My Invisible Kingdom: Letters from the Secret Lives of Teens Paperback may 2004	If I Grow Up: Talking with Teens about AIDS, Love and Staying Alive Paperback January 1997

Excerpts from “My Invisible Kingdom”
Chapter 4: Accountability

TJ followed me out to the field to tell me his story. "All my life," he said, "I swore I'd never do drugs. When I was growing up that was a promise I made to myself. That's the line I said I'd never cross.  I might get drunk once or twice," he added, digging a small hole in the dirt with his sneaker, "but I'll never do drugs." Then one day, everything changed.

"In 7th grade I tried pot because I thought it would make me feel better. But it only depressed me. There I was, standing on the line I said I'd never cross. So in 8th grade, I tried cocaine. What the hell? I was becoming the person I said I'd never be. In 9th grade, I moved up to GHB, dust and acid. Once I hid some acid pills in my sock and they absorbed into my bloodstream. I was tripping for four days."  He leaned his back against a tree and looked away. "Since I've broken my own rule, there's nothing to hold me back."

"I have a parole officer." he added. "I need a parole officer."

Everyday, we renegotiate the contracts we make with ourselves. We hit the snooze button on our alarm clocks and promise to get up after an extra five minutes of sleep. We go off our diets and promise to begin anew tomorrow. We cancel plans with friends and promise to make it up to them at a later time. Somehow, we get through. But when it comes to certain other promises, we don't allow ourselves to renegotiate as easily. Instead, we answer the call of the craving and hope that consequence will remain a voice unheard. We become the people we said we wouldn't, characters at the crossroads giving up all hope of restoration. We self-destruct. Yet if we never learn to renegotiate our contracts or attend to the outcome of our behavior, how are we ever going to learn from our mistakes?

*   *   *   *   *

Becoming accountable means answering to yourself in the presence of another.  It's busting yourself, tattling on yourself, telling your whole truth.  It's trusting the process of disclosure enough to blow the whistle on yourself, listening to your life as you speak, becoming mindful of your thoughts and actions. It's being able to say, "This is the loss I have suffered. This is what I have done with it. This is how I cope. And I want you to listen. I want you to see it. I want a witness."

Becoming accountable means simultaneously witnessing yourself while somebody else witnesses you with unconditional acceptance. It means hearing yourself testify with immunity from shame and any externally or internally imposed constraints. It means revealing to yourself, without any fear of judgment, all that is hidden in the hideouts of your heart. Becoming accountable is the courageous act of placing yourself in the presence of someone who will stand beside you and say, "Walk with me. Tell me. Let me hear your story." As directed by one teenager, "It seems to me that when I tell people I am going to do something I am more inclined to do it than just by telling myself." 

I met Jonathan when he was thirteen years-old. Once my self-appointed little brother, now a twenty-one year-old young man, he recently wrote me an email disclosing some of his internal controversy:

I am in one of those moods where I need to talk to someone and it seems like no one wants to listen, or they don't have the time.  I need to get this off my chest.  It feels like I am all alone out here. It's like no one I know feels the same way.  It's kind of like I am too grown up to talk to my friends about it and no adult wants to talk to me because I am a kid. It just feels like I have nowhere else to go. Everyone says, "You're gonna be great one day. You have so much potential." No one says, "You ARE great."  I wish I could call fear "excitement," even though it feels like fear but I am so afraid that I am going to grow up and fail in life and everyone around me will be disappointed.  And then again, I'm afraid I'm gonna succeed. I want someone to love me for who I am but I have no idea who I am.  Really am. I know who I want people to think I am but I don't think that is really me.  I don't know what to do with my life yet.  I don't know what I want to be when I grow up.  I don't know where I'm going, but I know I'm on the ramp to somewhere.  And I think that before I can figure out all the rest of that stuff I need to find me.  I just need someone to listen.

Sometimes we don't want the world to see that we are doing the best we can, for fear that they will judge, what Jonathan so aptly describes, "the private midnight that I call my life."  But at the same time, we want to find someone who can compassionately see that we are doing the best we can, even if our personal best is not up to our own self-imposed high standards.

Seek out someone with whom to share your story; but seek with discretion. This is not the "I need help," talk. This is not the "Can you give me some advice?" talk. This is the, "Can I get a witness, because I need to hear my thoughts and feelings," talk.

My friend Shawn tells me, "When you can say, ‘I am imperfect yet people still love me,' then you will know a new kind of intimacy. It's those small yet beautiful moments with people when there's nothing else but clarity and contact that sustain you."  Walk side by side with someone - not online, on the phone or in a text message conversation. Sit face to face with someone - not at a crowded party, at the dinner table or in a note that is passed in class, from hand to hand.  Look eye to eye with someone as you talk about yourself. Solemnly declare, "Okay, here I am," and then tell your story.

To be witnessed is to be made steady. It is the act of borrowing comfort. It is one of the key ingredients to establishing a healthy sense of self.  For our existence to be validated, sometimes we need to know that others see us.  They can substantiate for us that we exist in their hearts and their minds.  They can help us to say, "I exist because I exist, whether or not I exist in you.  But I feel and believe and know that I exist even more, because you acknowledge that which I reflect out into the world."  Development of a healthy sense of self relies upon many things, but especially an ability to be recognized and lovingly acknowledged by others.

Notice how often little children say, "Daddy, Mommy, look what I can do."  They use the power of acknowledgment in order to create a healthy selfhood. Later in life, it is this same call for affirmation, "See me, notice me," that can become the balm for a broken heart. In the times that we feel betrayed by our hopes and are faced with a life we never anticipated, we can be soothed by being accountable and receiving acknowledgment.  We can find the strength and faith to absorb the steadfast shocks of life.  When we hear a friend or parent say, "I know it hurts. I see that it hurts," we begin the liberation from our invisible worlds.

Become accountable.  Take inventory of your character and become responsible for making better choices in the future. In the words of Mara from Michigan, "I want so much for people to see that they are worthy and need to love themselves. Too many times I hear stories where people are making poor choices because they do not believe they are lovable. From this day on, I will honor my past and learn from my mistakes. Today is a new day, a new start and I am a new me." 

When you see your breath on the first day of winter, look at the piece of your life force that emanates from within. As you exhale or speak into that first frost, pay attention to the proof of your presence in the world.

When you type an email to a friend, read what you have written before you press the ‘Send' button. See your current existence on the screen before you. Take notice of how you are portraying yourself in that very moment.

When you empty your pockets each night, look at the day you spent. A day in the life of the things you collected: phone numbers, coins and new experiences. The things you used: money, ID cards or people. The things you held firmly: keys, coping mechanisms and hope.

Witness the imprint your life makes in this world and surround yourself with people who will vouch for your visibility. We are all living in a huge map of this world. Follow the arrow to the spot where it is written, "You Are Here." 

 

 

The Old Man at the Gate

The cloud of people who drift with me
The grass I sit on that rustles beneath
The warmth that splashes on my skin
The rivers of blood that rush inside
There are no words to say my prayer
I will write my prayer with my life

Samson, Age 16


The young December chill wrapped itself around the rutted streets of the Old City and in the narrow alleyways of the Arab shuk it was a challenge just to move windward through the cold, past the creeping crowds of shoppers and vendors haggling over souvenirs and other trinkets. Jerusalem, that early winter, was business as usual. I stopped in front of an Arab man selling age-old artifacts and disposable cameras from his tiny hut, inviting me to bargain. Gently, he slapped his hand across my face and smiled. "I make a nice price for you," he said before inhaling deeply into the open end of the long rubber pipe on his houka. I shook my head and moved along, deflecting his appeals with a wave of my hand.

Into the crowd I disappeared and searched for Jason, one of my eighteen year-old students from Florida spending the year in an Israeli yeshiva. "It's their way of warming up to you," he would later tell me of that slap, still feeling the shape of the vendor's hand across my face. Swept away by the undertow of pedestrian traffic, I continued on and headed towards the Jaffa Gate where Jason would then meet me and escort me to the Western Wall.

The Wall, or Kotel as it is known in Hebrew, stands on the site of the First Temple that was destroyed when the walls of Jerusalem were breached by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians, in the year 422 BC. It is also the only remaining structure that surrounded the Second Temple when Jerusalem was once again destroyed, this time by Titus and the Romans, in the year 70 A.D, killing two and a half million people and exiling another a million more.

Every day hundreds of people with hearts in hand and prayers in pocket stand before it, asking God to fix them or put them back together again.  As it is written in the Book of Lamentations, "Renew our days as You have done as of old."  Like soldiers of survival in a battle for an indwelling peace, they stand at attention before the Western Wall. Like a hotline to heaven where tourists-turned-pilgrims call out their prayers, the Wailing Wall reflects all that is indestructible in the human spirit.

I met Jason at the top of an immense staircase leading down to a wide plaza of people shuffling about, mostly under their fur-trimmed black hats.  "Right about here, on this step," he said, "This is usually the spot where I lower my voice." We descended the stairs together.

"Why?" I asked.  Glowing with anticipation, he placed his index finger against his lips, perpendicular to his half-smile and said, "Shhh..."  Jason was lathering himself in the honor of teaching his teacher. "Look all around you. Prayers are rising." 

As we approached the narrow gateway before the Wall, a beggarly old man held out a pair of tefillin, a type of wooden amulet that a Jew is commanded to wear during morning worship services. The long strands of leather attached to the two black boxes filled with scripture were as weathered and worn as the skin on the old man's face. As he mumbled something in what seemed like an antiquated mystical language, Jason reached into his pocket and tossed a few shekels into the old man's cup. "He said that you should be careful not let the headpiece of the tefillin touch the wall."

"Is that all?" I asked. "He seemed to be saying something else, but I couldn't quite make it out." Jason nodded his head in agreement and replied, "I think it was some kind of ... prayer."

The weather warmed with each step we took towards the formidable stone structure. I removed my jacket and wrapped it around my waist. Jason watched carefully as I set one small black box of the tefillin against my right biceps and entwined the attached leather strap seven times around my arm, opposite my heart. Then I placed the other small box on my forehead letting two more straps of leather hang down either side of my torso. Together, we whispered the appropriate prayers. "Thus says the Lord: I will betroth you with righteousness, with love, with justice and with compassion."  Finally, with the remaining quarter yard of strap hanging from my wrist, I wrapped my hand in leather, winding it three times around my fingers and tethering the rest around and into my palm.

Standing on my left was a young soldier in an olive colored uniform with his M16 resting vertically at his side. Eyes closed and prayer book open, his body swayed right, then left. He bent his knees and bowed his shoulders before the wall of peace. Standing on my right was a Hasidic man in a long black coat and curled sideburns underneath his wide-brimmed hat. Eyes closed and prayer book open, his body swayed left, then right.  He rocked his head back and forth and moved his lips in syncopation to the words in his heart, before the wall of supplication. As I stood there, open-eyed, empty-handed and with no book to guide me I realized that people pray in passionate ways. Although we look and behave differently from one another, when the sun is on our backs and we stand before the future we all seem to burn with a similar fire.

As a child I was taught, "Just as a man flails his arms above the water when he is drowning, so does a man shake when he prays." Bowing my head, studying the ground at my feet, I understood that I too had come to drown before the wall of worship. Flanking my shoes were puddles of carefully folded white paper pieces, the overflow of handwritten appeals beseechingly inserted in between the narrow cracks of Jerusalem stone.  Prayers on paper beweeping the story of a life, one after the other after the other.  With the excess freight of longing lying at my feet, I began to consider my own prayer.  Not having written anything down as evidence, as offering to place within the crevices before me, I wondered if this ancient altar of stone would be able to read the words languishing in my heart. I leaned my head against the Wall and tears settled into the corners of my eyes. With the small black box of scripture resting against my forehead, scraping the stone, I closed my eyes, dug my fingers into an ancient incision and began to pray.

Adonai, Hineni
Dear God, here I am

Searching my mind for any remnant of a blessing memorized from childhood, I listened for my father's voice leading Saturday morning services on holidays in synagogue, and my Uncle Seymour's annual soliloquy as he led our family Passover Seders, or any other bittersweet emotional intrusion. I had come to ask God to take away my HIV. To not allow me to die of AIDS. To forbid the world to ever forget my name. "Not me.  Please not me.  Don't make me into yet another piece of cloth on the Memorial Quilt, brilliantly laid out on a sparkling morning for all to see.  Don't celebrate the song of my soul with a candle in the night amidst thousands of others.  Don't honor me with silence."  I searched for the right sequence of syllables, a consecrated sentence that would give the proper heft to my plea. Yet all I could locate was one word.

Thanks.

For the sun on my back
For the pulsing of life in my veins
And for the T-cells in my blood

Thanks

For the soldier on my left and the Hasid on my right
For Jason standing by
And for the old man at the gate


Thanks

For the plane that will take me home
For the faces that will smile with greetings
And for friends I have yet to meet with eyes that laugh and arms that hold

Here is my simple prayer of gratitude for the very breath of life in me
Thank you for all this and more


PS...Please help me to remember my prayer when I need it most