Growth.

So, something has changed for me this week.

I was watching this documentary last night about women in prison who are working with this director on this writing project. It's called "What I want my words to do to you." In this video, the women read things they have written, mostly about the crimes they committed which got them put in prison for a very long time (murder is the most common one).
One of the women reads her essay about how she murdered this 71 year old man who had called her while she was prostituting. They had sex and then she killed him. She talks about how she found out later that his wife of forty years had died three months earlier and he was lonely. She says that she had thought of him as a pervert and a horrible person, but after finding out that he had been mourning his wife's death and this was his reaction to being alone, she felt differently.
The woman cried and talked about how horrible of a person she was.

What was amazing and inspiring to me was that the other women in the room listening to this did not encourage the woman to continue wallowing in self-pity. They said basically, "Yes, you killed a man. No, that's not awesome. But you have to move on now. Your life goes on and continuing to beat yourself up over this is not going to work. It's not fixing anything."

I feel like we let ourselves wallow too much. For instance, I have had the mindset for the last several months that the kids that I work with (homeless youths) who have been abused and taken advantage of and treated horribly have some kind of excuse to make the decisions they make. I do truly believe that they have an excuse. I believe that trauma has affected their brains in such a way that they have poor decision making skills and will struggle to turn away from risk-taking behaviors.
However, I do not believe that it is fair for them to lean on these excuses and not live up to the amazing potential that they have.

Some of my children do not want to get their education and work in normal people jobs. They have different dreams. For those kids, I would never encourage them to do things that they do not have their heart and soul in. But there are some kids that I see that desperately want to change the world, but they are so caught up in their circumstances that they have yet to even get their basic education. This makes me sad.
It makes me sad that I haven't challenged them to move past their circumstances and live the life that they really want to live.

So I have changed my approach. I refuse to not challenge these kids to do more, be more, than they think is possible. It's injustice for me to sit by and let them wallow in self pity.

It's injustice for me to sit and wallow in my own self pity.

This has changed for me this week.