Black and White

Recently, as I have come to recognize my calling in life and am deciding the best way to follow that, I have realized that there were parts of my life that I had left behind and needed to bring with me...if for no other reason than to remind myself that I survived.  Unfortunately, as I accessed documents and people in my past, I realized that my life had been whittled down to legal jargon and medical diagnoses in black and white.

As I delved into my past I came face to face with the court documents that detail my traumatic childhood.  Yet, in all the legal jargon, the emotion and pain is lost.  It reads like a million other documents.  I was struck by how clinical it felt to read the indictments and sentencing records as well as court documents.  There was no mention about a ruined childhood or a tragic one - just facts and legalese.

My medical chart is the same.  It lists my diagnoses and medications and there are references to the tragedies that caused these injuries but it doesn't talk about me as a person.  On a given day my chart will list my pain as a 9 out of 10 but omits that I am crying, miserable, missing out on events and gatherings.  It fails to explain the defeated human spirit I am carrying on that day.  The chart is my life simplified to clinical diagnosis to be passed along to the next provider.

How many parts of our life do we whittle down to mere words and ignore the intense emotion?

I realize that our medical and legal systems would crumble if they had to record the injustices in emotional language.  No one would be able to handle it.  The legal or medical jargon enables us to focus on the issue and stay an arms length from the human suffering.  However, I think it is important to remember that behind each of those medical charts or legal files is a living person.  Someone who is hurting dramatically in ways we cannot imagine. If we think a bit more about the humanity and less about the clinical diagnoses or legal jargon would we be moved  to help those in need?  It is much more difficult to continue along in our ruts when we remember that behind each medical chart or legal file is a living person dealing with unimaginable pain, frustration, and loss.  Life isn't lived in black and white and the tragedies we survive should be available to people in color.  Perhaps if in reading our history we were forced to see it in color, it wouldn't be quite so easy to repeat it.