Thoughts

I am, by nature, a very caring person. Just ask my friends. If someone has troubles, no matter who they are, I am more than willing to provide a hug, an encouraging note, a baked good, some advice, or a listening ear. I've comforted girls I barely knew with problems I barely understood--I've held them in my arms as they cried for whatever reason, and given them words of encouragement. When I saw the devastation in Haiti on TV, the suffering I saw rendered me unable to speak for several minutes. For some hours later, I only spoke when I had to. I'd give more examples, but I think you get the picture. My heart aches when I see someone hurting, and I feel this need to help them in whatever I can.

I've been thinking recently how I got to be this way. Was I born like this? Is it normal for another's harships to affect a person so? I know I've always been a sensitive person, but I believe it took specific events for me to reach this particular point. We are born with specific personality traits, yes, but it takes the events in our lives to bring them out and to shape them.


When I lived in Thomasville (from the ages of 7 to 13), I was friends with a girl who was a year younger than me. Our friendship was complicated. When I first met her she made me cry, having made some slurs about my former home in Athens, Georgia. But I am forgiving by nature (even more so when I was younger), and soon we became friends. She was fun to be around when she wanted to, but sometimes without warning or provocation she would lose her temper and lash out. She could be very cruel to others, to a degree I had never seen before in my young life. But since the one incident when I was first getting to know her, she had never struck out at me. She even defended me to others who gave me a hard time--which few people have ever done for me.

I just couldn't wrap my mind around how someone could lose their temper so easily, over absolutely nothing. There was one time when we were roller skating when she suddenly started screaming at the people around her, and no one could figure out exactly why. But I was one of her only friends, and I took that role seriously.

It wasn't until I was 12 or 13, after coming home from a vacation, that the truth finally came out. My friend, who in truth I barely knew and barely understood, had been raped by her step-father again and again from the time she was very small. When I found out, I wept. I also felt guilty, although that had been happening long before I knew her. I felt that I should have noticed the signs. I'd stayed the night at her house on more than one occasion, and I had seen how she and her stepfather interacted, and yet I never thought anything was wrong. Those feelings of guilt--and disgust that I had ever let that man touch me--still haunt me.

That event shook me. Suddenly, the world wasn't so good anymore. My eyes were opened, I suppose, to other's sufferings. It awakened in me a need to help and comfort those in pain. The world is full of people who, like my friend, are in need but are too afraid or ashamed to reach out for help. I want to be there for them.