This morning I watched President Obama's contribution to the It Gets Better Campaign, which is, for those who don't know, an online video collection of messages to young people to hang in there.  A response to the overwhelming number of gay teen suicides of late, it is one of my favorite helping actions, and I'm going to tell you why.  I don't think that strengthening laws against gay-bashing is a very helpful thing to do about this.  Of course gay-bashing is crappy, anyone-bashing is crappy, but kids do not kill themselves because they were picked on.  They kill themselves because they do not have any tools to deal with emotional and psychological pain.  While bullying is awful and should be stopped, there are at least a dozen other horrors of adolescence, equally excruciating, that we ought to put on the list, and we could spend our lives dealing with the list and forgetting about the kids.

I have said before that most of what I know about anatomy has been learned from my experience with injury.  For example, I have never really had pain in my stomach muscles, and so I really don't know them so well, but I have a clear mental image of the way the muscles of the shoulders connect to the back and neck thanks to a lifetime of tension headaches.  For me, pain illuminates what can not be seen.  It gives definition to the shape and structure of my insides, physically, mentally, and emotionally.  It isn't the only way to learn, of course, but it is one way.  For this reason, the anatomy of the suicidal mind and heart are not a mystery to me.

To discuss this further, I will now nutshell the themes of each of my major suicidal episodes here, for your reading pleasure:

Age 13: I am worthless.
Age 16: I am unloved.
Age 19: The pain will never end.
Age 26: I am irreparably damaged.
Age 28: I do not belong in this world.

See how none of those things are facts*?  Of course, I was told some facts by some people during those times, but they didn't compute, because all my life I had practiced believing that my feelings were real indicators of real ultimate truth.  Do you think I would attempt to end my life over some falsehoods?  Of course I wouldn't!  Who would?  My experience was REAL LIVE TRUTH to me.  Furthermore, I didn't know anything about the shape of the grieving process, and almost no kids know about it because it takes time to learn that, but meanwhile, we can at least give them some good information about what thoughts and feelings are: totally temporary experiences of tiny little chemicals in the brain.  Key word, temporary.

It Gets Better wins my vote because it declares the impermanence of suffering.  It does not dismiss or minimize the pain of the present.  It Gets Better brings reason to a highly unreasonable situation, and it does so with personality and style.  Way to go, video guys.  I don't have a webcam yet, so I'm going to do my It Gets Better here with words. 

--

Hey Teenagers!

Guess what?  You are totally right that shit is fucked up.  It makes sense that you would be upset.  We've been telling you since you were little that everything is great, and it's not great.  People are assholes, and there is no santa, and we're not sure if everything is ok when you die.  Sorry you just found all of that out at once.  That's actually our fault, so we understand why you'd be pissed at us.  We were trying to give you a nice childhood by lip-spelling curse words slowly to each other and not letting you watch anything good on TV, but it turns out that was stupid.  We don't know what we're doing.

I can tell you as one person who was once a teenager that it is honest to shit the single worst thing you will have to do in your life, getting through that.  Your parents might say that they are really stressed out, that they have "responsibilities" and that your life is so easy compared to theirs, but I want to tell you right now, that is total bullshit.  They just forgot.  They forgot that now they only hang out with who they want to hang out with, they forgot that they have to power to make their lives exactly the way they want them to be, they forgot that their responsibilities are the price of having really incredible things like kids.  Actually, if their lives really are super hard and painful, I bet you anything it's because of some shit that happened when they were your age that no one ever helped them with.

That's why I'm writing to you.  I realize you don't care that "I was your age once," that I was really hopeless and angry and sad, too.  Some really awful shit went down when I was younger, one day I'll tell you about it, and I thought I could never be happy or even ok, and so I treated myself like crap for years, and tried to die a few times.  You can't really understand what I'm saying right now in exactly the same way that I can't understand what you are feeling right now.  There are certain ways that people can't understand each other even when they are saying the same thing.  So I realize that you don't care, you can't care, because I'm a grown up who does whatever I want whenever I want.  But you will be a grown up, too.  Right after this crappy part, in fact.  Of course, the not very great news is that all those jerks you have to sit next to at school will also grow up, at least in the way that they will get taller, and some of them will be jerks until they die.  They will make tons of money and run for political office and this kind of thing, but you won't care, because you'll be happier. 

You will be happier because you are more interesting.  You will be the kind of person who has guts and character and compassion, because of the very bullshit you are dealing with right now.  You will have strength and creativity.  You will be wise.  You will know how feelings show up and disappear like a flame on a match, really big and firey and then smaller and then nothing but smoke.  You will know that because you'll be a feelings expert, and your expertise will make it so that you have psychic-seeming powers where you can tell what is going on with other people sometimes better than they can tell themselves.  You will clearly see their pain, their motivations, and their beauty, and you will be really valuable to them.  The people that love you will not be faking it and you will know that.  This is just one of the reasons why your sex life will be awesome.

The important thing for the moment is to stay alive for that.  I recommend that you make two rules and two rules only: 
1) Do not hurt your body.  (No guns, blades, needles, drunk driving, or drugs made by humans, and no forgetting a condom.)
2) Do not hurt anyone else's body. (Also, try not to fuck up people's cars unless it is for activist reasons, can we agree on that?)
Other than those two things, I think you have a lot of things to express and you should do anything you want.  Primarily because now is the time to get that out of your system.  Your parents will get mad, but they will get over it.  If they hit you about it, or say really shitty things to you, or if they are doing anything else to you which feels terrible, seriously, tell an adult that doesn't suck, like, now.

I am happy to be that adult, if you don't think I suck.  So, write to me if you want.  karenfaith@yogaforthemoment.com  Meanwhile, if there is no one at school that you like, get on the internet and find out what college has the most queers, geeks, freaks, punks or whatever and apply for early admission to that college.

Keep kicking ass,

Karen








*they are also relatively unrelated to the events and abuses that triggered them, isn't that interesting?