hurt

how do we respond to people who are mentally ill? how should we respond to people when they are sick? how can we not judge people when they hurt others so badly?

how can we encourage medication compliance so that our hurt children and fragmented friends do not become offenders ? where has our society erred in caring for its children who become young adults sick with schizophrenia--eventually to become offenders (by societal and moral law) when traumas, sometimes repetitive and sustained, tip them away from the equilibrium that may never have existed? and how do we return to the outsiders their identities once the title of "offender" has been applied to them and will not come off?

alas, that view is sympathetic. too sympathetic. is it not attributing emotion where there is none, where perhaps there is not even capability of feeling? pathetic fallacy is every empathic youth's downfall, and it ends up undermining the hurt that's been done. in short, this world is horrific because people are horrific, and, until hearsay otherwise, we will be inhabiting this place for some time. people hurt, and people hurt. Hurting is an action and a feeling, a choice and an inevitability, a simple fact and a blatant contradiction. what do we do when the world hurts and we withhold empathy for fear that we will seem sympathetic to horrors?

i am so sorry that i don't have answers when people tell me they hurt, or tell me they've been hurt, or ask me what to do when they themselves have caused hurting. i sit. i listen. phone to ear, i validate (even as i stutter). and all the while i pray to god that maybe the hurting will--for even a moment--abate.