About judgement...

I would throw myself into the wishing well of well-wishing if the well-wishers would save my life. I would throw my life savings into the well-wishing of the wishing well if the life savers would wish me well first. Point: Those who hate you because you're shy or poor or different wouldn't wish you well if it saved their lives.

There is no way an absolute stranger can make a judgment on someone they have never met. The anger in the hearts of unfulfilled grown men should not be taken out on a young girl simply because she has the hope that they don't have. They talked about her and this is normal, but they talked about her in badness. They talked about her in a way that would suggest that they knew enough about her to know her own thoughts and feelings about herself and the world. But even closest family and friends can never know out truest, purest thoughts and feelings. Not even mom has a special window into the most hidden self and can see inside hearts and heads. They determined from presumptuous premises that she is lazy and self-centered and crazy, and most of all, that she is not a good person. And these are the explicit kind of claims you can't really make about others unless you know a little about their lives, about their pain and of course, about them. It's bad enough making judgements on people you do know let alone those you don't. You can't see inside people's souls.

If they knew her, they would have seen that, in contrast, she worked hard, or to the best of her ability; she finally finished school, volunteered, wrote poetry and made art compulsively. She cared a lot about people's feelings and that's why she always agreed with them even when they said things that hurt her feelings. It didn't matter if they hurt her feelings. They didn't have to apologize. It didn't matter how wrong they were. She was too afraid of hurting their feelings. And to disagree with them was to hurt more than just their feelings, it hurt their pride. So she was always wrong. She was the one to apologize. She had always been like that. And so what if she lived in her own little world. The one outside was so complex that it forced her into her own.

She found her job too hard and she left. But discriminatory judgement said about her: "She's the type of person that wants to be home watching TV all day." This of course wasn't true. That's what they said about the shy girl who couldn't leave her bedroom; she was lazy, and she was crazy because she shut herself in listening to music all day. They called her sensitivity psychosis. They called her shyness sloth. And sadly she believed them. As a low self-esteem child she couldn't tell the difference between a prejudiced judgement and an honest opinion. She believed the prejudiced judgement and seldom heard the honest opinion. An honest opinion is based in experience and if you never experience a person by getting to know them, you cannot form an honest opinion.

She could never have a dream because she knows how it feels to be called a liar.  She could never be a child because she knows how dead it feels to make mistakes. She could never be a mother because she knows how dead it feels to be treated like dirt... by people she loves. She could never judge a beggar because she knows how it feels to be judged: "What if those beggars were my brothers? And those still-borns were my mom and dad? And those lies were the stars in my eyes?" Her mom talks about the racist bitch she met online. She taught her mother a little about prejudiced judgements as opposed to honest opinions: "All those niggers do is break the law and live on welfare." This reminds her why she is not networked anywhere online besides eBay.  And she would rather not even have an account if she could help it. But she can't. She has the drive to communicate through her art and the Internet gives her an outlet to do just that no matter how much brain honey and soul poison is on there. She's had enough of middle class intellectual bullshit. Message board and mailing lists feed hatred to her like honey and poison and she gags on every mouthful. Gotta love the Internet; judgement made paramount.

The shy kid they saw everywhere yet saw nowhere had a life out of being everywhere they weren't yet nowhere they were. They never saw her around so they felt she was too good to talk to them.  Yet now and then, they saw her: The snob who just sat there doing nothing but dreaming about how wonderful she was, was actually wondering why it was cool to hate her suddenly. That would make you a little lazy, self-centered, and crazy now and then. They created the monster they hated. She was too poor to dress like they did, too poor to go to the places they did, and cried herself to sleep every night. And that's the real reason why she locked herself in her room. She couldn't figure out why everybody hated her so much simply because her life was so fucked up and put down that she found it hard to love herself. 

Elaine 06