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.
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