I was that little kid crying on the playground because she was worried about what would happen when her cat died ten years later. I was that little kid fussing over the political correctness of backward overalls and Indian (Native American) day. Oh golly did that change, I'm one of the least politically correct people I know, without meaning to be. When I say that my insightfulness is a double-edged sword, I mean it in the sense that sometimes I think about things on a different level than most people do during their daily routine. I'm an insightful thinker, and not really a "hey, how's the weather" kind of gal. But I will talk with you about inoculating children, rescuing animals, or my limited knowledge of spirituality among other things like seeing a random car on the street and looking for a particular person in it, or drinking coffee and wondering when the filter was last changed. I will look at you funny if you want to talk about how humid it is outside.
Most of the ideas that pop into my head come to me by way of road rage and North Carolina's atrocious traffic, which my classes cleverly seem to be scheduled to start and end with. I was driving today and I was thinking -- right now, there is someone going through something so horribly bad you can't conceive it. You don't know this person yet. But you will. Someday, and you could meet them by sitting on them next to an airplane, accidentally bumping elbows on a train, etc. and you will be a sign of the end of their suffering. If you're a halfway pleasant person, you probably smile at strangers and open the door for the elderly. Or you're like everybody else and let the door slam in their face, or don't realize there's an elderly person behind you until after you've let this happen. I come by my friends pretty easily, and I genuinely love people. I've met several of them by chance in very unfortunate situations, most of them by random or association with people I already knew. Some of them were my patients, some of them were family of my patients, and some of them just started telling me their life stories as I apparently give off a vibe that I'd love to hear the whole shebang. I once met a man on a flight homebound from Fort Myers. He had the middle seat next to me on our connecting flight through Atlanta. He looked like an average Joe to me with a baseball cap, some blonde stubble, and a little bit of a beer belly. He turned to me and started asking me some pretty basic questions... nothing personal. He wanted to know where I went to school, what for, if I was working, how old I was, and we somehow started talking about family. If you can get someone onto this subject and they are a family oriented person, you won't hear the end. Or you will, just hours later when you're landing and thinking about eating every single cinnamon roll at Cinnabon in one sitting. It turns out that this man that I didn't even know prior to my boarding my 12:00 flight had just lost his fiancee in a car wreck a month before they were supposed to get married. At the point when I met this man, it'd only happened four months before. He described in detail how he had to identify her body and couldn't get out of bed for a month afterwards. He told me about how their dog would go and lie in her spot as if to keep it warm, thinking she was coming back at some point. He got choked up talking about how he absolutely fell in love with this woman's son and daughter who were relatively young, and how these children would be sent back to Kansas to be with their father, who had nothing to do with them. He had fostered these children and done this man's job going to all the baseball games, the Indian Princess meetings, and late night Wal-Mart runs for project supplies, and this man who did not even ask questions about the birth of his youngest child, had legal rights to both of them. I walked off that flight thinking about how good I have it, and how easily your life can be flipped over and dumped on the table in a blink. I don't know what it is about me that makes people want to tell me about very deep personal things, but part of me hopes it never goes away. I connect on a very deep level with the people around me. Sometimes it's depressing and a bit of a burden when I wish I had the innocence of people who don't connect the dots so easily on the negativity of human nature, but it's always insightful, and a daily reminder that we all bleed the same. Somewhere relatively close to you, someone is hurting. Someone has lost something. Someone is lost themselves. It doesn't hurt to bring over a muffin basket sometimes.
