Yesterday as I was driving home from my studio I received a call on my cell phone from my oldest son. He was wondering why there was an ambulance, a fire truck and a police car parked in front of our house. Pretty sure that it wasn’t my house on fire I turned the corner and sure enough, there must have been a 911 call because there were all the emergency vehicles. When my husband got home from work, he stopped to talk to one of our neighbors and got the news. We live in a townhouse community and as it turned out one of our neighbor’s grown kid (20 something?) had shot himself with a rifle in the head. So sad. It’s hard to imagine, or maybe not, what can make a person so desperate to end their life.
And then this morning I witnessed something I never expected. As I was driving to work there were cars stopped in the road. It was bizarre because there didn’t appear to be any kind of accident. Then I saw a policeman get out of his car, stand in the middle of the road, point his gun and take two shots at a deer. I’m guessing he was trying to put the deer out of it’s misery from being hit by a car. I was still feeling pretty shaken from what happened the day before and this kind of freaked me out. We are on, then we are off, forever.
Thinking about how depressed that poor kid who killed himself must have been, made me remember when I was kid in middle school and how tough it was. I was not a gifted athlete, I was a chubby kid, and was 12 when my family moved to New Orleans. Talk about a deck stacked against me. Every day I dreaded going to school, facing the bullies and the humiliation that ensued. I felt so incredibly alone, and yes, I had thoughts about killing myself back then. I also had hope. I had to believe that things would get better. In the eighth grade things had gotten so bad I could hardly stand it. Then, one day when I was riding my bike home from a friend’s house, I was hit by a car. It was bad and I mean bad. I had a serious head injury and was laid up in the hospital for almost 2 weeks. I was out of school for about a month and had lost a ton of weight during that time. When I came back I looked like a new person. Not even the vicious asshole bully bothered me anymore.
Weird thing is, during those really hard times when I felt like I had no friends and the world was against me, I always saw the light at the end of the tunnel. Though the tunnel was so damn long, I always felt like I had some kind of destiny, whatever that meant. My one solace was that I had my art. I had always believed in myself as an artist and no one could take that from me.