As soon as Dominic Thephasdin left the parking lot of St. Jude House, he was overcome with emotions he didn’t expect.
He began to cry.
The 18-year-old Crown Point resident had just toured the shelter for survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. He was there merely by chance, accompanying another Crown Point High School student, Mia Augsburger, who was dropping off donations to the center, located on the south side of his city.
“I needed a ride,” Thephasdin explained.
Inside the center, he noticed a whiteboard hanging on an office wall listing the names of current clients, women and their children. One entry on the whiteboard caught his attention: a single mother with six children, ranging from 6 months to 12 years old.
Inside the children’s playroom, Thephasdin made eye contact with a young boy sitting in the corner.
“I couldn’t help but notice his forlorn expression. His were not the eyes of a child,” Thephasdin jotted down later. “They told of horrors that I myself had never experienced. He looked away, and resumed idly pushing a plastic train.”
Thephasdin was escorted through the center by its director, Ryan Elinkowski, who showed the visiting high school students one of the standard bedrooms. It has two bunk beds framing a small window shielded by iron bars.
“I felt sick to my stomach, looking onto the dismal space,” Thephasdin wrote. “I wondered if it was the room of the family of seven I’d read about earlier on the whiteboard.”
“I struggled to fathom what the mother must have dealt with, the courage necessary to flee an abusive home with six children in tow. The uncertainty, the fear, and doubt that she experienced must have been crippling,” he wrote. “To think that she found respite from her desperate situation in this very shelter was a sobering relief.”
Thephasdin was so moved by the experience that he wrote about it for his college common application essay. He shared it with me after
After reading his touching essay, I realized something refreshing about his so-called “blind generation,” which is blind to a life without smartphones, digital devices, the internet, and other comforts grandfathered into their 21st century lives.
Last month I wrote a few columns focusing on the struggles of older generations. Loneliness, alienation, and the conundrum of having too much time on their hands while not having enough time left in their life. This topic touched older readers in profound ways.
Younger generations of readers couldn’t quite grasp this delicate situation. All they have is time on their hands. And, unlike older people, an infinite amount of time to spend it. Or so they think at their age. It’s one of the perks of youth. What they don’t have in experience they make up for in perspective.
Thephasdin’s college essay reflects this age-related dichotomy.
“My visit to the shelter made me realize that I couldn’t learn from others’ experiences without challenging my own beliefs and preconceptions,” he said. “Through my own experiences, without reservations, I needed to fully immerse myself in another person’s hardship to truly understand them.”
He was anything but blind to the plight of those families at the shelter in his city.
“I was flooded with unfamiliar visions of abuse and struggle while the young boy shared my gaze, yet I felt so personally impacted,” Thephasdin wrote.
He became interested in anthropology because he wanted to expose himself to different people and perspectives. This attitude alone separates him from most older people, according to the reader feedback I received to my columns on them. Thephasdin’s generation is a convenient target for criticism from anyone over the age of, say, 50. Heck, maybe 40.
The most common societal tropes mislabel his generation as lazy, apathetic freeloaders who care only about overpriced coffee, Snapchat photos, Amazon Prime deliveries, and texting each other until their overworked thumbs need medical traction.
I routinely tell my fiancée’s 18-year-old daughter, Sarah, that she is on the precipice of potentially wondrous things in her life. Time is on her side. Time will be her true BFF. Friends will come and go. Boyfriends may come and go. Jobs, too.
I tell Sarah that her life is ascending every day. Even if she has a bad day here or there, her trajectory is aimed toward the stars, not toward her bedroom or our home. Again, this is in sharp contrast to those older people I spoke with about their descending lives.
“But it doesn’t feel like it,” Sarah replied to me when I told her this perspective.
No, it doesn’t always feel like it at her age. These epiphanies usually come in brief flashes, not permanent feelings. This is the downside of youth. What should be exhilarating can feel frightening. Their deepest resource – time – can turn into their deepest fear – what to do with it.
Every experience can explore, or exploit, both aspects of their young lives. Even an experience which seems like the result of sheer randomness.
“I was there by chance,” Thephasdin told me after his visit to the shelter.
Maybe. Maybe not.
“Until recently, I foolishly viewed altruism as a primarily self-gratifying act, feigned selflessness,” he wrote in his college application essay. “I’m well aware of the irony, and possible peril, in disclosing this formerly held belief here. I didn’t anticipate that a brief tour of the local St. Jude House would have such an immediate and drastic impact on this ill-founded preconception.”
As he left the parking lot, Thephasdin not only began to cry. He began to gain a heightened perspective through personal experience. There’s only one way to do this. By immersing yourself into life, through personal interactions.
It’s a perspective paid for with the currency of wrinkles, gray hair and what they’ll learn is a fleeting abundance of time.
PREVIOUS ARTICLE
