My Experience Does Not Equal Everyone's Experience

My Experience Does Not Equal Everyone’s Experience

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

There I sat as a freshman in college, listening to our two best players talk about their time growing up in Bosnia during 1992-1995. These two guys survived a war during their childhood. It was a sobering moment for my mental health struggles. On some level, we are all selfish, and it's hard-wired into us. We only see the world through our own views and experiences, and it's easy to extrapolate that to everyone. It's a trap we all fall into from time to time. But it's not really how life works. I'm not saying either of these guys didn't struggle with traumatic issues from what occurred in their childhood. But, I realized I could never again walk through life thinking I'm the only one and what has happened to me, and how I handled it, is how everyone else should handle their stuff. 

We live in a weird state of the human condition. We have access to so much information and can take our personal views to large and small audiences through social media. However, we have forgotten to consider the importance of context, limits, differences, and, most importantly, the idea that anyone's personal experience is the only experience that has occurred. My grief journey differs wildly from that of my siblings, who lost the same father I did. What I had to do to become healthy again was not the same as what they had to do to understand their grief. Either of our journeys was the correct path or the wrong path. 

And this brings me to early this week; my wife watched a video about the adoption process. This is something we are keenly aware of as both my daughters are adopted in some fashion. As the video played, my blood began to boil as the presentation went on and on about how traumatic adoption is and how so many experience this and experience that. Mind you, all of what the presenter stated is more than likely factual; what made my blood boil was the parts left unsaid. We should never gloss over the fact that if 67% of adopted people feel a certain way, 33% of folks adopted didn't. If 55% of folks process grief this way, 45% don't. Those stories deserve attention in presentations as well. Your experience, my experience, your emotions, my emotions, do not and will never equal everyone's. Again this is not how life works, no matter how many viral videos occur or how often our thinking patterns convince us we have the situation figured out from every angle. 

In an effort to represent the under-represented, we are leaving people out again. We must improve at representing everyone in our presentations and value the unique experiences that lead to discoveries of how to live well. Some adoptions are 100% completely healthy and not traumatic, while others are 100% dramatic and unhealthy. Just like everything else, we have a large spectrum to examine. Where will our adoption land on that scale? That is up to several factors and numerous human emotions, from my daughters' to my wife's to mine, and many others. And all those emotions in that equation are of equal importance, and we can not diminish one to save another because then we will lose somebody in that dance. It's a constant give and take and continuous negation of the messy parts of life. It always will be, but I never want to diminish others. When I screw up, and I do, I'm hard on myself. 

The longer I work in this emotional and mental health profession and assist people with their trauma, the more I realize there is much more to learn. I still need to learn about inclusion, resiliency, representation, patience, the attempts it takes at understanding, forgiveness, and how open I have to be to solutions I do not understand; the more I have to embrace the notion that my experience of the world is 1 out of billions, and I should not stubbornly stand on one method. The more I realize that, instead of dividing, I want to move people together over their traumatic experiences, to make them feel digestible, to make them feel like it's not some unclimbable mountain, and that their experience is just as authentic, meaningful, and essential to the human experience as anybody's else's. 

My trauma always had me worried the world would go on without me. Suicidal thinking convinced me I wasn't significant enough to experience happiness again. Other people's suicidal thoughts had them thinking the people they loved would be better off without them. Both statements are factual and essential to every presentation about suicide awareness; plus, many more that are not mentioned here. For example, some adopted people never want to meet their bio-parents; some do, and that's ok. Some are healthy, and some are not. But, like a zillion other life experiences, let's find a way to honor them all. So if we do that; we might find ourselves in a place everyone feels like they fit in. And that experience of feeling like we fit in somewhere is a way to lessen a lot of suffering worldwide. No matter what anyone of us has experienced.