(for an index see http://stevehein.com/rw.htm)
Recent Writing
May 16
I was thinking about the first times I traveled in Europe by myself, listening to the Gypsy Kings. And I wrote this....
I wish I could go back and be a guide to myself. I wish I could go back and be there to talk to myself, to listen. I wish I would have had someone to talk to, to listen to me. To help guide me, to accept me. To hug me. To help me develop compassion. To help me see how judgmental I was becoming. To help me see what mistakes I was making, but help me in a compassionate way. I wish I had someone believe in me like I believe in some of the teenagers I have met. I wish I would have had someone say the things to me that I said to Sarah when she was 12. I wish they would have told me I have insight. That I am sensitive and this is a good thing. I wish they would have helped me develop my sensitivity. I wish they would have taught me how to listen and about invalidation. And the difference between fear and respect. I wish I would have had someone who would have listened to my girlfriends and I when we were arguing. Someone who could have helped us learn to talk about our feelings. To use "I messages." I wish someoe would have taught me that you can't feel empathy when you feel attacked and defensive. I wish I wouldn't have had to learn things like this so late in life, on my own, through painful experiences. I wish I would have had someone teach me to hug someone in silence when they are crying. I wish I would have had someone teach me how to say "yeah" when others just needed someone to listen. I wish I would have had someone ask me how much I felt lectured to and disapproved of by my mother and my brother. I wish someone had helped my father see what my mother was doing to him. How she would provoke him.
I wish I had some really care about me. Someone who wasn't so emotionally needy that they couldn't accept me as I was or even see who I was or who I could be. I wish I had someone who had encouraged me to think for myself and someone to help me learn how to ask questions without putting others on the defensive or feeling superior to them. I wish I had someone help me learn to ask important questions and someone who had encouraged me to start writing earlier and to take my writing seriously. I wish I would have had someone encourage me to write about what was happening in school when I was a teenager, or even younger, and how I felt about it. Better yet I wish I would have had someone help me express my feelings and help me write them down. My father tried to help me with my math homework, and my mother tried to help me with my project on Saudia Arabia, but I wish I would have had someone help me with expressing my feelings. And someone who told me I had a lot of good things to say, things that the people in the world needed to hear. Things that could help reduce the pain in the world. Things that could help teenagers from killing themselves or trying to stop their pain with drugs, alcohol, and distractions. I wish I had learned about people like Nathaniel Branden, Hermann Hesse, Wayne Dyer, Henry David Thoreau, Richard Bach, Ghandi, Nelson Mandela much earlier in my life. I wish I hadn't been taught to be so fearful of authority. I wish I hadn't been hit with a board in school. I wish I had been able to walk out when my mother or brother was lecturing me and I was just sitting there listening, not defending myself or expressing my feelings or even thinking about them.
I wish I hadn't been such a sponge for other people's emotional poison. I wish I would have had my own basic emotional needs met so I wouldn't be so emotionally needy now. And so alone. I wish I knew how to fill my own emotional needs. Because I see now that no one else is going to do it. And this scares me. Because I am afraid I can't do it alone and as long as I am emotionally needy, people who I need will keep leaving me because I am too needy. I wish I weren't alone right now. I wish I had people I could call and say, "Do you want to get together today? And they would say "Sure. What time?" I wish I had someone who I could hug. I wish I had someone who would listen now. Someone who wanted to learn from me. Someone who wanted to spend time with me. Someone who thought it would be an honor and a privilege to spend time with me. I wish. That is all I can say now. I just wish. But I also hope. I hope someone who reads this will understand. I hope they will learn what I have learned, but sooner. And they will be a guide to someone who has something special to offer the world.
S. Hein
Quito, Ecuador
May 16, 2004
Note- you can search this site and my eqi.org site for the people I have mentioned here, and the things like invalidation and respect and fear. I didn't want to interrupt you with a lot of links
Yesterday I got an email from someone I used to talk to when she was 17. She used to read my diary everyday. She is in college now. University. An expensive one on the east coast of the USA. She is taking a lot of courses about politics. Political this, political that. She said she is failing most of them. I was encouraged to hear this. I don't want her to take grades seriously. I asked her why she was even going to college. She wrote, "To get an education so I can get a well-paying job?"
She doesn't know herself why she is there. It is just the expected thing. It is what you do. It is the done thing. It is the common thing. (But she is not a common person.)
I thought of asking her if I could post her letter. But I decided to just write this. Partly to see if she will read it, but mostly to talk about how much she has changed. She is busy now with university classes. Even though she is failing she is still busy with school projects. They are more interesting now. She was always bored in highschool. She has more freedom now. She didn't have freedom when she was in highschool. So she has more ways to distract herself. She has made more friends who are close to her intellectual equal. She doesn't need to spend hours chatting with me or writing to me or reading my diary. It kind of hurts that she isn't interested in my life enough to read my personal site anymore. I told her I had been writing in it and hoped she would read some of it and make a comment about it, acknowledge me in some small way. She did write me back, but didn't mention anything from my site. Maybe she looked at it. I don't really know. Maybe she will read this and write to me and say, "I read what you wrote." But I will feel disappointed if I expect her to care about what I am doing these days, much less to support it in any way.
I have seen this happen before. I am starting to accept it. People who used to care about things like feelings and changing the education system, or making a difference in the world. People I started talking to a few years ago online when they were teenagers are now "growing up" and joining the adult world. The world where feelings don't matter. Where money matters. Where getting a job matters. Where things like children and children's feelings and freedom for teenagers are distant memories. Things that can be deleted with the push of a button. A whole diary of three or four years can be deleted. Written journals can be thrown out. The things that were written can be dismissed as unimportant. Just part of teenage angst.
I have met people who have thrown out their diaries and journals from their teenage years. I know people who have deleted their diaries and dismissed them as being worthless.
In the last few years, I have watched people's souls being killed. By the time they get out of highschool, most of them are dead or so close to it, that they might as well be. I don't believe in "souls" but I don' t know what else to call it. More specifically, the longer they stay in the "education" system, the farther they get from their feelings. They certainly won't get closer to their feelings reading a lot of books on politics and writing essays which their professors will approve of. They get farther and farther from caring about the things that were hurting them so much while they were teenagers. They will read their own writing and not be able to relate to it. It will seem as if another person wrote it. And that will be true.
I could list for you the people who are in college and universities now. Who don't write me anymore. Who don't read my writing. Who don't know what to say when I ask them how they feel anymore.
Last night I talked to Evan from Canada. He took a year off from school. He is traveling around South America. He said when he goes back he won't care so much about grades. He will just study what is interesting. That was encouraging. So I will end this on that positive note. He also said his parents were fine with his taking a year off. I hope there will be more people like Evan. I hope this piece of writing, this piece of me, will help inspire someone to get out of the system and go traveling. Oh, Evan has been doing volunteer work with children. He has seen what I have seen. That children are happy and cooperative when they are young and schools make them unhappy and competitive. But I said I would end this on a positive note. Oh, well, I lied. Shoot me. lol.
No, I will try to find something positive. You are reading this. And that encourages me. Thanks for reading.
Steve
May 16, 2004 - still in Quito!
The little girl crying outside the church
I heard her crying. I looked down. She was sitting on the curb next to her mother. She was about 7 years old. Her mother was selling food next to the church. Her mother was ignoring her. She was sitting there crying alone.
Then her little sister came over. I am guessing she was about 2. She put her hand on her big sister's shoulder. She softely patted her sister's back. I thought to myself, "The little sister knows what to do, why doesn't the mother?" And I wondered if the little sister had learned this from anyone. I looked at the mother's face and body language and I couldn't imagine her ever teaching anyone how to comfort someone else. She looked like a person who was much more likely to smack someone than to hug them. She was big, dirty and just looked mean. I would have to say the younger sister probably was acting from what we call instinct. The same thing that leads a spider to make a web or a bee to make honey or a beaver to make a dam. It is this instinct to help and comfort that schools and society seem to virtually destroy.
The younger sister stood there for several minutes offering comfort and connection. Their mother never even looked at them. She was too busy watching the food cook on the grill and too busy selling her food to the customers. She had her priorities.
Her older brother was playing with two clothes hangers. For a few minutes he was ignoring his crying sister, too. Then he tried to distract her with the hangers. He was smiling and for a moment she smiled too. But then she went back to crying. The hangers and distraction didn't fill her emotional needs. She knew this. But people who distract themselves as adults don't know this.
Her sister walked away for a moment, then returned. She put her hand on her older sister's shoulder again. Then she offered then hanger to her older sister. I watched to see if the older sister would push her away, knowing that this wasn't what she needed. The older sister did take the hanger, but she grabbed it and pulled it away. This helped her feel a little more powerful, more in control. She was trying to fill some of her emotional needs to compensate for others which were not being filled. Let's say she was trying to fill her needs for parental love and understanding by feeling more powerful.
How many times does this happen everyday in the world?
S. Hein
May 30, 2004
Otovalo, Ecuador
(This reminds me of the story "Women who wear make up make more money."