I’ve
always had this penchant for troubled individuals. I’ve been inclined to
believe almost anything this brand of individual says, have worked really hard
to understand them and convey that I am a vault for their secrets, and have
gone out of my way far more times than I can count for most of them. I seem to
really identify with people who struggle, people who have endured, and people
who have a hard time figuring out what the appropriate thing is to do. I’ve
always had this mentality that maybe to me, it all seems so easy. Within my
perception, the choice seems clear. But for other people, for this specific
make of individual, it isn’t so
simple. They are less likely to wrap their brains around a choice that I would
have long since made.
Maybe it’s
because of my love for these people that I went into social work. They are a
society deemed deceptively complex. And I adore them. I adore the torture and
the struggle, the willingness to confront their own absurdity, and the hope
they foresee for the future. They know their weaknesses and whether or not
they’ve come to terms with them, they are their own person: an individual, a
smoky, broken love song, a mysterious fragment in the crowd of life.
For me, it
was always such a fascinating notion. I was early on obsessed with the
chronically mentally ill, people who suffer from delusions and impulses, people
who just wake up one morning and decide to take a shotgun to everyone in their
family. What happens during that mystifying gap between early childhood, when
things are sunny and bright, and adulthood, when suddenly the world is just a
giant hurricane. How do individuals who have achieved every hypothetical
milestone in the most normal way possible turn into creatures of mass destruction?
Is it child abuse, the witnessing of spousal abuse, or just chronic racing
thoughts? Do people just become irrational over time or are they born that way?
Do they want to intentionally hurt people or do they just feel like they have
no other choice? What happened to them to make them believe that they had no
way out?
In my
opinion, these people are just fascinating. Even, and I really hate to say it,
the violent ones. Of course in those extreme cases, we want to get to the root
of the problem. We want to determine what we have to do in order to make the
atrocities stop. As a domestic violence advocate by day, I am not someone who
would ever condone violence of any kind but that doesn’t mean that I would ever
give up on anybody. It doesn’t mean that I believe these people aren’t worthy
of rehabilitation. We all are, aren’t we? And once it has all been subdued, once
justice has been served and victims have been vindicated, why don’t we take the
time to figure out where it all started? What turned the sugar into acid? And
how can we prevent this in the future? What can we do to help those currently
affected and prevent those next in succession?
You cannot hinder someone’s free
will. That’s the first law of the universe, no matter what the decision. –E. A.
Bucchiarieri, Brushstrokes of Gadfly
I had this
friend in middle and high school who was this beautifully broken young woman.
She was incredibly wise beyond her years, just frighteningly intelligent. She and
her family had migrated from up north somewhere, I want to say around near the
Boston area, and as such, she spoke with this really unique New England accent
that always fascinated me. It was something that had been really foreign to me
up until that point and I remember thinking that she always sounded so elegant,
so educated, like she didn’t belong in Pasco County.
When we
were in middle school, she was reading books that were eligible for college
reading and she actually understood them. She was always listening to this
rare, indie music and talking about topics that I didn’t even know existed. She
always spoke about all these random movies from the seventies, about people who
had intellectually moved her, and about how our political system was going down
the drain. I don’t know if she was ever tested but I’m sure her IQ was north of
150 and sometimes she used words around me that I would have to write down and
look up later. She was this crazy talented artist and she always carried
multiple sketch pads around with her to document whatever she was feeling. I
remember one time, I fell asleep during a planning period in high school and
she sketched a picture of me. The likeness was uncanny; I’m certain my mom
still has that sketch tucked away somewhere in a yearbook.
I was
always charmed by her; captivated by her brilliance, stunned by her literal infinite
knowledge, and left insecure by the fact that back then, I couldn’t measure up.
I always felt like I was having a different conversation than she was, even if I
had been present for the entire thing. She was on a different level than the
rest of us were and I think we all knew it. She was way deeper than your
average adolescent, had been somehow exposed to more knowledge than most
college students, and seemed to suffer from this romantic darkness that always
followed her.
She was
like every other brilliant and tortured artist that has ever graced the world
with their presence. She was too smart to act incessantly happy because she
knew all the things that could happen, all the things that lie ahead in the
proverbial future. She was privy to too much historic failure to really have
faith in anything and instead of worshipping, she spent her time reading and
expanding her awareness. She knew better than to be blissful because she knew
she would be safe in the parameters of her own darkness. Now, looking back on
it, she was like an Edgar Allan Poe or a Sylvia Plath. She was painfully
intelligent and absorbed by this real, incredibly intoxicating sadness. She
made it all seem so exciting, so remarkable.
She was
incessantly suffering from something. And it wasn’t like she was being dramatic
or trying to get sympathy because it was all very legitimate. And this isn’t a
hit at her character because on the contrary, I think she was just emotionally
mature enough to be in touch with her various feelings. She seemed to suffer
from some kind of depression and although it never hindered her from
maintaining straight A’s for her entire educational career, it consumed her. It
was written all over her face and despite the fact that she tried to shield it
from the world, we all knew. She struggled with things like eating, her weight,
and calorie consumption. I even remember a few times, she got so winded and
overheated (because she never ate appropriately) that she had to be carried off
the football field during band practice.
I remember
that day very vaguely because it was such a long time ago but she was seemingly
unfazed. She wasn’t reaching for the nearest cell phone camera to post a social
media picture for sympathy (not that such things really existed back then) or
crying about how sick she felt. In fact, if anything, I think she was
embarrassed by all the attention we paid to her that day. She didn’t want any
part of it. She just wanted to suffer in silence, unburdened by an audience.
No one loses their innocence. It is
either taken or given away willingly. –Tiffany Madison, Black and White
There is
just something about being troubled that is so whimsical. There is something so
seemingly romantic in the idea of being flawed, something so honorable about
having the ability to overcome something tragic or life altering. I mean,
that’s our whole fascination with celebrities, right? The fact that these
individuals are so publicly a hot mess makes them endearing, it makes them relatable,
and it makes us feel better about ourselves. I find that some people are
viewing individuals like Amy Winehouse (the talented binge drinker gone too
soon), Lindsay Lohan (the sordid cocaine snorter who proudly professed her
recovery on an Opera special), and Johnny Depp (the recovering drug addict
turned alleged wife beater) one of two ways: either they are absolutely
fascinated by the deterioration of these people or they’re disgusted by the way
they’re acting despite the realization that they’ve got everything from incessant
fame to prime LA real-estate above Sunset.
I happen
to fall in the former of these two categories but then again, I’m a social
worker. People fascinate me. Even the troubled ones. Especially the troubled ones.
I always
try to let people know that they’re safe with me; I’m always saying to my
friends that I’m a vault, that this is a “judge free zone”. I have the kind of
persona that loves to listen to people complain about their lives, I enjoy
being someone that can be relied on in times of trouble, a person that others
go to when they just need to vent. To be honest, I see myself somewhere in the
ten-year future being a therapist of some kind, sitting in a chair and being
the face of comfort when individuals tell me how stressed they are, how anxious
they’re feeling, how no one understands them. The notion of being a treasury of
information, a person that people can go to when there just isn’t anyone else
really appeals to me. The best part of my job is the stories. I could just
listen to the case managers and counselors talk for hours about the people they
see and the stories they hear. I could definitely make a profession of that.
I don’t
look at this brand of person and think they’re acting out irrationally. I don’t
read gossip magazines dictating celebrity behavior and think to myself that
they’ve got everything and should just stop acting crazy and be thankful. I
don’t see people like Mary-Kate Olsen and Nicole Richie circa 2006 as
individuals hell-bent on seeking attention because they clearly aren’t getting
enough from their various followers. I don’t see people like Britney Spears and
Randy Quaid as high paid drama queens who beat the paparazzi with an umbrella
because they want to be on the cover of Us
Weekly. I mean, I could go on and on about celebrity culture and how
they’re basically destined to descend into this crazy world of fame and tragedy
but I’ll save it. (I’ll save it this time.
I have a wholllllle other blog in the works about the love triangle turned
cheating divorce debacle that is LeAnn Rimes, Eddie Cibrian and Brandi
Glanville. Just you wait. READ IT. I know you’ll love it.)
I saw
something on Pinterest the other day about how “rock bottom has built more
heroes than privilege”. When I first saw that, I slowed down from my rapid
scrolling to really look at it. Maybe it’s just something cliché that is
commonly found in social media network gatherings like Pinterest but I saw so
much truth in it.
Moral of the Crazy: I know it probably seems crazy that
I thrive off of people who have lost their way. I know that I probably look a
little crazy for traveling along this road that allows for people to make incessant
errors, that justifies certain mistakes given the circumstances, and that makes
room for people who have sought solace in things that are harmful. Sometimes I
really believe that if people weren’t addicts, if they hadn’t cheated in
relationships, if they hadn’t fallen on hard times and subjected themselves to
unhealthy habits, they would never learn how to take care of themselves. I see
it nearly every day, this constant struggle with doing what’s appropriate and
doing what feels good. Sometimes I get so frustrated because I think to myself
that these people have such incredibly important things on the line and yet,
they partake in things that [I think] they shouldn’t.
But
mistakes are made. They’re made every day by all of us. Sometimes I really
believe that chaos is the only way certain individuals can function. Without
the pandemonium, without the struggle to survive, they are nothing. It’s like
my mom used to always tell me, hardship builds character.
And maybe
it’s the pulling out of the struggle that really makes you human. It gives you
the ability to comfort yourself, like infants when you leave them to cry for a
couple minutes. They’re learning how to feel better on their own.
The
reality is that if you’re given absolutely everything, you never really learn
how to grow. If you aren’t dealt some trouble or misfortune, you never really
establish any character. It’s impossible to successfully color your world when
you’ve never really learned how to actually live in it. In strife comes
strength, I think.
And a
little mystery only enhances your appearance.
You can’t blame anyone else. No one
but yourself. You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day
with the consequences of those choices. –Max Brooks, World War Z
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