Note: names and other details have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.
Let me tell you a story…
A long time ago, I knew a girl named Maya. Maya had a lot of things going for her. She was president of a non-for-profit company before she graduated high school, she’d won awards for spoken word poetry, she was friends with everyone she met, and she had a boy who doted on her constantly. To many prying eyes, she was the girl that everyone wanted to be.
Yes, you guessed it. There was a lot more to Maya than I thought. But, I’ll start with how we met.
Maya and I were working on the fall play together. I was stage-managing, and she was the lighting technician, so we often worked late nights together. There was a lot of coffee and noodles involved, and we bonded over our mutual hatred of people who put ketchup on their mac and cheese (sorry if you’re one of those people, but c’mon, that’s weird). Many times, our conversations would range between the sheer inadequacy of the people around us to how much we loved reading stupid horoscopes and pretending that they had a major impact on how we went about our days.
Needless to say, I enjoyed my time with our school’s It-Girl very much. Maybe it was a crush, or just an infatuation, or maybe it was nothing at all. What it was doesn’t matter, what became of it does.
One night, Maya had to step out for a phone call. I didn’t think anything of it, until she came back in and was clearly upset. But, when I asked her what was wrong, she only dodged my questions. I left it alone, not wanting to pry, but when her phone kept blowing up with texts from her boyfriend that she consistently ignored, I asked again.
She burst into tears immediately.
I was shocked, to say the least. I’d seen Maya for years, going about her life like she had everything figured out. I knew there had to be something, everyone has baggage, but it never occurred to me the sheer brevity of her own.
Maya, like many unfortunate others, was sexually assaulted when she was only a kid. Barely in middle school, by an old man that she never knew to fear. She’d kept it inside for years, not fully understanding what she went through and not knowing how to talk about it. When she finally did, she was forced into police interviews and a lawsuit that she had no idea how to deal with. She told me how her parents wanted to fight for her, how her boyfriend held her when she cried to him, and how her lawyer wanted to get justice for the people who had done that to her. But, she also told me how much it hurt her that no one cared to ask her what she wanted. No one went to her and asked, “will this bring you peace?”
It didn’t. The call she’d gotten was from her mother, saying that her case had been dismissed six months ago due to a lacking of physical evidence. Her story and her scars were not enough physical evidence for our criminal justice system. Her mind was not enough for her own parents to tell her the truth: that even though she finally said something, even though she finally began to deal with what had happened to her, it wasn’t enough. She wasn’t enough.
Her boyfriend was trying to tell her that everything was going to be okay. That she didn’t need a criminal trial to prove that what happened to her was wrong. Maya knew that; she knew that she didn’t the guy to be in jail for her to get closure. What hurt her was that everyone had kept it from her. No one decided that she was strong enough to handle it. I looked her square in the eye and said, “you are strong enough. No one else needs to know that but you.”
I never looked at Maya the same way again. We went about our lives, the show went on, and she stayed in her bubble of popularity and high school drama. She stayed where she was comfortable, and that was okay with me. It was okay because when I looked at her in the hallway, she’d give me a smile that she never gave anyone else. She gave me a smile of understanding, and appreciation.
I still talk to Maya sometimes, when I’m home for break. We’ll catch up and I’ll ask her how her life is going and she’ll tell me her nightmares and her fears. She’ll tell me that she still jumps even though there’s nothing to be scared of; that she still gets flashbacks out of nowhere; and that she still doesn’t have the peace she always sought. It makes me sad, and it makes me wonder.
How many others walk around with a hidden strength that no one knows they have? What made these people who they are?
I told you this story because the world needs to be aware. We need to be aware of how important it is to really get to know someone. We need to know their pain in order to know their pleasure. It’s not enough to casually say hi to someone and ask how school is going. It’s not enough to drink with them on the weekends and forget about them in the morning. It’s not enough to walk through life thinking you know someone simply because you follow them on Twitter.
To know someone, and I mean really know them, is to know their lives and their stories, to know what they’ve been through and who they’ve become. Our world is falling apart because we think a comment on Instagram counts as a conversation.
I’m making a pledge to get to know the stories of everyone I meet. I’m tired of superficial relationships that won’t last. I’m tired of pretending that simply because I know my friend’s favorite Starbucks drink that it makes her mine. I want to know the strength in people. I want to know the weaknesses. I want to have meaningful, honest, caring, trusting, loving relationships. And I want you to want it, too.
