Losing

Last week, I came across this video post...

It's hard to watch because it feels very honest and direct.

As adults, we are caught off-guard.  It challenges our ideals of what childhood should be like knowing full well that, at the same age, we all kept secrets and pretended to be somebody who only really existed in family snapshots. 

To watch this is to have unfocused outrage.  Tillie has experienced things that no child should experience, even though to be an adult is to experience everyone of them in some form or other.

We want to help, to reach through the little YouTube window and try in some way to make it better even though we would, at best, only be delaying the inevitable disappointments of adulthood.

The real message of this video is not in the incidents of her life--shocking though they may be--but in how she has chosen to respond.  The take-away is that, after all that has happened to her, she is still accepting, still willing to listen, still thinks that everybody, no matter who they are, is "beautiful."

* * *

One of my jobs is to keep the Agency's Facebook pages supplied with new material.  To do that, I look at lots of blog posts, news stories and videos from all over the world.  Lately, there has been a whole lot of material relating to teen suicide.

It doesn't seem to matter whether the suicide happened in the developing world, the developed world, across the street or across the country, it was remarkable to me how similar the stories are one to another.

The players in each of these dramas have experienced loss, or have been threatened with loss; have been shamed, or believe they have brought shame to their families.

One story that has produced a number of different articles concerns a murder-suicide in Mississauga, Ontario near Toronto.  A 16 year-old male jumped from an overpass onto a busy expressway just prior to the discovery of the body of his 17 year-old female friend.  The young man survived the fall and being struck by at least one car only to succumb to his injuries a week later.

In the days since this double tragedy, it has come out that the male and female were friends, but that the male wanted more of a romantic relationship and the female did not share the same feelings.

The impact of this story and others like it on adults is generally one of shock and surprise.  We can't seem to understand why the young man would take the life of his friend and then try to kill himself.  Surely, this was just a case of unrequited puppy love.  What's the big deal?  Right?

The arc of childhood development is the evolution of empathy.  As infants we are completely self-obsessed and, hopefully, before we are turned loose on the world, we have some sense that others may have equally, if not more, compelling needs and desires than our own.

Researchers are now telling us that the brain is not fully developed until the mid-twenties.  Seen in that context, the challenges of navigating high school and relationships--romantic and otherwise--seem much more perilous.  As adults, we think we are lucky when we find the love of our life, but, as teenagers, every relationship is the love of your life.

I remember the last day of elementary school very clearly. 

It was a bright late June day and I was walking home from school crying.

I was absolutely inconsolable because I was never going to see Jane again.

This WAS a big deal.  For most of the previous 7 years, Jane had been part of my life.  She, along with the Wood sisters, was one of the three who were perpetually ahead of me in terms of grades. 

It's not like she and I were friends, but now that school was over, we never would be.  She and her family were moving to Ottawa and I wasn't.

I think I can still find the park bench that I collapsed on and where I spent what seemed like an eternity sobbing.

I was learning about loss. 

And it was more than the loss of a pet, or a cherished toy, or even a beloved relative:  this was the loss of an idea.  A secret vision of a theoretical future that was so special that I had dared not speak of it to anyone.  In fact, I don't think I really understood how I felt about Jane until I realized that I would never see her again and even that wasn't really real until after I had seen her for the last time.

But when I did, it hurt a LOT.

Everyone has had an experience like mine; one where you figure out what you want and then learn that not only can you not have it now, you won't ever have it.  The kind of want that so easily gets mistaken for need.  The kind of want that makes your heart race and your chest feel tight and your breath seem hard to catch.  The kind of want that makes an 11 year-old kid think that he could take a 90-minute bus ride to Ottawa despite having no earthly idea where to find Jane and a sneaking suspicion that she wouldn't exactly be happy to see me if I showed up.

Everybody has been that way about something, or somebody and so, no matter how hard we might wish to deny it, we all have a way back to understanding what it is, and how it is, that our teenagers are thinking. 

We can make that journey--make that connection--if we want to.

But, paradoxically, to be a teenager is to be in a rush to be an adult and we learn from our parents that teenage thinking is not nearly as important as adult thinking.  Teenagers are encouraged to "grow up" and to "get serious" even while their brains are still changing and their passions are so monumental because they are so new.

After the constant upheaval of being a teenager, what is desired is to have "adult passions" that are properly sized, proportional, manageable.

It is only after having been an adult for a while that you recognize the trade off that has been made and the space that has been emptied of outsized passions and filled with many too-small and far too trivial sentiments.

* * *

I try to take my dog for a walk every night after work.  I should be better about doing this considering all of the things he continues to teach me.

We have two or three routes that we take on a rotating basis.  A couple are pretty short and one is so long that he is dragging his tail before we are two-thirds done.  I try to mix them up just to keep it interesting for him--go a different route every day--but what I have come to understand is that it really doesn't matter.  We could walk the same route every day and it would be the same treat for him.  The choice to change up routes is one that I am really making for myself.  As far as the dog is concerned, so long as he is out walking, he's happy.  I might not be able to tell, but every tree--even though it was in exactly the same spot yesterday--is a new discovery, a chance to catch up on current events.

I have to keep reminding myself of this.

I watch him engage with his world from the other end of the lead.  I have to correct myself, stop myself from getting impatient as he makes his tree-by-tree, post-by-post inventory of the neighborhood.  I catch myself thinking how could he possibly be interested in smelling the same dried smells that he smelled the day before.  To him, they are of course fascinating and nuanced because he receives a lot of his information about the world through his nose.  I get much of my information about the world through my head.  I associate new information with old information, I see, or perceive, patterns based on experience.  As I get older, it takes less and less input to create new, fully formed impressions of the world.  My dog gets up every day thinking that it is the best day ever.

* * *

I'm much older now.  In theory, I could go to Ottawa any time I wanted. 

In theory.

I want to be absolutely clear. I have no interest in tracking down Jane, or anybody else.  I'm married and have a dog.  (We have a cat too, but we're never sure he's made up his mind to stay with us.)

In theory I could do a lot of things, but the other lesson you learn as an adult is that every choice has a consequence, every decision to move toward something is to move away from something else.  And choice by choice, day after day, the once seemingly endless possibilities of your future become the responsibilities of your present. 

Instead of treating each new opportunity as a sensation to be experienced, it become an obstacle over which it becomes harder to see from where you have come and that blocks your path to the future.

Tillie, for all the growing up she has already done, has not yet done so much that she can't see her future.

We all know a Tillie, probably more than we realize.  Get to know their stories.  Listen without judging.  Acknowledge them.  If you're feeling brave enough, tell them what scares you.  The life you save, just might be your own.

--Graham Campbell
Associate Director