Have you ever had an experience or gone through something in your life, yourself or maybe someone you love, that forced you to fundamentally rethink and reevaluate something you previously felt pretty strongly about?
It is pretty much human nature to form opinions and views on things but it is also pretty much human nature to not always, or not at all, understand things we have had no real experience of or with. E.G. You were strongly opposed to stem cell research until your child was diagnose with an illness that had no real cure or treatment but stem cell research looked promising. You thought you knew what kind of people ended up on food stamps, or became homeless until you lost your job, or got sick and amassed a lot of medical bills, you had strong opinions about homosexuality and then it turned out that one of your children was gay, you had opinions about mental illness and then someone you loved was diagnosed with a serious mental illness like schizophrenia. Or a woman you loved was raped in the parking lot of a club or on some dark, lonely road waiting for AAA to come and change her tire. Well, anyway, those are more than a few examples, you get the idea.
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When I was a freshman in college, I met someone who was transgender – she later became one of my closest friends. Back them, she was a mentor, an older peer educator who would teach me much of what I now know about gender politics. I listened to her coming out story as we all had to share ours and cried my eyes out. I had no idea there were people like her, as weird as that sounds. Those three days fundamentally changed my being – about 3 years later I would enter my own struggle with my given gender and reject it. But it took some time to truly understand some of the concepts I now discuss and it was all thanks to her struggles. I stood by her through many altercations on the streets with people, through many vigils for trans friends murdered, through her being on a cover of a book about transgender youth in NY, etc. I am lucky to have her as a friend and my children are luckier still.
Nothing earth shattering. I think when your young you make a lot of hasty decisions and swear their are thing you’ll never do and say because you don’t know what you will really do until you are in those position. Like when you hear people say, I’ll never yell at my kid when I’m a parent. Then when you are a parent you see its not that easy to keep a cool head when your kid acts like an idiot.
Opinions and thoughts are like rain drops. They fall all around you by the million. Only you don’t know when one will cause something a flower to bloom or drown it.
I came home one night after a hard day writing traffic citations and court. i have loved my occupation for 44 years. some of the younger rookies are hard to keep up with and i guess it showed this paricular night, to my wife. all of a sudden she made the following comment to me: “honey, don’t you think its time for you to retire and let the younger officers take over”? her question was like a bullet in my heart. for all of these years, i have been married to her and the job. her comment hit home and i knew it. somehow, i knew this statement was coming, but i was not mentally prepared for it. did she change my mind? yes. i would not have listened to anyone else, but her, making this statement to me, did the trick. three days later, i handed in my retirement papers. oh, the power of suggestion from a good wife.
When you realize you can not trust anyone even your family
I used to believe in God. But religion is a touchy subject, perhaps an open forum such as this one is a bad idea. I’d be willing to discuss it in a private message.
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