a hard row to hoe.

My like or dislike of people in my psychology class is mostly based on how interesting their comments are. It's a discussion-based class, and the best ideas come from the older, more world-wise classmates. Though I like the kid who sits two seats down, it's hard to take him seriously when everything he says screams out the fact that he is only eighteen.

Suzy is soft-spoken, but not afraid to speak. Her points are reasonable and plainly stated. She's always struck me as someone who has had to toil through life, though I've never been sure exactly what her struggles have been. She just seemed downtrodden, even when she was laughing and joking. One Thursday night, our teacher told us that we were having a guest speaker. Our guest speaker was Suzy. And so I found out about Suzy's problems, and they were much, much worse than I had imagined. My mother would say that she had a hard row to hoe.

She started out with sexual abuse from her older brother, memories of which she completely repressed until she was thirty. Then she moved on to an eleven-year period of hard drug use, basically using every drug I've ever heard of, and some I hadn't. She talked about working at a pharmacy, stealing the drugs for her own use and to sell. She talked about following little grandmothers home from the pharmacy to break into their houses and steal the drugs she had given them. She talked about shooting up in her parents bathroom at twenty-four years old and then deciding to get clean. Then she talked about being diagnosed with hepatitis C twenty years after she stopped sharing needles and how now that she has a chronic and often fatal disease, she really wants to live for the first time in her forty-six years.

Now Suzy goes on a talk circuit, giving talks to people in safehouses and at twelve-step meetings. She talks to them just like she talked to us. I've heard speakers like her before, giving the story of their glorious rehabilitation like a made for TV movie. But those people were professional speakers, emphasizing the right points and saying the right phrases to make the maximum impact. Suzy was just telling a sad story, and the fact that it was about her was incidental. It wasn't meant to shock and it wasn't meant to motivate, just to say, "This is where I've been." And yet that was what was inspiring about her words. She was so regular and so open that it was a testament to what regular people can do in the face of adversity.

I left class feeling sort of awestruck by Suzy's bravery and frankness. I felt a bit foolish, too. Two weeks before, we had been assigned a four-page paper about our lives and the major events that had shaped us into the Interpersonal Psychology students we are today. I'd written mine in like an hour, no problem. I've got lots of practice writing at length about myself. I was honest and open, too, but about what? My two-parent home and carefree, drug-free school years? My paper was downright light-hearted. Let's face it, life's been dealing me all the good cards. I think I'm a pretty cool and well-adjusted person, but I have no excuse not to be.

I confess that I am waiting for It, the thing that will immediately even out the great odds I've been given, because, well, I believe in statistics and probability. Something's got to give. Maybe in some sick and naive way, I want It to happen, so I can prove that I can come through a life that is not all violets and primroses, that I can still be a pretty cool and well-adjusted person when I would have an excuse not to be. I mean, who really wants to live happily ever after anyway?

Oh, wait. I do. I take all that other stuff back. Forget it ever happened.