My saddest story is not the story of growing up in foster care, or losing a brother to HIV, or losing another brother to drug addiction. My saddest story is a simple one. One where I was a young girl, maybe around eight, and I loved everyone and everything. I loved my street, I loved my mailbox, I loved my teacher, I loved my hair, I loved clothes, I loved buses, I loved trees, and I assumed everyone and everything loved me back. But then one day I discovered that wasn’t so. Maybe someone made a crude gesture, or yelled at me, or I got skipped over in line, and there it began—the breaking of my heart.
I read somewhere that if you were to take an MRI scan of someone’s brain who was experiencing social rejection it would exhibit the same pain as the MRI scan of someone who had broken an arm. I guess this is why I feel so compelled to tell stories of economic hardship. Economic violence is the most pervasive and insidious form of social rejection, and most of society finds it perfectly acceptable.
The stories that scrape strongest against my heart are stories of economic struggle. Just the other day, a woman seven months pregnant, with an 18-month-old at home, was on the side of a snow-stormed mountain trying to earn rent by putting chains on tires. I looked on sadly at her gloveless blue hands. How much money, I thought, would it take to change this?
When we got to the cabin we were renting, a man—robust in his mid-sixties, in a flannel shirt, khaki pants, and cheap sneakers—was knee deep in snow shoveling our driveway. “I guess I’ll just keep doing this until my ticker gives out,” he tells me.
[For more of this story, written by Melissa Chadburn, go to http://true.proximitymagazine..../15/melissachadburn/]
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