Friend #37 - Jaye

When Jaye was a tween, her father had an opportunity to expand his business into the United States so he moved the family away from their beloved Canada to live in Arizona.  There are a lot of things Jaye missed about her home country but mostly, she missed her friends. 

Twenty years ago, there was no social media to keep up with people we once knew but Jaye found a way to communicate with those she knew in Canada through a series of chat rooms she found on the computer.  It was all very innocent.  Still, while she was exploring these chat rooms, she met a boy from Iowa online and they began chatting regularly.  The two of them became very close over a period of time but after a while, they drifted apart as the young tend to do. 

Then, when Jaye was sixteen, she got a message from this long, lost boy.  He wanted to come out to Arizona to meet her.  He had just turned eighteen, making him two years older than her.  Jaye told her parents…and they panicked.  Who wouldn’t?  Even Jaye, herself, said she would never let her own children meet a stranger from online.  But eventually, her parents relented and the two were allowed to meet.  Turns out, the boy wasn’t a psycho.  He was actually a pretty decent kid.  They began dating long distance and eventually…they got married.

In a lot of ways, Jaye admits she is very lucky.  She realizes she missed out on some things by finding her match so early on, but she’s also had the opportunity for the two of them to grow up together.  No one knows her better.  Jaye is a CFO for a local non-profit.  Her husband has his PhD.  They own their own home and have two adorable children.  They have a couple of Siamese cats.  One of them may be schizophrenic.  All in all, it’s a pretty nice life…but lately, Jaye has been feeling sad for no particular reason.  Her husband noticed it, too, leaving them both with a feeling that something was very wrong.

I applaud Jaye for having admitted this:  She has actually been going to see a therapist.  There is a stigma in our society that therapy is wrong but in reality, it is only the strong that have the courage to admit there are things out of their control that they don’t understand.  Out of therapy, Jaye realized her issues have been triggered by delayed grief.  When Jaye was nineteen years old, her father died.  The next day, Jaye packed her belongings and moved, giving herself no time to grieve. 

And grief is an interesting thing.  It is uncontrollable and often comes in like the waves of the ocean.  Sometimes the waves recede into normalcy.  Sometimes they are so overpowering one feels like they are going to drown.  And it’s okay to be sad.  So often we fear sadness as if it is something that should never be…but it’s normal.  When someone you love dearly passes away, it’s okay to feel depressed.  It’s okay to have days when you are overwhelmed with emotion.  I don’t know where the belief that we always have to be superwoman came from!  We live in a world where sometimes unfortunate things happen.  We do ourselves an injustice by not letting ourselves feel.

Jaye’s learning some of this one day at a time.  I get a sense that she can be quiet, a bookworm, maybe a tad analytical, and when you aren’t the most outgoing person in the room, I would imagine it’s harder to connect with people.  Yet as Jaye sat across from me, I could feel my own humanity want to reach out and touch her, bring her comfort in some way. 

This experiment of meeting one new person a week has taught me how important it is to have human connections in our lives.  We all think we are so connected with social media but in reality, there are people like Jaye, who look like they have everything anyone could want…but still need someone to smile at them.  They need to be distracted by the ridiculousness of other people’s lives so they don’t have to fall into the dark pit of their own emotions.  They need a community that rallies around them, tells them they are cared for so they can feel the things they need to feel in order to fully heal. 

I want a world like that.