Into A Million Pieces

It doesn’t matter how many sad commercials people see, how often they hear of starving people in Africa, or how many stories they hear about dead puppies who were all shot and left on the side of the road, they just don’t feel the need to help out. It’s sick. Honestly, whenever I see one of those commercials with starving children or injured animals my heart breaks a little bit. But do I do anything to help? No. I don’t. And you know what? I hate it.

            I hate that I’m too concerned about what my own problems are to help anyone else. . The things I go through are nothing compared to what I’ve seen other people go through. I look at news stories all the time and see nothing but broken people, but I don’t do a single thing about it.

            There’s no hope in our society today, and I’m not going to act like I want to be the poster child for hope. I mess up. I think my problems are too big for me to wake up the next morning, even though in all reality I’ll forget about them in two days. Don’t get me wrong; some things could be a lot harder for other people than they are for me. For example, if my dog died, I would be upset for maybe a week and move on. Not because I don’t love him, but because I just don’t feel like it’s something that I need to mourn over for a super long time. But if my neighbor’s dog died, maybe that dog was twenty years old and my neighbor’s best friend, so he might take it to a totally different extreme. Heartbreak hits us all differently.

            The one thing I’m sick of is seeing people who act like great people, and I know to be great people, leave people starving and mourning on their own because they can’t get over the C they got on their last math test. They can’t look past their failures and struggles to help someone else. I just don’t want to see people being so into themselves that they can’t be there for anyone else. It drives me nuts.

            Because of this, I started something. Something that brings people closer together, brings some people a little bit of hope. I made a jar, kept it in one of my teacher’s classrooms and told everyone to write a problem they’re having on a piece of paper without their names on them, and put them in the jar. Every two weeks we have a meeting, and I pull out every slip of paper and read them out loud. The first couple of meetings there were only a few slips and a few people to show up. Soon enough, the jar was flooded with people’s problems and we all sat after school to listen and give advice to the people who wrote these slips for hours.

            Something stuck out to me in one kid that I have been going to school with since kindergarten. He doesn’t have many friends and looks like he spends a lot of lonely days at school. I’ve never figured it out, but I think a lot of those entries were from him. His name is Aaron. He’s a quiet guy, but once you get him talking he’s sweet and really funny. One day Aaron came up to me and asked if he could talk to me about something. I was ready to hear a story about the friends he has made since this group started, but he told me a completely different story. His life’s journey.

            His parents died when he was three years old. He bounced from foster family to foster family for two years until he ended up with his parents here. They enrolled him in school and he didn’t know what to do with himself since he never had any friends or even much social interaction because he was never anywhere long enough to do so. So he went throughout his school days barely getting by. Always lonely, but always happy when someone would do something as small as smiling at him, or picking up his pencil after it rolled off his desk to the floor. He was sick of always being lonely. He never liked to go to school or be home. He didn’t feel welcome at either place. He felt like a puppet at home and he felt invisible at school. He didn’t know anyone cared about him. He didn’t care if anyone cared about him. He didn’t care about him. He was thinking about taking his own life, but then he heard of this group that started at the school.

            He was nervous to go to the first couple of meetings. He was never well liked, so he was afraid to intrude on a club where no one knew his name. After a few meetings, he decided to come. He told me that he didn’t feel like an intruder, he felt like he had known everyone well since he was born. For the first time in his life he felt acceptance. It was life changing for him to see people who usually are too busy  concerning themselves with their own problems unlocking their hearts and loving each other.

            When he was done with his story, he looked up to me with tears in his eyes and whispered “Thank you”. I was trying to hold back tears myself when he held out a piece of paper and asked me to look at it. It didn’t take me long to realize it. The piece of paper he handed me was a suicide letter he wrote recently. He continued his story.

            “I want this out of my life. I don’t ever want it to come back again. I want you to help me destroy it. You helped me in so many other ways, please, help me get rid of this burden.” He pleaded.

            “Come here, let me show you something.” I replied with a smile on my face.

            There was a paper shredder I knew of in the office and I wanted to bring him there. Ideally I would have burned it, but we were in school and that’s against the rules. So we walked into the office, I handed the note back to him, and pointed to the shredder.

He looked at it, looked back at me, I nodded to him, and he did it. Right then and there the burden that had been on his shoulders for so long was shredded into a hundred pieces. He finally felt accepted. One person’s life was changed forever.

Like I said earlier, I don’t want to be the poster child for hope. Hope isn’t something you can pull out of your back pocket. It’s a lifestyle. A lifestyle I am choosing to live. Now when I see those commercials I’m reminded of Aaron and his story. I am reminded that by a few people’s love and compassion many people’s lives can be changed or even saved. It’s a beautiful thing.  

I have my own problems but they don’t consume me. Something that I hated pushed me to do something that I love. It’s weird how life works sometimes. We change the world with the passion we have for or against things. The most beautiful thing about it is, you can be anybody and you can still make a difference.