Morning Pages: August 5, 2002

Injustice and oppression are complex issues rooted in social policy, the environment and the economy. Social action workers understand people may experience problems as individuals but these difficulties can be translated into common concerns.

Images of the teens at the writing camps are crowding my mind now. I see a young male, not quite sitting at the table, not quite sitting away from the table. His body is turned towards the window as if he is poised for flight. I see a young woman, dressed in the uniform of her culture, open enough to write of what she doesn't like, yet frightened enough of saying the words out loud, calling upon a friend to finish reading for her. I see a latecomer, a tall young woman with cascading wavy light brown hair hanging down around her face, which is always looking down, as if it were a brocade drapery pulled to keep things out or maybe to keep things in. I see their words splashed cross page after page screaming about this loneliness, this isolation, this desperate way of life. I see these teen years as the time when we learn that one doesn't talk about certain things except we know from their writing that not talking about htem doesn't make them go away. And so these unspeakable things churn beneath the surface causing internal damage slowly, steadily, until somehow, someway, we each find our own way of speaking about the unspeakable pain. That voice, the one that spoke about my unspeakable pain, was alcohol and for ten years, alcohol abuse spoke my pain. When finally the pain caused by the new voice became greater than the pain it spoke of, I had no choice - it was either die or speak for myself, of my own isolation, my own loneliness - which had grown larger while the alcohol was on watch.