I am one of them

It’s the People That You Meet
v.2
“I am one of them”

Several years ago, I performed at a school for emotionally challenged children in New Jersey. My performance was for the staff, who, themselves, proved to be a resistant group of miscreants. Ok, perhaps I exaggerate the matter at hand; however, for the most part, the majority of them were well equipped at the art of detachment, with one glaring exception to this observation: the principal of the school.

The Golden Gate Bridge, in San Francisco, is the number one public suicide site in the world. Since 1937, there have been more than 1500 suicides from that bridge.

All throughout my performance, this beautiful soul of a leader kept smiling and bountifully expressing her reaction. She was a source of comfort to me, as I felt the aloofness of the rest of her staff. She didn’t allow her staff’s lack of emotional investment to curtail her transparency. She laughed when she found humor in my show, and she cried quietly when her emotional strings were plucked. She was the reason I was able to survive those empty stares.

Since 1937, there have only been 25-30 survivors who have jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge.

Upon completion of my presentation, only one audience member approached me – my delightful principal. She embraced me with a hug born of a deeper narrative than transpired words. As she hugged me, she turned her back to her staff, and said the following: “Michael, please don’t walk away. I don’t want my staff to see me cry. I don’t want them to know that I am not as strong as they think I am, but I need to tell you that your show deeply affected me. I have a secret that I have never told anyone. It is the reason I am crying now. I am one of the survivors who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. I am one of them.”

I continued to speak to her for another 20 minutes. I was worried about her, and I was moved by her honesty. Here was a woman who spent years wearing an ironclad mask of tenacity that hid the most brittle of pain; a woman who was an impenetrable leader in a demanding school who knew, all too well, the sadness behind her students’ eyes.

I wanted to take her pain into me so that she could be free from its shackled grief. I wanted her to know that she was meant to survive that day, both then and now. She was here to live. To live. Unabashed and unfettered.