Unknown Caller

by Lisa Unger

Here’s the thing. Some people just want to die. They have their reasons. Grief. A lifetime battle with depression. A terminal diagnosis. And those folks? You can’t stop them.

But the people who linger on the edge, looking down, the people who pick up the phone and reach out for help? Most of the time, you can talk them down. They are looking for a way back to the light.

“It changes. You find ways to live with it. Your life grows around it.”

We broadcast one version of ourselves, cropped and filtered and out there for consumption. But the real person is hidden behind that.”

“Hidden and alone,” she said. “No one wants the real me. They want that girl, the perfect one, the one who never loses, who always looks just right, the one who’s always smiling. If they could see me now, they’d hate me.”

I am only shattered pieces now, glued together with hard-won wisdom. I’m a better person than I was when she needed me and I couldn’t be there. I hope.

Because it’s what you do with your life that matters. It’s not about how you look. Because you don’t have to be perfect. No one is. You are enough. You are more than enough. And it’s time to get real.”

It would be like Wonder Woman dating Oscar the Grouch.

One of the weird things about insisting that you’re not a hero: no one ever believes you.

Maybe you’re still friends with people even after they hurt you, even if they keep hurting you. Because there’s something there. Something true and deep that stays even when it aches.

I saw something in you, she told me later. The knowledge. Of life and all its pain, the decision to stick around and do better. That’s what heroism is, you know? It’s not goodness. It’s not bravery. Not just. It’s the courage to keep fighting, keep trying to be a light in the darkness even when you’ve failed at that already.

Forgiveness is not saying that certain deeds are acceptable or forgotten. Forgiveness is an acknowledgment that we are all deeply flawed, and some of us make terrible mistakes or do horrible things. But to cling to rage, hatred, or grief, to rail against what is or has been, is to kill yourself again and again, rob yourself of what life you have left, what good you can still do.

I see all the kids—the popular ones, the brains, the jocks, the punks, the burnouts. They are not who they will become. This moment, teenage life, it feels like the whole universe, but it’s only a millisecond.

“When you compare your messy three-dimensional life to the filtered and curated two-dimensional version of everyone else you see on social media, you’re not getting the whole picture. Real life is what happens between those posts. And you only know the version people show you on Instagram. It’s a fiction. And I guarantee every single one of those perfect people you see out there is feeling as lost and insecure as you are.”