Dear Me,
I watched a few shows this past week. They are all kind of dark, and heavy. One is a movie <Dark Water>, you may have seen it. It tells the story of Rob Bilott, an environmental lawyer, his decade-long legal battle against one of America’s most powerful corporations — DuPont, who allegedly contaminated drinking water with PFOA, a life-threatening chemical used in the production of Teflon, that caused cancers, birth defects and other illnesses of at least 3,500 people, and affected 70,000 residents.
It is a hard battle. DuPont has all the money and power to defend itself. People were threatened. I am not gonna tell the whole story here (no spoiler alert), please watch it yourself. The movie itself is dark too, black and dark green tone, like the color of the deep sea. It feels helpless and hopeless for the entire two hours. Don’t worry, in the last minute, there would be light, Ron won.
Mark Buffalo played the role of Rob Bilott. I loved Mark’s performance, so I went researching more of his shows, when <I Know This Much Is True> caught my eyes. It is a story of Dominick and his paranoid schizophrenic twin brother, Thomas, yes, Mark played both roles, stunning. Dominick is mentally healthy, though, he is troubled too, recently divorced, lost his beautiful baby who was only breathing on the blue earth for three weeks, and he has no idea of his birth father since the twins were born forty years ago. Dominick has been taking care of his brother Thomas for half of his life until one day Thomas went to the public library and cut his own right hand as a sacrifice for God. Everything went darker, like been swollen into a black hole.
With the help of a psychologist, a social worker, his ex-wife Dessa and his best friend Leo, Dominick made tremendous efforts to release Thomas from the asylum where he was beaten and even raped. Unfortunately, Thomas died the next day he was released and came back home. Police concluded it was an accident. Just a short while ago, their mother passed away and left their grandfather’s manuscript to Dominick. A few weeks later their stepfather had a major heart attack. Too many tragedies. Too much pain.
As I was writing this, I glanced through the window on my right side, a group of birds flying from right to left. They are so free. Birds are less intelligent, but they are freer. I don’t think I had any ideas of hierarchy or discrimination or inequality when I was little. I guess, I was too much focused on myself and wasn’t aware of the outside, or I was lucky enough to be protected under my parents’ wings. The world becomes more and more divided to me, or maybe it is like this all the time. I learned about Darwin’s Theory of Evolution when I little, “Natural Selection” or “Survival of the fittest”, is the principle of all lives, and of the game of the world. In other words, the strong wins, the weak lose. I find it cruel.
It is all or mostly about money and power. People with money and power can get what they want, and get away with what they don’t want. People at the bottom, born at the bottom, and maybe would be at the bottom until they die, have to fight so hard to get what they need, not to mention what they “want”. It is helpless and hopeless.
Someone with major depression told me that he tried so hard, years, to get himself help, dealing with insurance companies, healthcare companies, and the government, being kicked from here to there like a ball, waiting, waiting, and waiting, still nothing. Mentally disabled, not enough support from the family, he can’t afford hundreds of dollars per session of Psychotherapy without insurance. I can’t even afford it. “They only want to help people who are rich, so that they can be rich. Who cares about us, me?”
Therapists or psychologists, at least the ones I know, at least for all us volunteer counselors on the suicide and crisis hotline, chose to do this job because we care, and we are willing to put into our time, efforts, and heart to help people in need, and in despair.
I am also watching <Brave New World>. The brave new world is a happy world, with no pains, no struggles, and no negative emotions. And everyone is connected to everyone, everyone belongs to everyone. People are predefined and conditioned, hierarchies, jobs, and relationships; everything is programmed and planned, who they meet with, what they eat, who they have sex with, and what they say and how. Everyone is happy, everyone should be happy. It is the happiest world. Well, I think it is also the saddest world because you don’t have any control of your own life, you don’t decide, you can’t choose to change, you are not a human being anymore.
I realized that the essence of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is not “Natural Selection” or “Survival of the fittest”, but “Adaption”. Yes, we may not have control over the moment we born, but after that, everything is changing, the strong is changing maybe into the weak, and the weak is changing and becoming the strong. We, no matter strong or weak, are able to adapt and change. No matter how dark it is, there would be light.
I am reading <The Choice: Embrace the Possible> written by Dr. Edith Eger, a psychologist, and a Holocaust survivor. The Holocaust was the state-sponsored mass murder of over six million European Jews and millions of others by the German Nazis during World War II. The book starts with beautiful memories Dr. Edith Eger has of her family during her childhood, right before being separated from her parents and transported to the Nazis camp — Auschwitz, everything after that is unimaginable and unbearable. She survived. The horrors, traumas, fears, and pains only made her strong, and free. She is free, so free, like that group of birds flying in the sky. She said that we can’t prison ourselves, she said:
Freedom lies in learning to embrace what happened. Freedom means we muster the courage to dismantle the prison, brick by brick.
And that we always have a choice:
What happened can never be forgotten and can never be changed. But over time I learned that I can choose how to respond to the past. I can be miserable, or I can be hopeful-I can be depressed, or I can be happy. We always have that choice, that opportunity for control. I’m here, this is now.
And that there are opportunities:
Even the dullest moments of our lives are opportunities to experience hope, buoyancy, happiness. Mundane life is life too. As is painful life, and stressful life. Why do we so often struggle to feel alive, or distance ourselves from feeling life fully? Why is it such a challenge to bring life to life?
There would be light. There is light. At the end of the show <I Know This Much Is True>, Dominick’s stepfather revealed the truth about his birth father. Dominick lost his twin brother, his mother, his three-week-old daughter, and his marriage in a few years. And he reunited with another brother with who he shared the same father and remarried with his ex-wife, his first love. What is more, the couple adopted a baby, a new life. In the very last scene, he said:
I am not a smart man, particularly. But one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own and my family’s, and my country’s past, holding in my hands these truths: That love grows from forgiveness; That from destruction comes renovation; That the evidence of God exists in our connections to one another. This much, at least, I’ve figured out. I know this much is true.
The movie <Dark Water> ended. In the last minute, it showed on the screen that Rob won his first three settlements and followed with DuPont settling the class action for $670.07 million, almost two decades since the farmer, whose land was contaminated by poisonous chemicals dumped from DuPont’s plant, who later soon died of cancer, approached Rob for help. The story doesn’t end here, Rob is still fighting.
He is fighting. She is fighting. They are fighting. We are fighting. Respect to all who are fighting, still fighting.
There will be light. There is light.
(Originally published on July 21, 2020 on Substack)
