Sometimes I wonder about the weight we carry and how for each of us there is a different burden. Sometimes seeing the burdens another carries makes you wonder how they could possibly bear the weight of it. Sometimes you wonder if you could carry the weight they shoulder. You wonder if you are luckier than they are to have been dealt an "easier" hand in life. I sometimes wonder if perhaps they are the chosen ones. If we are all being tested in this life, maybe the ones who carry the heavier burdens and bear the greater hardships are the ones who are taking the advanced course in life.
Then again, I think 9/10ths of reality is perception. Adjust your perspective and it all changes.
I know this girl. She has attempted suicide more than once and these were not cries for attention, they were serious efforts that sent her to the hospital. She was sexually abused, or more accurately regularly raped, by a step-father for four years, beginning when her age was still in the single-digits. She has a younger sister who she deeply loved and wanted to protect, leading her to basically offer herself to the step-father in return for him not "taking the virginity" of the younger sister.
I find it hard to even imagine the size of that weight. Or maybe the right way to put it is, "the mass of that weight."
She wants to hurt herself constantly and is a very advanced cutter, having cut up her face and having slit her own throat. She fantasizes about becoming three hundred pounds, motoring around in a wheelchair and wearing "old lady clothes." She would have succeeded in killing herself years ago except she holds herself accountable for her younger sister, who she insists must succeed in life, even as she considers herself a lost, empty vessel with no redeeming qualities.
She's intelligent and highly creative. She writes the most intense poems I've ever read, dark and empty and yet in no way similar to the typical shopping cart of angsty poetry you can find in the notebooks of many high school girls. Her poetry will make the hair stand up on your neck. It violates your soul just to read it. Her drawings are equally dark and somehow deeply expressive. If it is possible for someone's bones to grate against their soul on a daily basis, that would define her existence as expressed through her art, but I don't have the right words. She makes me feel like a hack.
I had to say goodbye to this girl recently. I wanted so badly to do something to inspire her during the time I knew her, but I feel very mortal in her presence. I wrote something for her and gave it to her as a going away present. I saw tears in her eyes when she read my goofy story. It was about a tree whose branches reach towards the sky, but does it matter if no one ever sees those branches or the sky? It was about a tree whose roots grow very deep, but does it matter if no one ever notices those roots?
As she turned to go she smiled and told me, "No one ever pays attention to the roots, you silly old man. The roots are underground."
When I left she told me, "Make sure you keep writing stories."
Maybe we aren't asked to carry more weight than we can bear. Maybe we all carry just enough that if we shoulder it just right, we can see eternity.