I've come to realize that the best way to heal is to channel the pain from a traumatic experience into a cause to help people who are or once were in a similar predicament. You see it all the time with people whose private tragedy or trauma pulled them into the spotlight:
Lets start with Korey Wise, who many people are familiar with the sensational success of the series When They See Us about the exonerated Central Park Five who were five black and latino teenagers who were falsely accused, convicted and imprisoned for raping a jogger in Central Park. Other than Korey we have Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson all whom are men that you could never quantify the suffering and humiliation they endured. But Korey was unique because he was thrust into the adult prison system immediately and spent the majority of his 13 year sentence fighting for his life from the brutality of the physical assaults to the torture of solitary confinement to carrying the infamy of being accused of gang raping and brutalizing a woman. Thankfully he was compensated through a case with the city of New York. But I'm amazed at how well he has adjusted, and how quickly he seems to have healed. In fact executive producer and visionary Ava DuVernay calls him a walking miracle considering there is so much more he went through that is not publicly acknowledged. And I think I can safely attribute that to the activism work he does on behalf of others that are wrongfully accused as part of that. He donated $190,000 to the UC Boulder Law school's innocence project, and continues to speak about criminal justice reform throughout the country.
Next we have a very different kind of victim: Elizabeth Smart who was just fourteen when she was kidnapped from her bed at knife point by a homeless man that her parents hired to do odd jobs around the house. She was held captive by this man and his accomplice wife for nine months where she was raped constantly, starved, chained up and forced to endure threats against her life and that of her family if she tried to escape. The news of her abduction was so shocking that it spurred a remarkable search effort but as time went on more and more people grew convinced that she was dead and felt there was no need to continue, but she stunned the world by turning up alive. Now, once the euphoria of freedom and being reunited with your family fades, it would cause you to wonder just how to pick up the pieces of your life, make sense of what happened, heal and find some semblance of normalcy. And her mother, the morning after she came home, gave her advice that was game-changing. She said,"they have stollen nine months of your life away from you that you will never get back. But the best punishment you could ever give them is to be happy, is to move forward with your life, to do all the things you want to do." And through following that advice she moved forward and found many sources of healing and happiness but the most important one was advocacy work with helping survivors of kidnapping and sexual violence as well as prevention and child safety. She travels around the country speaking about her kidnapping as a way to raise awareness as well as connect with and support other survivors. And while I assumed living through something like that would ruin someone's life she has even said she's grateful for what happened as it gave her a platform to enact some real change.
Then we have Denise Brown who was the sister of the late Nicole Brown who was the ex-wife of football legend and actor O.J Simpson who was viciously physically and verbally abused, stalked and terrorized by her ex-husband. Tragically, like many battered women she would go on to be murdered by her abuser along side her friend Ron Goldman who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time yet died trying to protect her. And then there was the trial of the century that ensued. I can't even fathom the rage and despair that the two families felt when he was acquitted. But the Browns were in a different position than the Goldmans they were raising the children of the murderer so for the kids' sake they were courteous towards O.J's family and civil towards him. But her older sister Denise was a bit different; she was the most angry and bitter person amongst the Browns because the relationship she had with her sister was like no one else. Nicole's death shattered her, but eventually she had to put all of that aside because it wasn't going to bring Nicole back and she was then filled with a determination to not to let any other family go through what hers did. So she started the Nicole Brown Foundation to fight domestic violence and help battered women and their families find safety. She pushed for the Violence Against Women Act to pass in Congress and does speaking engagements all over the country to raise awareness about the silent epidemic that is domestic violence.
Finally we have Miss Sybrina Fulton, or as many of you may know is the late Trayvon Martin's mother. She is truly extraordinary, her strength and grace while dealing with the unthinkable, your own child being murdered. Trayvon was a good young man with dreams of being a pilot and having a family of his own was walking in his Dad's Fiance's neighborhood when the volunteer neighborhood watchman, a piece of human garbage named George Zimmerman, stalked and chased him around the area despite being told by the authorities not to approach him. Eventually after a brief struggle and Trayvon screaming for help he was shot twice in the chest and died instantly. And the anger she felt was complicated and intensified when her son's brief life was put under the microscope. There were many, politically conservative mainly, media sources that portrayed a child that was killed through no fault of his own as a "thug," unearthing images of him with gold teeth and less than flattering twitter posts as a way to distract from what truly matters a child murder and what it says about us as a culture that we allow such things to happen. And when he got away with it through "stand your ground laws" which is effectively an extension of the self defense laws that were already on the books. The jury bought the bullshit self defense argument (even though Zimmerman confronted him) and he was acquitted of 2nd degree murder. Their were mixed reactions all over the country but Trayvon's family were forced to grieve the injustice as well as the loss of their son in the public eye. Throughout this saga, she started the Trayvon Martin Foundation to support families that lost a loved one to gun violence as well as advocate for gun reform, and the Circle of Mothers which provides support specifically to mothers who have lost a child to gun violence. The open letter she sent Leslie McSpadden (Mike Brown's Mother) after his killer Officer Darren Wilson was acquitted was moving. And now she's even running for county commissioner on a platform of housing reform, improving public transportation in the Miami area and income inequality. And despite her child being gone forever, or a hole in heart as she puts it, that's how she goes on.
So I think about some of the toughest times that I've had in my own life. It has rocked me to my core, traumatized me in ways that are hard for other people to understand, and utterly and completely changed my identity. And that is the bullying, harassment, mental illness (depression mainly at that time) and loneliness and how it dramatically led to me being committed to a mental hospital at the age of seventeen. I will tell you the story in greater detail in an upcoming post but basically I wrote a suicide note, a school administrator found it and I ended up hospitalized. The hospitalization was the most surreal, traumatic, formative reality that opened my eyes to the flaws of the mental health care systems in this country in a way that nothing else could. So in the aftermath of this event I was consumed with concern for the kids I had met (and countless like them) almost as much as I was with my own residual trauma of my hospitalization. I heard so many stories and saw things that are burned into my memory like: all types of abuse (sometimes at the hands of their own parents), the voices in their heads and all of the things they were commanding them to do, substance abuse, suicide attempts, eating disorders, arms that were slashed all over the place, etc. And as much as it was a bolt of reality that helped me put my own problems into perspective it in a way was a call to action. I begun to think about the reprehensible attitudes and conduct of the staff that made it feel like prison instead of treatment and the fact that the overwhelming majority of kids relapsed again and again. The youngest children in our section were five and I got to know so many kids in the adolescent ward that grew up in and out of mental hospitals without any long term solution or reprieve from their conditions. So although I knew a very limited amount about mental health care at the time I begun conflating my experiences in this 10 day period to a national phenomenon and convinced myself that this was my life calling. I began to dream of being a prominent psychiatrist that transformed psychiatric hospitals in America as well as building a coalition for this cause in Ethiopia. I was wanting to do what the aforementioned people did seamlessly---channel my pain into something extraordinary. But of course, I did not have the platform, resources they had or the technical know how to achieve this goal. I hung on to this dream because I felt like I didn't have anything else, I was overly medicated at that time, still very depressed and barely scraping by in community college because I was not functioning a lot of the time. I had nothing else to sustain me or help me make sense of this awful, painful, traumatic thing. Eventually, to some extent, I came to terms with this and I also begun to realize that I didn't want to be tethered to this experience for the rest of my life and I begun to dream of reasonable, attainable things like I did pre-hospitalization.
Most importantly though, what I've come to realize is that ordinary people have the capacity to do extraordinary things and you don't necessarily need fame, connections or an exorbitant amount of money to touch people's lives and make your mark on the world. Also, human beings are so strong and resilient by nature, that's how we, as a species, survived while others died out and I believe that could be helpful reminder to everyone who is struggling. Always remember that there is hope, there is light at the end of the tunnel and you always have people in your corner that are ready and able to help you. I wish I had someone to say that to me in my darkest times so I want to be there for you. If anyone who is reading this is in pain or feels alone or helpless please reach out to me, I would love to speak with you.
(I can give additional contact info at a later time if need be)
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