Where Has the Kindness Gone?
When I was in high school, a girl I was only kind of friends with was diagnosed with a rare condition that affected her kidneys. It was a situation that might land her in need of a transplant.
I spent the afternoon talking with her on AIM, well, mostly listening. She let out her worries, her concerns, her hopes, fears, everything. And I sat on the other end with tears streaming down my face. It scared me that something so awful could happen to someone so young, someone who seemed so healthy. Someone not much different from me.
A few days later, I told my mom that I wanted to get tested to see if I would be a match. I’d done some research and had a basic understanding of how the transplant process went, and if I could save her life, I wanted to.
It never came to that. I can’t remember now exactly what happened, but I do know that she went on to live a happy and relatively healthy life. I can’t even remember her last name.
I used to be the kind of person who empathized so much that it was bordered on a flaw. I used to be the kind of person who would do literally anything for another human being if it made their life even just a little bit easier.
It didn’t matter if we were friends. It didn’t matter if you were the worst person to me ever. If I had the opportunity to do something nice for you, I did it.
In fact, I had an arch enemy in high school. I don’t know what I ever did to that girl, but she was absolutely awful to me every chance she got. It didn’t matter that I was two years older. It didn’t matter that I was friends with these people first. She took every opportunity to make my life a living hell.
And then one night, I noticed that her away message was a little off. (Keep in mind here that I usually only checked her away messages to be sure they weren’t more attacks on me…which happened often). Whatever was written concerned me, so I reached out to her. When she replied I could tell she was upset. She was fighting with her boyfriend, a friend of mine, and he wasn’t answering her anymore. She ended the message with “whatever, I’m just going to walk over there.”
It was 10PM. They lived 5 miles apart in a shady part of town. I told her to stay where she was, I ran downstairs, grabbed my keys, told my mom where I was going, and I was off. It didn’t matter that she was an awful human being. It didn’t matter that I had a 103 fever. She was a person and she needed help.
I brought her to her boyfriend’s house and sat in the car while they sorted their shit out.
The next morning at school, she initiated a whole new war rampage on me for absolutely no reason at all.
I say all of this now because I’m wondering whatever happened. I think that goodness is still inside of me somewhere, but I haven’t seen it much lately. I used to be the girl who would go hang out with the boy standing alone at the dance. I befriended people because they were people. I didn’t judge. I didn’t wonder what they could do for me, people were people.
I’ve lost that somewhere along the way. I’ve become an angry person, disappointed by people time and time again.
I used to put kindness above all else, and it seems I’ve forgotten about kindness altogether. And maybe you have, too. And if you have, let’s make it our mission to bring it back. What do you say?
