If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
-Emily Dickinson
This poem is short and has a simple message, but few words have resonated with me as consistently throughout my life as these have. They express the simple truth of caring for another in pain and need, and ends with a bold assertion that simple adherence to this principle gives meaning to our lives. "I shall not live in vain". There are few principles I value as much or buy into as wholeheartedly. Actually, while I've struggled to do so, I've sought to center my life around these concepts.
For as long as I can remember, I have approached the world with the sense that it was a beautiful place with many wonderful opportunities waiting for me. I've believed that people were inherently good, that love was the great healer, and that good would always win out against bad. Through my childhood and long after, life had mostly good things to offer me. I recognized that blessing and wondered why I had been given such a life of good things. There were few things that challenged my rose-colored perception of the world.
Until I started gaining difficult life experience...
Until I started gaining difficult life experience...
When I came out and addressed my sexual orientation, my life gradually took a turn down a road of rougher terrain, my confusion causing me to reassess my perception of the world and the human experience. I began running into the first of what would end up being a never-ending stream of questions about life in general, but especially about my own. The hopes and dreams for my future were brought into question. During these periods of darkness, I watched my own departure out of bliss and ignorance into a space of real-life challenges and hopelessness, and seriously wondered if my heart would become irretrievably hardened and then ultimately break. Despite these storms, I remained optimistic that above the layer of black cloud was shining a beautiful bright sun that would eventually break the tumult and shine down on me again.
It wasn't until my spinal cord injury that I felt so beaten down that I truly challenged my own sense of optimism and hope. Life wasn't beautiful anymore, it didn't feel like there were good things to come. Happy endings were out of sight, and finding relief to my anguish felt impossible. I questioned everything that I thought was good and right in the world. I began to bitterly reprimand myself for the fairytale thinking I had bought into as a young, naive boy with such little life experience. I wanted validation for my deep suffering and sense of injustice, and tried everything I could to derail the optimism of my mind. In essence, I was feeling jaded and hardened, and began to mourn the loss of the Carson who believed that life was beautiful.
Because I didn't believe I could endure any more disappointment, and worked to avoid any thinking that might set me up for such, like hope and optimism. If I believed that life was only one big mishap of loss and pain, there would be no disappointments to be had. Despite my efforts to remain what I was calling "realistic" about life, every so often, during very depressed times, I would be blindsided momentary feelings of light that were too brief to measure... And the feeling always whispered that life was beautiful.
I would attempt dismiss the feeling and move on, but these feelings began to happen frequently and came from such a deep place inside of me that it became difficult to avoid or ignore them. Sometimes it was a song that brought the feeling, sometimes it was a thought, but it was usually an experience dealing with people. It was knowing my family slept together on the floor of my living room the night of my injury, or it was receiving over 600 letters of love and support in the hospital from many people I had never met, or seeing strangers with "Team Carson" or "Defy the Odds" written on their T-shirts.
I slowly found the courage to re-reassess all the same things, vacillating back and forth between two ends of a spectrum, feeling the fear that accompanied the hope... The hope that life could still be beautiful.
The truth is that my life experience has brought my fairytale thinking to an end in many ways. I now understand that tragedy strikes unexpectedly, and that in many ways loss is an inherent part of life. Bad things happen to good people, and good people sometimes do bad things... but in other ways, my same childhood thinking has only been reinforced, but this time against the backdrop of experience and testing. While I haven't experienced the worst this world has to offer, knowing that beautiful ideas have withstood the most hellish of times brings me a great amount of confidence as I adopt these views as my own.
I do believe that life is beautiful. I also know it can be terribly difficult... but more than ever before, I believe that a life of helping others and alleviating pain is a life of great worth and a part of the path to finding happiness. I once worried that the words to this poem would feel cheap and meaningless at some, but they carry far more weight than they ever have, for which I am grateful.
I would attempt dismiss the feeling and move on, but these feelings began to happen frequently and came from such a deep place inside of me that it became difficult to avoid or ignore them. Sometimes it was a song that brought the feeling, sometimes it was a thought, but it was usually an experience dealing with people. It was knowing my family slept together on the floor of my living room the night of my injury, or it was receiving over 600 letters of love and support in the hospital from many people I had never met, or seeing strangers with "Team Carson" or "Defy the Odds" written on their T-shirts.
I slowly found the courage to re-reassess all the same things, vacillating back and forth between two ends of a spectrum, feeling the fear that accompanied the hope... The hope that life could still be beautiful.
The truth is that my life experience has brought my fairytale thinking to an end in many ways. I now understand that tragedy strikes unexpectedly, and that in many ways loss is an inherent part of life. Bad things happen to good people, and good people sometimes do bad things... but in other ways, my same childhood thinking has only been reinforced, but this time against the backdrop of experience and testing. While I haven't experienced the worst this world has to offer, knowing that beautiful ideas have withstood the most hellish of times brings me a great amount of confidence as I adopt these views as my own.
I do believe that life is beautiful. I also know it can be terribly difficult... but more than ever before, I believe that a life of helping others and alleviating pain is a life of great worth and a part of the path to finding happiness. I once worried that the words to this poem would feel cheap and meaningless at some, but they carry far more weight than they ever have, for which I am grateful.
In retrospect, I realize I've been a "fainting robin" of Emily Dickinson's poem. So many of the moments that challenged my dark perception of the world around me were moments when I was scooped up by some kind soul and put back in the nest, only to inevitably fall out again. It has happened countless time. If there is something that I am both intensely grateful for and perplexed by, it is the number of times someone has been willing to help me along my sometimes helpless journey. I'm not sure I realized the power behind small acts of kindness until I was the one that relied on them for my survival. Sometimes we are the helper and sometimes we are the helpless, and for me, both bring the light that haunted me in my nightmarish moments... the light that told me that life is still beautiful.
