Making Sense of the World and Compassion

It has been a very eventful week. I have had 4 papers due this week, all together 32 pages that my poor senioritus stricken mind has had to produce, and a lot of other homework on top of that. this is not what I am going to be talking about in this post: I want to talk about compassion. It might be specific to certain situations, but then again maybe not. So here it goes.
You know when you are talking to someone and they believe something that makes no sense? It seems like insanity to believe it, but they hold tighter and tighter to this belief no matter the logic and evidence you present. It may even contradict some of their own beliefs but they ignore (or struggle with) the cognitive dissonance. They become defensive and you become frustrated at their inability to see the light. A good metaphor for this idea is when a person has been wandering in the dark with a glow stick and you offer them a flashlight. They refuse to use the flashlight when the glow stick has kept them safe for this long. It doesn't make any sense right?
I saw this happen to a girl in my class this week. She was making a comparison between alcoholism and depression claiming that a depressed person, like the alcoholic, is addicted to depression when they first indulge their sadness. I just want to say for the record that I do not agree with her.
There was another girl in the class who took great offense to this and took advantage of the classroom setting to vent her anger. She shared with the class that she had struggled with major depression, had been very close to committing suicide, and was upset to have her problems compared with alcoholism.
The second girl publicly confronted the first girl and cruelly ripped her apart. The first girl apologized but the second girl relentlessly perused her revenge. The first girl started sobbing loudly, continuing her apologies, but the second girl continued her verbal assault until she was satisfied. By the way, the professor did nothing to stop this all from happening. I found this first girl after class and talked to her about what had just happened. This girl had a mother who had major depression while she was a child and was not available for her. She resented her mother for not being there for her and viewed depression in an . . . odd way. It was how she made sense of the world where her mother was not there for her. Sometimes there are things that have happened that never stop hurting. They often decrease in potency and frequency, but they come back out of the blue and it takes time to wrestle them back. This brings me back to the glow sticks.
Though it does not makes sense to use a glow stick in place of a flashlight, it is all that they know. They have fought hard to attain the little light that they have and the prospect of changing is devastating. When you take away the way a person makes sense of the world, the world no longer makes sense. It is easy to say that you are giving them a better way and if they were smart the world just take the stupid flashlight already, but it's not that easy. If you have ever tried to break a bad habit like overeating or swearing, you know that it is a difficult process that takes effort to change. It's second nature to drop the F-bomb when your car doesn't start and to head for the cookies when you have to spend another Saturday night alone. Changing the way you think is harder, especially when there are strong emotions tied to those beliefs. You have taken the only light source they have ever known and now they are standing in the dark holding something they have no idea how to operate or understand.
Though things may seem simple to you there are people who have never had the opportunities you have had and those people deserve patience and most certainly our compassion. Just because you have a flashlight does not make you the master of the darkness or better than the person with the glow-stick. Always remember that there are things that may not be apparent to you either and you would want someone to be kind to you if/ when they point them out to you. You may have a flashlight, but God knows where the light switch is.      

My Random Ideas on Love

Last night was rough. There is a strong positive correlation between between my stress level and the approaching finals week of this last semester. I have the usual overwhelming amount of assignments due and not enough time to do them. Also I have had the wonderful combinations of familial discord and disappointment in a loved one to compound this stress. I finally had one of my famous Liz stress breakdowns last night. To say the least: I was a sobbing hot mess. My poor husband sat there and did his best to comfort me but the only thing that was going to make it stop was to just get it out. When I was finally able to calm down my husband took me in his arms and just held me. Then something so cute happened. If any of you reading this blog really knows Jason, you will know that he isn't the most poetic or eloquent, but he knows his stats lingo. He started telling me in statistical terms how much he loved me. He used standard deviations to tell me how above the mean his love for me was and many other things that my mere 1040 stats class did not allow me to comprehend. The thing that I did understand was that he loved me. He was able to talk about it for minutes and minutes in an eloquence any actuary would be proud of.
This made me think about how we all talk about and display love for one another. Only a few are able to display the popular ways of communicating love: the rich buy extravagant gifts and take loved ones to dinners, the poets write poems, musicians play and sing, and others borrow from an assortment of these. While they are all good things to do, they have become a little trite and impersonal. Like the different people in relationships, love should be shown in different and unique ways. It doesn't matter if it's unusual just so long as the one you love understands you. True love is understanding and being understood. I am not saying that you must perfectly understand the one you love, that is impossible. What is important is that there is an active effort being made. I know that was  random tangent but seriously guys, don't be afraid of putting a little bit of you into showing someone that you love them.