This is an unusual post, given that I most often write about leadership and related issues. Sometimes, however, life hands you a larger lesson, meant to be shared with those for whom it might make a difference.
The Words Inside
Alison is 20 years young. She holds her words tightly, making sure they stay inside. Sometimes it seems they are about to push through her lips, but she seals her mouth shut. On occasion, you can see her lips open, just a hair’s width, as if she might let the words escape, as if she actually wants to put them outside her mouth and into the room, but she has no breath with which to push them beyond her teeth. Then, quickly, she draws her lips together, and the words fall beneath her soul.
She cuts herself. Why? So that the thing she names “overwhelming”, is transformed to a single unit, a measurable physical sensation, that can be released in small drops of blood.
Sometimes she thinks about suicide, and when she can bear the thoughts no longer, she texts. Her words go to a woman who is eight years older. The elder texts back. “Think of all the reasons you have to live. Think of all the people who will be hurt if you leave.” Alison paves over the killing thoughts, for now.
Worthless
This is the word she uses to describe how she feels about herself. Why? Years of sexual abuse, against which she was too young, too frightened, and too unknowing to defend herself. So, she feels worthless, because she was a girl worth abusing.
This is What I Want to Tell Her
You are right. Something calls for death.
But this thing that must die, is not You. It is something else that needs to die so You can live.
Do not mis-take the call as a demand for your physical death. It is not. A long time ago something invaded You, and it took the place of the You that never had the opportunity to be known, not even to your Self. But You are there, waiting. You are the one who opens her mouth sometimes, as if to let the words out.
She will ask, “How do you know this?”
So I Will Tell Her
I knew a young man once. He made me think of the saying, “Commit random acts of kindness.” That is what he did.
But his soul could not breathe in this world.
He was born into the worst of circumstances. He became a “foster-kid”. That was how he called himself. He was punished for things he never did in ways that are not to be spoken, ever. He was sexually abused.
There was one time, when he had a chance. He was on his way, in the car, with the social worker, to his adoptive home. The phone rang. There was a death in the adoptive family. They would not become his parents.
The beginning ends before it starts.
Foster Kid. No scaffold built from love to hold him up.
He became a man in body and in years. He suffered on the inside where the abuse had settled. He went to a psychiatric hospital. It became his family, the scaffolding he never had. But he got better there. So he left. And then he came back.This happened over and over. His doctor said, “Here, in this place, he is the best he will ever be.” It was true, and I knew that I would never forget those words. He was about to leave his hospital family again, but one morning while everyone slept, he decided it was time.
His soul could not bear the life he was born to.
I dreamed of him the night before his end. We were on a fire escape. The building was burning. He called out a number. It was the time of his death.
I cried for a year.
Every day.
I cried until I thought there was no water left behind my eyes. There is always more water.
What I Learned
Several years later I met with a wise elder and began to speak of my sadness. He gave me a book, Suicide and the Soul by James Hillman. Years later I got to meet the man who wrote the book. I love and cherish him. He is a wise man. He thinks with his mind and his heart. We spent the day together talking about life and beauty and art. The man had three cats.
In his book, he explains that suicide is a mis-take in meaning making. The person hears the call for transformation, which involves the death of a part of the Self, as a call for physical death. When I read those words, I knew he was right.
The elder, the man who gave me the book, told me this story. He was giving a lecture on dream interpretation. When he was done, a woman asked to speak with him. Her neighbor, a young man, had killed himself. She did not know him very well, but after he died, he visited this woman every night in her dreams. He told her the most mundane details about his room, the room inside the house next door, where he lived, before he killed himself. This continued every night for a year until the anniversary of his death. On that night, when he visited, he said, “Tell my mother I’m okay, It’s okay where I am, not great, just okay. And tell her I’m sorry. It was a mistake.”
That is how I know.
Note: While writing this post, I discovered that James Hillman died in October, 2011 at the age of eight-five. He is, however, still teaching me about life, and for that I am truly grateful.