“It’s a good story,” he said. He even grinned at me. “I’ll tell you.”
“Please,” I said.
And then he did.":
It was a very good story indeed, but at the same time, the saddest one.
Sometimes, when you read about a book character and their childhood, you just want to dive into the book and save them: You want to be everyone they need; hug them when they need it, talk to them when they want to share something and most importantly, you want to protect them from monsters.
It's hard not to feel empathy for Jude, one of the main characters of the book. Even though his adulthood is really good—he has friends who care about him and people who love him—his childhood was so unbearable that it left a lasting impact on his entire life. Just reading about it was tough enough:
“His childhood might well have been spent in 19th century not the 21st, for all he had apparently missed.”
If you ask me, there should be a manual that tells us how to help a friend get to therapy; Jude's friends need such guidance just as much as they need to save their best friend. Even though Jude tries to overcome some of his traumas:
“-I was raised Catholic
-but you’re not now?
-no-he said. He had worked for years to keep the apology out of his voice when he said this.”
We can see that unfortunately, it's not enough.
His traumas had already caused unbearable damage; he hated himself:
“Fear and hatred, fear and hatred: often, it seemed that those were the only two qualities he possessed. Fear of everyone else; hatred of himself.”
"He rarely got angry about things that happened or had happened to him: his pains, past and present, were things he tried not to brood about, were not questions to which he spent his days searching for meaning. He already knew why they had happened: they had happened because he had deserved them."- That was the moment when I wished I could tell Jude: "No one deserves that—no one, not even the people who did it to you." But would he listen? Did he listen to the people who loved him? No. It's as if trauma made him deaf to words that expressed how much his loved ones cared about him and loved him.
Convincing someone that what you feel towards them is not pity, but genuine love, can be a challenge; especially to convince someone as stubborn as our main character was: He often feared that friendship was really motivated by his friends pity for him and not by genuine love.
Nothing could convince him, he would listen his friends:
“You were a kid, a baby. Those things were done to you. You have nothing, nothing to blame yourself for, not ever, not in any universe.” Andy looked at him. “And even if you hadn’t been a kid, even if you had just been some horny guy who wanted to fuck everything in sight and had ended up with a bunch of STDs, it still wouldn’t be anything to be ashamed of.” He sighed. “Can you try to believe me?”
would see how they treated him, read their letters:
"I COULDN’T BE HAPPIER FOR YOU AND THE ONLY QUESTION IS WHAT TOOK HAROLD SO FUCKING LONG. I HOPE YOU’LL TAKE THIS AS A SIGN THAT YOU NEED TO TAKE BETTER CARE OF YOURSELF SO SOMEDAY YOU’LL HAVE THE STRENGTH TO CHANGE HAROLD’S ADULT DIAPERS WHEN HE’S A THOUSAND YEARS OLD AND INCONTINENT, BECAUSE YOU KNOW HE’S NOT GOING TO MAKE IT EASY FOR YOU BY DYING AT A RESPECTABLE AGE LIKE A NORMAL PERSON. BELIEVE ME, PARENTS ARE PAINS IN THE ASS LIKE THAT. (BUT GREAT TOO, OF COURSE.) LOVE, ANDY It was, he and Willem agreed, one of the best letters they’d ever read."
and still think that he didn't deserve al this love (Go to therapy, Jude, please. Even though you don't have the language for the dreadful things that happened to you, I'm sure you'll find them. You will be able to explain yourself to yourself, I have hope in you.)
In Stephan Chbosky's book “The Perks of Being a Wallflower" a teacher gives the main character, Charlie, an advice about relationships and says : "we accept the love we think we deserve” which really sums up the importance of patterns we have because of traumas in our present relationships. If we don't believe that we deserve goodness ("And sometimes it’s because I feel happy, and I have to remind myself that I shouldn’t.”) , most likely we'll end up in a toxic and abusive relationship; that's exactly what happened with Jude.
No, I don't think it's easy to make yourself believe that you are a lovable person. I know it's not an easy task at all, especially for Jude. He was told he was found near a trash bin, convinced by multiple men that he was born to be used by them, and had pleasure removed from his life by the very person who initially helped him discover the joy of being human.
I just want him to be a survivor. His friends wanted it too. they did their best:
“Has anyone ever told you that sometimes you just need to accept things, Jude? Sometimes nice things happen to good people. You don’t need to worry- they don’t happen as often as they should. But when they do, it’s up to the good people to just say “thank you” and move on and maybe consider that the person who’s doing the nice thing gets a bang out of it as well, and really isn’t in the mood to hear all the reasons that the person for whom he’s done the nice thing doesn’t think he deserves it or isn’t worthy of it.”
"“So finally, he did what they had all learned over the years to do when jude’s legs were hurting him, which was to make some excuse, get up, and leave the room, so Jude could lie perfectly still and wait for the pain to pass without having to make conversations."
But as I already said he is quite stubborn.
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