Throughout most of high school, I was incredibly lonely. It wasn’t until college that I made friends with people whom I felt the true sense of connection I’d once felt with Ellie. So maybe it’s surprising that when I look back, I don’t regret any of it. I spent much of high school studying, and it paid off when I got into my first-choice college. I focused on what interested me, like the books we read for English class, and I joined the track team, and today I still love to read and to run. Ironically, my decision not to do things that made me uncomfortable, like drink and smoke and lie to my parents, caused me a lot of discomfort. But it was a manageable discomfort; there was something true in it. I can honestly say that the consequences of being yourself are never worse than the consequences of not being yourself.
As for Ellie, the last time I saw her was the summer I graduated from college, when I ran into her at the mall. I knew she had gone to community college then dropped out to work, and soon after, became pregnant. It surprised me to see that she was pregnant again. “When are you due?” I asked.
“September.” Her voice was flat, and her skin was pale and pasty.
I was afraid to ask anymore. I was pretty sure she wasn’t married.
“What’s going on with you?” she asked.
“I just graduated,” I told her. “And I’m going to London for an internship.”
“That’s great,” she said, and again, there was no enthusiasm in her voice.
I wanted to look at her and tell her with my eyes, It will be okay for you, too, Ellie! I remember how smart and strong and fun you were. I know that you can put your life together again. But every time I looked at her, she was looking away— staring hard at something I couldn’t see.
Caroline Smith
My Grandma Told Stories
When I was young, my mother was going to Florida to visit my grandmother. I begged her to take me with her. “I’ll take you, but remember,” my mother warned me, “Grandma is sick.”
I had seen plenty of sick people before, so I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal. Besides, by the time we got to Florida, my grandma would probably be okay. Then we would have fun just as we used to. I remembered how important I had felt the summer before when my grandma carried me on her shoulders down the streets of St. Petersburg.
My mother and I took the train to Florida. She brought a bag of cherries along with us. It was a huge bag, but instead of giving me a handful to eat, she gave me the whole bag to hold. After I ate my first handful, I looked at her, but she didn’t say anything. Although she sat next to me, she seemed far away, immersed in her own thoughts, as she vaguely looked out the window. I took another handful, and still she didn’t say anything. She didn’t even notice. My mom let me eat all the cherries I wanted, but when I looked down at my new shirt and discovered cherry stains on it, I was afraid I’d get in trouble. When I told my mom, she said it was okay, and she patiently wiped at the stains with a cold, wet rag.
We took a cab from the train station to my grandma’s house. I got more and more excited as we approached.
Grandma was a great storyteller and her stories made me feel special whenever she told them. “Grandma, tell me a story,” I’d say, and she would always begin the story, “Once upon a time there was a boy named Billy . . .” Every story started with a boy named after me. When I arrived at her house, my first words were going to be, “Grandma, tell me a story.”
When I got to Grandma’s house, she didn’t come out to meet me. Even after I ran up the steps, she still didn’t come out to meet me. I went into her bedroom. In a moment, I was changed forever, because what I saw in that room wasn’t my happy-go-lucky grandmother. It was a crumpled body, thin and drawn.
That night as I lay in bed, I heard my grandma moaning in pain. It had the same effect on me as someone running fingernails across the blackboard. I just wanted it to stop. It continued all night.
The next morning, I asked my mom if I could leave because it hurt too much to see Grandma that sick. She sent me home that afternoon on the plane. A few weeks later, my mother came home and asked me if it was all right if Grandma came to live with us. I said yes, but in reality I never wanted to see my grandmother again.
Although my grandma lived with us for the next few months, I never went into her room. She couldn’t get out of bed. I didn’t have to see her. Every so often, when I walked past her room, I could see her with her back turned toward me. Sometimes her backside showed from under her nightgown and I saw how wrinkled it looked with her back and bony pelvis showing through her hanging skin. I felt ashamed because I didn’t think I should see this side of my grandmother.
One day, my grandma called to me as I walked by her room. I didn’t want to go. Her voice struck an intimate and familiar cord inside me. It was a voice I couldn’t disappoint. I followed the voice as though in a daze. In her room, I didn’t look at her. I just looked at the floor and told myself that this wasn’t my grandmother—it just couldn’t be.
I was about to run out of the room and leave it forever when she spoke, “Once upon a time there was a boy named Billy . . .” I followed her words to that place beyond words and crumpled bodies, to that place of recognition and recollection: “. . . and little Billy loved his grandma very much. . . .” I raised my head and looked at my grandmother. Although her crumpled and dying body hadn’t changed, I could now see behind her appearance. I went into her room every day after that until she died, and every day she told me another story about a boy named Billy.
William Elliott
Where the Locks Click Open
Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself.
Cicero
Flipping to journal entry number seventy-nine, I smile knowingly at the subtle change in voice I can’t quite explain and note with mixed irony that the entry has the same digits as the year of my birth. Since my first weekly journal assignment in the second grade, I’ve taken my journals more seriously as an exercise for myself. Rereading them shows me the peaks and valleys, the good and the ugly. It’s enlightening to read about my childish obsessions, the arguments with friends that now seem trivial, and the ones that still carry their salty sting. It may only be ink on paper, but it’s my loves and hates and sighs. When I’m not writing in my diary, I find myself out of touch with reality, unwilling to see it in my own words and handwriting.
Journal entry seventy-nine was written when my best friend held her hands out and shoved the sight of two tormented wrists into my face. I wrote about a stumbling dimness in her eyes as I looked from her wrists to her face, searching for some kind of explanation or answer. “Who did this to you?” tumbled out of my mouth. “I did,” she replied. I grabbed her hand, careful not to touch the bruises and fine lines and knots of dried blood. Her eyes lowered to the ground, unable to withstand the pain of my blunt eyes. I was only thirteen then, barely a teenager, and my best friend since childhood had been hospitalized for attempting to commit suicide. The shared silence we’d become comfortable with as best friends was broken that day. Noise screamed in my ears—always the incessant yet not verbalized question of “Why, WHY? WHY?” She had a constellation of reasons, but I know now that she never could have given me one I could come to terms with. In that period of darkness where an unbridgeable gulf separated me from her, the mirror of my own self-evaluation shattered piece by piece, and fragile shards of my naïveté and beliefs fell to the ground.
I wrote about gliding through a pins-and-needles dream where numbness overwhelmed my body and emotions. Her deep pain translated into my own, and I felt as if her experience became my own first brush with death. In the face of all this adversity, the complexities of our lives intertwined even more strongly than before. Through her dimmed and lifeless eyes and through my numbed voice in the form of senseless words on an undetermined page, I began to see with a wider perspective on life and death.
A lot of what happened that day and the months that followed are a blur. For a long time, it remained an untouchable subject tucked aw
ay somewhere deep and dark in never-never land. Today, looking back on that particular entry and the entries that followed, I can trace a distinct change in tone and voice. What Peter Pan always dreaded happened to me overnight—I grew up. Even though I sometimes feel a pang for the return of my idealism and innocence, I know now that what I gained instead was more precious—an affirmation of love and strength.
Writing in my journal has provided clarity in my life; it brings me to a place undisturbed where I can collect my thoughts while staying in constant repair with reality and myself.
Stephanie Hsu
Rolling Down Summer’s Hills
Every human being on this Earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn’t original sin. He’s born with the tragedy that he has to grow up. A lot of people don’t have the courage to do it.
Helen Hayes
We run through the August night with only fireflies lighting our way, feeling the freedom of time that only children of summer ever know. The echo of our laughter sails through darkness, while we chase each other in tag. Soon we become silent, hunting through the tall, damp grass punctuated only by the beating of our hearts.
A hand pierces through the night, grabbing me. Our two bodies fall entwined into a huddled mass of legs and arms with her gaining the upper hand because I let her. She pins me down upon my back, her hands holding mine outstretched upon the moist grass. Straddling my chest with her knees, I sense her head slowly growing ever nearer. We’re so close that I can feel the ins and outs of her breath upon my lips. She covers my mouth with her own and I am lost in the newness of my first kiss. Before I can speak or think, she pulls away. Running off, she leaves me there dazed. That was how the night ended; this is how it began.
It’s the summer of my thirteenth birthday, and I’m enjoying these majestic Pocono days. Our cabin overlooks the endless rolling hills carpeted by sweet-smelling grasses and black-eyed Susans. My younger brother Mikey and I climb to the highest point and then, lying down on our sides like two bowling pins, we close our eyes rolling wildly down to the bottom. It’s a dizzying sensation to feel the world spin around and around this way. Sometimes I lose control and go careening off into some unplanned foreign destination.
And so it is when I first see Carly, hanging out among the other girls at Lake Wallenpaupack. I didn’t know then that I’d go careening off sideways and smack straight into her world.
She hangs with this group of thirteen-year-old girls who’ve teamed up more out of convenience than common interest. Her long black hair falls in waves against her pale white skin, and she has this unique ability to smile at me with her eyes.
My posse looks like an odd assortment left over in some thrift-shop clearance box. First off, there’s me. I had a major growth spurt this summer, and my limbs feel way too long. It’s weird to suddenly tower over your own mother, the person you’ve looked up to your whole life. Now a good three inches taller than she, I can easily pat her on the head. Yet no matter how much I eat, my pants hang low on my gangly, 105-pound frame. Everything is changing around me and inside me. I can’t even count on feeling comfortable in my own skin, which is now riddled with acne.
Then there’s my ten-year-old brother, Mikey. He hasn’t found any other kids his age around, and appears to be going through severe Nintendo withdrawal. It’s my responsibility to watch out for all four fast-moving feet of him. We make an unlikely pair. Although only three years come between our ages, almost two feet separate our heights.
Finally there’s Ron, who’s fourteen, a full year older than I and so much more wise in the ways of the world. He shoves his Mets cap low on his head to shield his eyes from the sun and any parent’s watchful gaze. In his left ear he sports a fake diamond stud, which denotes the coolness he envelops.
Ron and I sit on the dock, dangling our feet in the water’s edge, while Mikey floats carelessly in his black inner tube. Once in a while we have the nerve to dart our eyes over to the girls who are taking turns diving into the water in their bright bikinis, giggling and trying to peek over at us as well.
Ron shares his experiences with women and I wonder how much of it is really true, but I listen closely just in case it is. Some of his stories are funny, and others are just really gross, but I tuck all of what he tells me safely away in the annals of my mind for future reference.
My only other experience hearing about sex was back in health class, and there it seemed like such a crude joke. There was this one jerk in the back of the room who’d laugh whenever the teacher mentioned anything sexual. He was the same guy who’d repeat over and over that there was going to be a “teste” on Monday and then die laughing at his own wit.
At home, my parents speak in strictly medical terms. The way they tell it, the whole thing sounds more like a painful procedure for wisdom teeth removal than a pleasurable experience. Here, sitting on the dock with Ron, it seems a lot more real. I watch Carly in her red two-piece. Her shining black hair reflects the noonday sun, and I wonder what it would be like to kiss those peach-colored lips. So far it’s taken all the courage I can muster just to say hi as we pass each other every day at the lake.
Soon, night falls and Dad calls us around the dinner table to have an informal family meeting. He says he wants to talk about our “future.” The cabin is hot and noticeably un-air-conditioned. The sweat on the back of my legs causes my skin to stick to the vinyl-covered dining chairs.
My dad sits at the head of the table with his elbows resting on the yellow Formica. He hasn’t shaved since we arrived here, and the gray stubble on his cheeks and chin make him look old. My mother sits at the other end of the table still wearing the same swimsuit she wore earlier today down by the lake. She pulls the seat of her suit down over each thigh, fidgeting more than her usual calm demeanor allows. Mikey sits lazily dipping his Oreo cookies into a large glass of milk and then sucking them down over his wet lips.
My dad tells us he’s been laid off from work—straight out with no beating around the bush. I can’t say I’m shocked; we all saw the writing on the wall. Dad’s a textile man, and the industry is dying. I know this because I’ve heard the hushed conversations between my mom and dad. With most labor now going overseas, there’s just not enough work to keep the U.S. sewing factories alive. It’s not as if Dad has a profession where he can just slip comfortably into a new opportunity. Finding another job at forty-six years old is rough.
Mikey just keeps sucking down his cookies. He’s too young to understand that there is no magic that will make everything better, and that Dad doesn’t have all the answers.
In between frantic thoughts, I hear Dad saying something about our home; using words like “scaling down” and “tightening belts.” All I keep wondering is, How is this going to affect me? Will I still be able to afford to go to the movies with my friends, or will I be left at home? And where will my home be? I hear Dad saying something about our horrendous taxes and the possibility of moving to a smaller apartment.
I want to grab him and yell, “Stop! Don’t you know you’re ruining my life? I can’t move . . . this is where all my friends are . . . this is where I go to school. We had a deal, remember? You would take care of me, and I would never have to worry about these kinds of things, because I’m just a kid.”
And then this feeling gives way to a sickening rush of guilt for being so selfish. I look over at my parents who seem small and vulnerable. Who are these pathetic imposters whose words change everything for all of us, and how should I react to these strangers that I love so much? Should I lie and tell them everything will be okay? And is that what they need to hear, or is that really what I need to hear? I suddenly feel like the parent.
That night I run out to play tag with all those kids whose lives are still unchanged. I run through the night hoping to knock the wind out of myself—running to forget about my dad or maybe to stumble onto an answer that will save us. That’s when Carly’s arm reaches out to grab me. She kisses me, and I forget for one moment about all the uncertaint
y.
Then she’s gone, and I lay there in the pitch-black darkness with my head spinning the same way it did when I rolled down those long summer hills. I feel that same dizzying disorientation lying there alone in the darkness, and I realize that sometimes there are no real answers, and life goes on.
C. S. Dweck
Who Is Jack Canfield?
Jack Canfield is a bestselling author and one of America’s leading experts in the development of human potential. He is both a dynamic and entertaining speaker and a highly sought-after trainer with a wonderful ability to inform and inspire audiences to open their hearts, love more openly and boldly pursue their dreams.
Jack spent his teenage years growing up in Martins Ferry, Ohio, and Wheeling, West Virginia, with his sister Kimberly (Kirberger) and his two brothers, Rick and Taylor. The whole family has spent most of their professional careers dedicated to educating, counseling and empowering teens. Jack admits to being shy and lacking self-confidence in high school, but through a lot of hard work he earned letters in three sports and graduated third in his class.
After graduating college, Jack taught high school in the inner city of Chicago and in Iowa. In recent years, Jack has expanded this to include adults in both educational and corporate settings.
He is the author and narrator of several bestselling audio- and videocassette programs. He is a regularly consulted expert for radio and television broadcasts and has published numerous books—all bestsellers within their categories—including more than twenty Chicken Soup for the Soul books, The Aladdin Factor, Heart at Work, 100 Ways to Build Self-Concept in the Classroom and Dare to Win.