"How You Get Unstuck," written by advice columnist Sugar from The Rumpus really struck a chord with me. Sugar always gives straight-shooting, marvelous advice, but in this post she shares stories from her past as a youth counselor which reverberated in two other stories I have been thinking about recently. This country puts so much emphasis on "making it" and "winning" that the tendency is to look away from or avoid the folks who aren't doing just that.
There are all sorts of levels of not winning — financial status is just one measure. It is terrifically hard on young people, girls especially, who might be in difficult, even impossible, situations, that so many don't want to even admit that they might be in trouble. Or that the system is helpless to actually help.
Photo by Darcy Padilla, The Julie Project
Sugar was a school counselor to middle school-aged girls, some of them barely teenagers. She found the harrowing stories of their young lives both riveting and heartbreaking. "I told the girls that these sorts of things were not okay. That they were unacceptable. Illegal. That I would call someone and that someone would intervene and this would stop."
The school's tactic was to expose the girls to positive things, in the hope that it would bring something positive to their lives. "I was meant to silently, secretly, covertly empower them by taking them to do things they’d never done at places they’d never been. I took them to a rock-climbing gym and to the ballet and to a poetry reading at an independent bookstore. The theory was that if they liked to pull the weight of their blossoming girl bodies up a faux boulder with little pebble-esque plastic hand-and-foot-holds then perhaps they would not get knocked up." As much as a program like the one Sugar was involved in might be a temporary balm, not everyone has access to one.
The Julie Project, a phenomenal photo essay by Darcy Padilla, chronicles the life of a young woman who truly lived on the edges of society. The subject, Julie, was an 18-year old with AIDS when she and the photographer first met in 1993. They stayed in touch on and off for the next 18 years, Padilla snapping photos of Julie, the men in her life, and her children, as she gave birth to them and had to give them up to foster care.
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