I have some pretty big walls built up around me. I'm someone people tend to let in quickly because (at least I think) I really care about other people. I've experienced suffering and when I see someone else suffering, whether because they're sick or broke up with their boyfriend/girlfriend or another trauma, I want to do everything I can to make things better. I can go with you into your suffering, can go with you into your joy, can sit with you through it all... but it takes a good long time for me to let you sit with me in my stuff. I tend not to believe that people can handle the heaviness, that they really want to sit with it with me and the uncomfortableness of wondering and worrying about the other person takes away from my ability to get what I needed in the first place.
The other day, on my favorite blog (http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2008/12/question-of-day_18.html), the question of the day was "Have you ever experienced an act of random kindness?" I read all the comments before work and then spent the day reflecting on how many acts of kindness I have experienced in my life. I was overwhelmed to think of it all, to think of the people who I wasn't close to who stepped into my life when I needed someone there. People who owed me nothing. People who I had never given help or joy to. People who saw someone sitting in the darkness and who stepped over my walls, through the uncomfortableness, and just stayed with me until I could walk out on my own.
I try to pay those kindnesses forward. I try to thank those people when I can. Yet somehow, it never seems to be enough. The place they fill in my heart, my memories, and my life is so large that its heaviness is beautiful. Its heaviness asks to be shared, even if it's just to the universe.
L met me in my darkest days and when she didn't really know me from Eve, she recognized pain that she had experienced and she sought to help me with mine. She walked with me for hours in the freezing cold when I couldn't sit still or be alone. When I refused to get the help I needed she got it for me and she fought with doctors to make sure it was the best kind of help. She made me mixed cds. She checked in with me continually. She fought for me until I could fight for myself. And she has done it over and over again throughout the years.
T was my TA for a quarter. We knew each other as well as most TA's and students know each other and yet when I was raped and my world was rocked my sophomore year of college, she stepped in out of nowhere and let me stay at her house whenever I wanted over the next two months. On really bad days, she'd run me a bath, light candles, and put her computer with Ani playing in the bathroom. She'd read to me some nights to help me fall asleep. She invited me into her super wonderful group of friends and they made me feel safe again. I spent almost every day for two months with these people and they helped me survive. It was their senior spring and they could have been making sure to have fun, but instead, they helped me. She had been nothing but my TA, no one I was close with or knew much of anything about. Her friends were complete strangers. I don't know how I would have survived without them. I don't talk to any of them anymore; they graduated, I went abroad and we didn't really know each other in the first place, so keeping in touch became hard. But for two months they were everything.
“Fairy tales are full of stories about the burden of gratitude borne toward one who has saved your life. The stories detail the lengths the saved will go to acknowledge that debt, for the saved know the fragility of what was nearly lost. The saved know the critical moment in which life becomes death, know that grace and courage must intercede forcefully because the water rushing over the cliff has tremendous momentum… The saved know and can’t express their gratitude adequately.”
-Patricia Weaver Francisco
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