Jay - Supernormal: childhood adversity and the amazing untold story of resilience

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

Maya Angelou

H elen looked as put together in person as she had sounded on the phone. Precisely on time for her first appointment, she sat on the couch with her back straight and her hands resting on top of one another, the bottom hand clenched. We exchanged some pleasantries, which included my asking if she had found my office without incident. To this, Helen replied, almost offhandedly, that she had been late getting out of a meeting at work, rushed over in her car, gotten a flat tire on the way, rolled into the closest service station, dashed in to drop off her keys, dashed back out yelling over her shoulder that she would return in an hour, jumped on a bus heading in the right direction, hopped off a mile or so later, and ran the last couple of blocks.

You sound like a superhero, I said.

Tears began to fall down Helens cheeks, and she looked at me wryly, sadly. You dont know the half of it, she replied.

Helen told me she had spent most of the last several years since collegeHow many has it been? She paused to count. Ten? Eleven?crisscrossing the globe with nongovernmental organizations fighting for a better world. Social justice in Africa. Climate justice in Southeast Asia and Latin America. Juvenile justice in Eastern Europe and the Caribbean. Helen went wherever she was needed and then, one day, her mother sent word she was needed back home.

Helens father had killed himself in the house where she grew up. Theirs was a modest home in a suburban neighborhood about two hours outside San Francisco. It was a place where there had been a yard to run around in, and Helen and her two younger brothers each had a bedroom of their own. Maybe this was why, many years ago, no one heard the youngest boy sneak out of the house in the middle of the night and head for the backyard pool. Maybe this was why no one saw him drown.

Before she was even a teenager, Helen had begun to sneak out of the house at night, too. At first, she wanted to know what the world had looked like to her brother just before he died, but then she kept doing it because it felt like getting away, at least for a while. Her father was not arguing for a fresh start somewhere else. Her mother was not crying, refusing to leave her memories of her youngest childand the marks she had made on the kitchen doorway as he had grown tallerbehind. During the day, Helen walked down the halls at school where she earned good grades with a smileher parents needed her to be the strong one, and she was. In the dark of night, though, Helen could walk for blocks and blocks, and as she moved in and out of the cones of yellow light from the streetlamps, there was no one to be strong for, no one to save.