep, rebellious anger of a kid who doesn’t want to be a kid anymore and who wants to be heard, and the cold-subtle rage of a parent who will go to great lengths to be in control and to feel respected.

I’m pretty convinced of something, and watching this father and daughter publicly rage at each other confirmed it. I think we’re all pretty messed up about our anger. I think we carry around a ton of it, and I don’t think we have any idea what to do with it.

For some of us, anger has been the language of our lives; the people who were in charge had no other tongue, and we never learned any other way to speak. And so, you have spent much of your life squarely in the middle of your anger, nurturing it and wielding it in an effort to dominate and control others. There is often a white-hot word burning in the middle of your brain—respect. It’s what your authority figures demanded of you. You were like a fuel pump, dispensing respect in a drive-by fashion, feeling used and mostly forgotten, and now it is your turn to get filled up. So, when a person cuts you off in traffic, or that kid of yours knocks you off your pedestal, the anger isn’t just red, it’s white—blinding white. And you will be reclaiming that respect you are owed in any fashion necessary.

Or perhaps you lived your life underneath the thumb of anger, and you developed a deep, smoldering sense of injustice. You were like a sponge, soaking up the anger of everyone around you, and there was no way you deserved to be saturated in that way. But now, you see the injustice everywhere. You rage when the kids mistreat you with their noise, you are convinced your wife is trying to bankrupt you with the most recent purchase, everyone else’s promotion is a crime against you, the kids’ constant demands for more, and more, and more, feel like a verdict you don’t deserve. So, your life becomes a courtroom, where you are the furious judge handing down verdicts, naming everyone else the bad guy and nursing a sense that the unfairness of it all will never get corrected.

For others of us, anger was treated like a four-letter word. You were taught that feeling and expressing anger is bad, evil, or worse. You learned that the people you were most angry at, your parents and authority figures, couldn’t handle your anger, whether they demonstrated this by trying to immediately fix it and make it go away, or by burying a clip full of bullets in your laptop. And when we have to deny our anger by burying it inside, it can wreak a quiet kind of havoc. We may become like two people, outwardly placid, composed, even unflappable, while inwardly we eye the broiling cauldron of emotion that is always lapping at the edges. We become anxious about our anger, afraid it will boil over, convinced that when it does there is no healthy way to feel or express any of it. Or, not having any place that we can safely express the hurt and the anger, we may direct it at the only safe target—ourselves. We demean ourselves, and we become ashamed of the people we have convinced ourselves that we are, and we become depressed, and no anti-depressant ever seems to completely free us from it. Or, we discover that we alternate between strenuous, draining efforts to suppress the anger, and moments of rage that surprise us and everyone around us, because anger is a part of the human experience and it cannot be denied forever.

And yet.

I’m also convinced that anger gets a bad rap. I think we all need to feel our anger a lot more, but in ways that are healthy for us and for the people we love. I think there are plenty of times when we need to actually act from our anger, as well. You see, anger is the perfectly valid response when a line has been crossed and a wrong has been committed. When our fears paralyze us, leaving us exposed, anger protects us from predators. Anger gives us the energy to set boundaries when nothing else can. When we have things we lose and we need to grieve them, anger will be a part of the process, a healthy part, and there is no way to get through the grief without passing through the anger. Put simply, if you are human, there are several guarantees: you will be born, you will die, and in between you will breathe and you will feel anger. What do we do with that?

Well, we begin by understanding that our experience of anger is usually messed up because it originated within a relationship in which there were only two available roles: the role of a kid who either quietly submits or angrily rebels, and the role of an authority figure whose anger is used for domination and control.  Our vision of anger is born blurry, and we need corrective lenses. Because the anger we learned early was broken anger. And anger doesn’t have to be broken. It can be healthy. Feeling it in a safe place and in an honest way can feel like being unshackled from chains you didn’t even know you were dragging (I thought I was crazy for feeling it). Feeling it in this way, you discover that the rage has barnacles, things that have grown attached to it, like sadness, loneliness, and fear (I thought I was the only one who felt this). Feeling it is like opening the shades and letting light into a dark space where the monsters sleep underneath the bed: it had such power while the darkness ruled, but the morning light brings a sense of relief and freedom (I don’t have to feel this anymore).

Not many of us have a place where we are given the permission to experience anger. And, really, we need permission. We need someone who can handle it, and even invites it. Sometimes, the therapeutic space is the only place in the world that will allow it, that can handle it, especially when the anger has been festering for years and, at first, it’s going to be white-hot and broiling and have all sorts of other thoughts and feelings attached to it. We may even feel and act like children at first, but that’s okay, because we are feeling it and acting it with a person who has a vision for the adult that we can become.

And what will our anger look like when we have matured into it, when we no longer suppress it and we no longer use it like a weapon? Last week, a wise man reminded me that, when that happens, the anger comes, but it comes slowly, and it wants to listen before responding, and it asks of itself how much of this is justified and how much do I need to take responsibility for myself? It doesn’t act like a judge or a conqueror, and it doesn’t hide away like a victim or a slave. It invites. It invites honesty, relationship, connection with the people we love, and the invitation is a welcome one. It’s an awesome thing to sit in a room with a parent and a teen, to watch the parent say, “Wow, you’re really angry, and I’m angry, too. I want to hear more about why you’re angry.” If I was a gambling man, I’d bet every time that the kid’s eyes don’t stay dry for long. That the frustration and sadness wells up into relief and that the tears are like a wave washing away the anger. Kids who have that experience aren’t likely to post their angry rants on Facebook, because they already have a place where their feelings are getting a “thumbs up,” and they’re getting meaningful “comments” from the people who matter most.

And when anger happens like that, you might even save yourself a few bullets.

In Family & Parenting, Psychology , , , ,
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Truth and Baseball Cards

February 10, 2012 — 17 Comments

I begin each day at my office with a stack of client charts. I sort through them, making sure that everything is in order for the day, and then I hide them away inside my desk. Why do I hide them? Because we have eaten a lie, and its wound runs deep, and a pile of charts is like salt on that wound. You see, all of us, with the barest of exceptions, have been conditioned to believe that our value, our worth as a human being, is relative to everyone else’s, that our value is achieved by comparison, by competition, and ultimately by victory over the rest of humanity. So, we engage in a deeply wounding game in which the grand prize is personal worth. And until those lies are exposed and the wounds are healed, it is difficult to imagine a space in this world where the game has been called off, where you don’t have to compete for attention, approval, and value: a stack of charts can be perceived as another reminder of the lie, fooling you into thinking that the therapist will be deciding which client is healthiest, funniest, easiest, or most important. So, out of respect for the wound, I bury the charts away and anticipate the day when the healing has begun, the lie is exposed, and that stack of charts will lose its power to harm.

The games that we play vary dramatically. Your particular game, your on-going competition for value, seems to be dependent on the particular lies that you were fed. We receive these false messages about our value from so many sources. Some of the messages we take in are injected by people who use us for their own purposes. These wounds are the deepest and the most obvious. The relative or boyfriend who wouldn’t stop when you said no and drilled into you the belief that your value is dependent only upon giving others what they want.  The father who lined you up in the kitchen at midnight after a case of beer and screamed messages into you that you have never been able to shake, convincing you that you have no value, because we beat up and abuse the things that don’t really matter. The mother who raged when you wouldn’t talk to her or when your words weren’t what she wanted to hear, filling you with the belief that your value is dependent upon feeling just the right things at just the right time.

But many of the messages we swallow about our value are delivered to us unwittingly, by people who genuinely care about us and intend us no harm. A glass of milk is spilled at the table, and a parent huffs and gripes, or scolds and reprimands, and a lesson is learned. (My value is diminished when I make mistakes.) Or when we bring home our first set of As in the fourth grade, we see our parents aglow with pride, we notice that we get a little more cake at the dinner table, and they seem to be just a little bit kinder for a while. (My value is increased when I perform well, and it seems assured when I perform better than everyone else.) Or we get our first car, with wheels a little bit brighter than anyone else’s, a speaker system that produces the purest and deepest bass sounds around, and people start looking at you, and you notice that the Facebook friend requests surge. (My value is dependent upon what I have, and how beautifully and how loudly I wield it.) Or you land the big job or the right wife or a house in the right neighborhood, or whatever thing it is that your particular lie has convinced you will bring prestige and power and influence and respect, and, sure enough, people start asking and admiring, and you think that maybe, just maybe, their mouths hang open a bit wider in awe. (My value is dependent upon what I achieve and the number of people who admire it.)

There is a culture reinforcing all of it, too, telling us that this thing or that thing will solve it all, satiate the hunger. And what is it that needs to be solved in us, what is the hunger that needs to be satisfied? From the moment that our minds can comprehend that there is me and there is you, we begin to crave and seek out an assurance of worth. We are like starved creatures, and we will feed on anything. Discernment is an afterthought when you are emaciated and the stomach is cramping—we will take our food in any form we can get it. And so the lies come, and we eat them, and they satisfy for a time. But the energy given is malignant, convincing us that the competition continues, and that if we sit on the sidelines too long, someone else will take the lead. So, we dress ourselves up to look like we’ve won the game. We quit eating because the smaller the size of the jeans, the bigger your lead in the game. We mortgage this and that and find ways to stay ahead. Or, if we can’t muster the energy for any of it, we play the game in our heads: knocking that person down a notch, raging at that idiot on the road, smirking at that person with screaming kids in the checkout lane. We play. And play. And play.

But we must fight to remind ourselves that we have eaten crummy food and swallowed crappy messages. I think most of us do want to fight that fight, but the reality is that, if we quit swallowing the messages we have been fed, we are still hungry. Where do we begin to find some semblance of assurance about our value as a human being, our worth as a creature? Maybe we can begin to find it in the truth of baseball cards.

When I was a kid, fourth and fifth grades, I would wait for my allowance every week, then hop on my bike and head to the local department store. In those days, baseball cards were a big deal for young boys (especially boys who were Cubs fans and needed some kind of intrigue during a baseball season). I would go, and I would buy as many packs as I could afford that day. I would open them quickly, thumbing through the stack for a card of value. But what gave a particular card value? The irony is that a baseball card’s value was only partially (even minimally?) determined by the popularity or batting average of the particular player it depicted. Ironically, the value of the card was almost completely determined by its rarity. That is, if a particular player card was mass-produced, that card was referred to as “a common,” and it had the same minimal value as any other “common.” But if only a small number of a particular card was produced, the value of that card soared. And there was a further level of irony: some of the most sought-after, most valuable, cards were “error cards.” These were cards that contained some rare error, a misspelled name for example, that was not detected in the earliest printings, but was later corrected. The flaw gave the card a particular uniqueness and a rarity that elevated its value dramatically.

I think these are the truths we need to consume. We need to know that our value comes not from what we do or achieve, or how far ahead we are in the pennant race of life, but that our real value is located in the fact that there is only one of us. Only one person with our particular set of thoughts, feelings, beliefs, passions, gifts, callings, and experiences. There is no other story like yours, only one of you has been produced, and because of that, you have infinite value. The games we play in our competition for value, our attempts to do what everyone else is doing but just slightly better, actually have the opposite effect: they make us common and decrease our value as human beings. And I think we also need to consume an even deeper truth: the flaws that we carry with us, the mistakes we have made, they give us value, too. We will seek to correct them in later “printings,” of course, because most of us want to be better people who make the world a better place, but for now, those “errors” we have made further distinguish us as rare creatures with a unique story to tell with our one life. And we need to tell that story, because no one else can.

So, I bury the stack of charts in my desk, knowing that for many of us the lie is still alive and the game is still being played, and this visual reminder that I will be spending time with other people will get confused as a competition for value. I bury them, but I anticipate the day that you will walk into my office, and you will sit down, and you will see a big stack of charts on my desk, and you will smile, because you know that, in this space, you are an “error card” of infinite value, and it feels so good to be retired from the game.

In Therapy & Personal Growth , , , ,
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I Wish I Was Clark Kent (And I Wish You Were Too)

February 3, 2012 — 12 Comments

Every blog post should be written like a love letter.

Donald Miller implores every blogger to remember that you are writing to a real reader, with a real life, a life that may actually be impacted by what you write. According to Miller, every writer should fix the reader in mind, by loving them (http://donaldmilleris.com, September 16, 2011). In that sense, I suppose, every blog post is like a love letter. However, love letters are never written only for their intended reader. Philosopher and theologian, Peter Rollins, reminds us that love letters have another purpose, as well: 

“Love letters always get to their destination. Love letters always get to the person they’re addressed to, because, in a sense, love letters are addressed to the one who’s writing them. That’s why we often write love letters that we don’t even send…they’re there for us to work through our feelings, to work through our emotions… the one who is speaking it is the one who really needs to hear it” (February 20, 2011).

I think that is true of my blog posts so far: I am writing to you, but I am also writing to myself. (Even shrinks need to be reminded that life is a story, that redemption is slow, that shame undermines our story, and that we all need new, fresh voices to help us narrate our lives.) But I think that is especially true of today’s post. You see, I’m a cautious person. I was the kid who avoided the cracks on the sidewalk, not for fun, but because, “Who knows?” I figured my mother really needed her back, and I wasn’t about to mess it up for her. My nickname in my church wilderness group was “Shy Fox,” and my Sunday school teacher once told my parents that she was concerned about my mental capacity because I never talked. For a kid like that, it’s very hard to imagine yourself growing up into a hero. I mean, Clark Kent may wear his glasses askew for effect, but let’s be honest, when you’ve been jumping over buildings for most of your life, it’s not much of stretch to imagine yourself a grown hero. However, when you’re a third-grade boy named Kelly, in your third new school in three years, and on the first day of class when your name is called the boy next to you says, “She’s not here,” and you shrink down and can’t imagine correcting him, well, being a hero seems like a serious longshot.

Yet, I’m convinced that deep down, we all yearn to play the role of a hero in our own story. I think we want it, not to satisfy our narcissistic need for attention and acclaim, but because heroes save and protect and leave the world a better place. Somewhere in us, we know that if our story can be about those things, then when the credits roll, we can be at peace with ourselves and the stories we have told.

But I wonder if we have given up on real-life, I’m-living-it-out-in-the-world-of-flesh-and-blood heroism? If the young people I meet with in my office every day are any indication, the answer is a resounding “Yes.” The kids that I’m talking to are insightful and articulate, and they have something to say: They look around their world, and they see parents whose stories are about scrambling to make mortgage payments and fighting to protect their fragile egos (by the way, I’m guilty as charged), and they wonder why, if that is the story awaiting them in adulthood, they should try so hard to grow up. They have parents and teachers who are telling them that life is all about being in the top quarter of their graduating class and getting a step ahead of their competition, and they sense that their authority figures have lost the plot. They see the aimless stories being lived out around them, and no one is giving them a better story to join. So, many of them have given up on being someone meaningful in their own story. The consequence is that they are bored to death. Most of the kids I talk to are not delinquent or rebellious or disturbed—they are bored. Question: “What would life be like if you quit smoking pot?” Answer: “Boring.” Question: “What would life be like if you quit having sex with random people?” Answer: “Boring.” You get the idea.

But it isn’t all the drugs and sex that has me thinking about this as a crisis of heroism. After all, teenagers have been having sex and doing drugs for a very long time. Rather, it’s the video games. It’s the games the kids are playing that have made me realize how much our kids are hungering for a story in which to be a hero. The majority of the most popular video games being played today are called role-playing games (RPGs for short, or “first-person shooter games;” think Call of Duty and Halo), in which the gamer is playing the role of a hero within the context of the game’s “story.” The stories themselves are not particularly creative: the world is in danger of annihilation, whether at the hands of zombies or aliens or some other sinister force, and it is your job to almost single-handedly save the world from destruction. Now that’s a hero. They play for hours, because with controller in hand, they can step into the role of a hero and save something big, whenever they want. And with no other alternatives being offered in their real lives, a generation of adolescents is abdicating heroism and sacrifice to the video game console and the movie screen.

This is tragic, because we need real-life, flesh-and-blood heroes. We need them badly. We need the obvious heroes: the police officers who dedicate their lives to making sure that drugs don’t find their way into our children’s veins, the firefighters who will climb up burning towers while those towers are falling down, or the men and women in uniform who believe so deeply in the value of freedom that they are willing to die for it. But we need the quiet and hidden heroes just as badly. We need the pre-school brother who grabs his sister’s hand so she doesn’t step in front of a moving car. We need the first grade boy who is reading books to raise money for orphans in Rwanda. We need the second grade girl who is collecting pennies for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. We need the middle school girl who spends all of her social collateral by standing between the mean girls and the girl with big glasses and braces, because that girl’s tears rupture her heart. We need high school almost-men who resist the advances of confused young women, because they care more for her heart than for her body. We need leaders who leave work early to tutor disadvantaged children in after school reading programs. We need men and women who watch the snow falling and think first about the elderly woman across the street who will need her front walk shoveled. We need business people and homemakers who drop what they are doing and flock to disaster areas after hurricanes and tsunamis hit. We need people who are willing to sacrifice a season to build wells for parched tongues in West Africa.

I want you to know, I have seen the look in a kid’s eyes when he realizes that he doesn’t have to sit in front of a television to be a hero, and it thrills me to my core. Girls who choose a summer trip to the inner city over cheerleading camp. Boys who write poetry, despite the taunts of the masses, because that is what their heart is saying and they think it might make their friends better people. I have seen middle-aged men, just fired from a job that was supposed to be unloseable, decide that their stories stink and that they’re going to do something that matters in the world, even if it means cancelling a cable subscription and chewing up a 401k, and it makes me want to sing. I have seen women who have spent decades lying down while their husbands dictate everything begin to stand up straight and place themselves between him and the kids, and it makes me want to be a better person.

Thank you, to all of you who are insisting that your story be meaningful and that you play the role of a hero in this world. You give me hope.

In Story & Narrative, Therapy & Personal Growth , , , ,
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