To preface this post, I am not trying to gloat or be self serving. These are situations I never hoped to find myself in, but I did. I would just hope a stranger would help me if I ever needed it.

 

In the past 7 months, I’ve called 911 five times for strangers. In August, I saved a random woman from being sexually assaulted, and then had to call 911 because she had alcohol poisoning. Two weeks after that, I discovered a man having a seizure in a party store, with no one helping him. People were quite literally stepping over him, paying him no mind. I called 911. A month after that, I witnessed a massive car accident. I called 911. 2 weeks after that, I witnessed another car accident. This time, the car caught on fire. I called 911.

This past Sunday, I witnessed a heroin overdose while grabbing a drink with a friend at a mainstay Flint bar. He fell out of his chair, and my friend and I thought he was just drunk. After he wasn’t waking up after a couple minutes, I knew this wasn’t just alcohol. His “friends” were telling everyone in this bar to not call the cops. I knew this man was going to die if he did not get medical attention. I told them, “Your friend is barely breathing, he needs help.” They responded, “No, he’s just tired!” I called bullshit. While on the phone with 911, one of his friends started yelling at me. I said, “I don’t care what he is on, but he needs help.” After I said that, his “friend” searched his passed out friend’s pockets. He pulled out what looked to be heroin.

This last instance shook me. I truly could not process or believe what was happening in front of me. This man was clearly in distress, and his “friends” did not know what to do, so they chose to do nothing. They were thinking about themselves, because I’d safely assume they too had some kind of substances on them. They let him lay there, while the staff of the bar had no sense of urgency to help this man. It was not till I called 911 that the staff decided to do something besides stare at the man nervously. That mentality is exactly how people die. It also made me realize that addiction is everywhere. I’ve never known someone that has been an addict, so witnessing that opened my eyes to exactly what that looks like. My friend that I was with asked me, “Why do these things alway happen when you’re around?” I can’t say for sure, but maybe it’s because I’m not a bystander.

I’m writing this to make the case to not be a bystander. Be the person that does something. Don’t be the people that stepped over that man having a seizure in the party store. Don’t be the store clerk that let him lay there and suffer. Don’t be the bartender that did nothing. Don’t be the driver that sees an accident and doesn’t call 911. That’s all it takes. Most of these events took up maybe 20 minutes of my time. That time saved lives. Call 911 when someone is in trouble. Most people reading this post are college students. We have to know when to act in a situation. Young people make mistakes, but they don’t have to suffer because, “It was none of my business.” Make it your business. I know I’d want someone to help me.

I don’t really know what to write about. It can’t possibly be that there is a too much to write about because that is an outright fallacy. From international events, to national and statewide events there is a smorgasbord of topics to discuss and debate. So why do I not have the motivation( or is it the gumption?) to write and talk about events that are so pertinent to the sociopolitical fabric that plague us?

Could it be that these things are happening too fast? Preposterous, if you call yourself a writer then you have to be able to keep up!(who ever said I was a writer?).

Could it be that I just don’t care? No, my friends and family always get an earful of daily events and it usually starts with me saying: “Did you hear what happened today?”(this is coupled with a psychotic grin and a twitch in the left eye(a stiff drink is optional depending on the the day)).

Maybe it is because if I kept up with the news and prolifically wrote on the absolutely horrific, Orwellian, draconian, asinine, idiotic, half witted, and downright dimwitted policies and deals that are going on in Washington D.C.(D.C stands for Dunce Congregation), then I would lose my sanity,

Or, I could be making excuses for my lack of gumption(or is it motivation?) Anyway: the only thing we can do now is keep a keen eye out for bullshit, protest when necessary, look out for one another, and mobilize for the midterm elections in 2018.

Signed,

Snitchell

P.S. Yes, that is a double parentheses that I used. If you were uncomforted by it: sorry. But if we learned anything form the Bowling Green Massacre it’s that: fuck it you can do whatever you want!

As a feminist, I often spend my time talking to others about the many difficulties and mitigating circumstances of women’s lives. The horrors, big and small, that women face that make our lives more challenging than that of men. I talk about these things to educate others about what it means to be born female in our society, and how those big and small challenges can have large impacts on our lives.

I do this to educate, to advocate, and to help others gain a deeper understanding of themselves or the women in their lives. More recently, however, I’ve found that perhaps I have not applied these ideas and tenants to one of my earliest and most important female relationships- the one with my own mother. My relationship with my mom has always been a tumultuous, complicated, often ugly affair. My childhood was spent walking on eggshells to avoid traumatic outbursts, and then comforting my mom as I assured her she wasn’t actually a bad mom, all while wishing I could have had anybody else as a mom. I saw my mom as mean, cruel, emotionally abusive and manipulating. When she wasn’t those things she was sad, guilt-ridden, and often drunk.

These things are all true, and I cannot sugar-coat my childhood nor try to rationalize my way out of these facts. All of those things happened and all of the damage done is there. I have spent the better part of my adult life trying to undo that damage, and to somehow find my own peace with the trauma I experienced alongside my three younger sisters-who will surely spend their own adult lives trying to fix their broken parts, just in the way I have.

In my own journey, I have come to a point where I can no longer find anger in the memories of my childhood. Becoming an adult and a feminist, I have begun to understand the own mitigating factors and horrors of my mother’s life; horrors that have left her with her own brokenness. In my adult life, I have learned that my mother was sexually assault by her own father, that shortly after her divorce from my dad (a divorce she never wanted) she made the hardest decision of her life- to go against her Catholic faith and have an abortion in order to devote herself to caring for me and my sisters, and that these events have scarred her in ways that as a child I couldn’t fathom, and as an adult make me want to cringe.

Even after learning these things, it took me a long time to understand and appreciate how this must have affected her. After learning of her sexual assault, my first (selfish) thought was not sympathy or understanding, but why didn’t she get help? Why didn’t she recognize her own damage, as I have done, and seek healing? Why couldn’t she let herself off the hook for her abortion, one that allowed her to marry my stepfather and have my youngest sister? Why did she believe that she deserved all the pain and heartache she endured, instead of fighting for herself? At the very least, couldn’t she have gotten help for me? For my sisters? Weren’t we worthy of that?

As a feminist, I know that sexual assault (particularly in childhood) often leads to Borderline personality disorder, anxiety disorders, control issues, drug and alcohol abuse, PTSD, and many other emotional issues that take years of deep-digging to even scratch at the surface of. As a feminist, I know that many women feel so heavily the stigma surrounding abortion that they never tell anyone, instead living in guilt and fear of being found out. As a feminist, I know that going to therapy means re-living the trauma of your abuse. And I know, as a feminist, that sometimes that trauma is too much to try to endure. That it hurts so deeply and so profoundly that it is often easier to bury it deep, where it (supposedly) won’t hurt you.

But it hurt me. And it hurt my sisters. And it continues to hurt my mother. So what do I do with that? As I continue to grow in my feminism, the more I recognize that I cannot begrudge my mother her own self-protection. I cannot blame her for how she chose to cope with her trauma, and I cannot hope to ever understand how much these events caused her pain. What I can do, as a feminist and as a daughter, is recognize that my love and understanding are what she needs. She needs to be told that her mistakes are forgivable, her trauma was not her fault, she is deserving of the love and care she should have received as a child and as an adult. I hope to heal myself and move past anger and into forgiveness. I only hope that I can continue to grow in my feminism and in my relationship with my mother, and to someday be able to bring my sisters into the fold of understanding that I have come to be a part of.

Author’s note: I have made this piece anonymous for the simple reason that my mother, as a victim and as a person, deserves her privacy. I am one of three people who know the facts enclosed. Not even my sisters fully understand the reasons behind our childhood, and while my heart aches for them to know and understand what has happened to our mother, I’m not sure they are ready to find forgiveness. They still live in anger, and until that day when they are ready to forgive, this piece will remain a secret from them. This will most likely stay secret from my mother for the rest of her life.