Emotional Intelligence | Cara's Main Page

Letters from Cara

Intro...

First I wrote this...

Cara has been bitching at me to help her feel more important, so, cuz I love her even tho she's annoying sometimes, lol...

But now that I have re-read a few of her letters, and cried, and thought some more, I am going to change it to this.

Cara has been feeling unimportant lately, and even though I have felt a little over-needed and resentful, I wrote how I felt and this freed me to go back into hotmail and open it up and search for her old emails. When I say it freed me I mean I didn't feel as obligated or blackmailed into doing it. I did it because I wanted to. Because Cara needs and deserves to feel and know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she is important to this world, first, and to me as a distant second, because Cara will still be making a difference in the world, in her own way, long after I am gone and only my writing and memory persists.

So anyhow, I went into hotmail today and did a search on her email. this is what i got

More than 100 messages were found that match your search criteria. The first 100 are displayed below. If you do not find the message you are looking for, refine your search and try again.

lol

So it might take me a while to put them all up! Or I might never get them all up, but honestly when I went back and read the first letter she sent to me, I got teary eyed. And I'm getting teary eyed again.

The world almost lost Cara.

And that is something that makes me cry.

Cara's father recently hit her and called her a stupid bitch. Now, please tell me as you read the letters and the main page on Cara if you believe that man deserves the right to have legal or any other kind of power over her.

S. Hein
June 12, 2007
Paysandu, Uruguay

From: "steve hein"

Subject: msn
Date: Mon, 04 Sep 2006 21:26:38 +0000

hi u added me but do i know u?

tell me who u are please!

steve

Sep 6, 2006

Oh right, how very rude of me. Sorry!

I am Isabelle, 15, New Zealand.

My dear beloved fiance (no judgements required thanks) emailed you and being nosy and controlling I read it and got kinda concerned, ya know... didn't know who you were so I googled you plus the "Sarah" he mentioned and got your emotional intelligence and suicide page things. Which is fairly scary when you realise your man has been visiting suicide sites but that's beside the point...

So anyway I'm not entirely certain why I felt the need to add you, I'm sorry if I wasn't meant to. I will delete you if you like, but if not, I am very interested to know what you are all about. I am one of many teens who has had my "attempts" (more like cries for help really). I have the scars. And like all I have a sob story which would take up a few pages. I'm just really concerned for other young people out there because of the scorn that it is usually received by when teens can't cope and start cutting or trying to kill themselves.

It is disgusting that we live in a society so lacking in empathy that I have been told I'm "a bit fat for an anorexic" and "why don't you slice down parallel to the veins if you're so miserable!" and I know I'm not alone in this. "She's trying to be cool" is one I've heard when a girl in my class tried to commit suicide... It's shocking. So yeah, that's my five cents worth...

As I said, sorry for adding you randomly and if you don't want to be on my list or whatever then feel free to tell me to delete your address and I shall.

Grosses Bises (don't you love french letter endings...)
Isabelle

Saturday, September 9, 2006 2:50 AM
To : steve hein
Subject : Wat fool invented thoughts this deep, they only cause us pain...

Steve,

I've been on your website again.

You mention that children aren't born "evil" or "sinners". So what is your definition of evil? I don't believe in evil. I don't believe that there is a single act in the world that doesn't have some positive consequences. Good and bad are a matter of how an individual perceives a situation.

"Acts of Terror" to one person are justice to another. It's all about what we believe really. So if you believe nothing, then nothing matters.

You also put religion as being one of your lowest rated values. Now I'm not one of those scary christians but I still believe that if believing in something gives someone a sense of security and makes them feel like they matter, there's nothing wrong with that.

Because without the existence of something more than the physical, nothing matters.

I mean, in the grand scheme of things we are nothing more than specks of dust in a constantly expanding universe, and what we do has no bearing on anything but our own selfish petty existences. My logic tells me this but even so I can't help still caring about the 6 pounds I want to lose, and the little fight me and my partner had yesterday. I guess my belief is in life.

If there's something more to it than that then at least we would have a new context in which we can justify our own importance, and justify caring so much about what happens to us and our loved ones. But without religion, or believing in some greater principle beyond mere particles/superstrings/M-Theory, the simple truth is that nothing matters. Nothing at all. Because life goes on, death goes on, the chemicals that make up emotions and love go on, and the universe doesn't care about a little girl crying on that insignificant planet we call Earth.

Have you ever just burst into tears because every single second someone in the world is losing a person or animal who meant everything to them? I have.

I mean right now some poor man's wife probably has died of breast cancer in Latvia and a boy in USA has just witnessed his dog being hit by a car. And the very thought of that makes me cry. And what makes me cry even more is that someday I'll be dead and my loved ones will be grieving but in the end only about 0.0000014% of the world's population will actually care. And that makes me sad because I'm selfish. And (let's be honest) we are all selfish.

Empathy isn't a strength really. If you count success as survival, both literal and emotional, through whatever happens, then caring about others makes things harder. I can't be happy because at no time in the world is everyone truly happy. And the suffering of others makes me cry, which makes me wish I didn't care.

Empathy makes it hard to live in the misery and suffering that makes up the tiny insignificant dot of a world we inhabit. Selfish people are happy people, often.

I know it's silly but sometimes I think every cut is a tribute to others sufferings. Every scar represents the hurt of a strsnger I'm never likely to know. Some people do it to relieve their own internal pain, and I guess that's a part of it, but my pain comes from the pain of people I don't even know. Which makes me crazy, really.

Have you read The Secret Life of Bees? May can't distinguish between her own sadness and the sadness of others. She kills herself in the end. She probably wanted to make a difference once too. She probably wanted to stop others from suffering. But nature triumphed, just as it always will. Because humanity is so flawed that if I was the universe or God or whatever matters, I wouldn't want people to be able to change things either. I wouldn't give such power to fools.

Oh crap, I've rambled on to a complete stranger about goodness knows what. I'm sorry. But in spite of myself I'm going to send this. I guess because it doesn't matter if you judge me, or if anyone does really. And partly because if I tell other people things that are a part of me, I won't be gone when I'm physically dead? I don't know. I think, therefore I am, and as my thoughts are ephemeral so too am I. Where did that come from?! Sometimes I don't know I'm thinking something until I write it down.

Anyway, sorry for the rambling and increasingly neurotic email. I'm not your average person. But then nobody is. And if we all have abnormality in common then I guess we are in some way normal.

Bye for now,
Isabelle L-S

Saturday, September 9, 2006 3:11 AM
To : stevehein@hotmail.com
Subject : Random prose of times now past.

I had a visitor today.

His name is despair.

When all else is lost he comes and takes me by the hand, and leads me to a quiet place inside my head
Where there is nothing.

No goodness, no love-
Not even hope.

A night without the inevitable morning.
Winter, but without the whispered promise of spring.

He looks at me silently.

He never speaks, not a single word,
But he is there when I have nothing,
When I have lost sight of everything that
Makes me who I am.

He’s not a friend.
He’ll only ever be welcome when all else is lost,
And I will never want him or need him.

But although he never comforts me or makes it better,
I let him stay,
If only to keep me company when there is no-one else.

Like a life support system,
He sustains nothing but my soul’s miserable existence.
Survival, but not life.

But my soul likes to survive it seems,
And when people try to take him away,
I cling to him.

Not because I don’t want him to leave,
But rather because secretly
I am afraid of staying.

Because despair is easier than facing who I am.

Isabelle (at age 14)


Drop a stone into the water
And see what happens.
Ripples radiate outwards,
Until they cover Everything.
All the things that ever were,
And ever could have been.
And when the ripples fade
The stone is gone, forgotten.
But not quite.
It's still embedded in the riverbed.
The water still flows ever on,
But now it moves around the stone.
Life goes on, our soul's river runs,
But what we do never really goes away.

Isabelle (age 12)


My soul is a one-way mirror,
And I've shut myself on the wrong side
So that I can see my outer self
And never who I am.

Isabelle (at age 12, nearly 13)

Sunday, September 10, 2006 12:02 AM
To : stevehein@hotmail.com
Subject : time


I just realised, it is saturday where you are as I write this on Sunday at 12.02 pm. And it's like 9.02 where you are. wow.

Monday, September 11, 2006 10:16 AM
To : stevehein@hotmail.com
Subject : Oh Wise and Noble Steve...


You seem to bring out the "me" in me. I feel inspired. I drew a good picture of my friend that actually looks like her. I write things that make sense to me. My emails flow straight from my heart to the keyboard. I don't even know you but you stand for the ideals I lost a long time ago. I miss them. I miss caring about anything. At least when the pain is there it's real. Emptiness takes the reality out of things.

There is a difference between listening and hearing, but when I'm the speaker I can't tell. You possibly don't even read my emails, but if I perceive that you care that's what matters. I know I'm no more important than anyone else, and I don't expect anybody to care. And when you don't expect anything you can't be disappointed.

Wednesday, September 13, 2006 7:52 AM
To : stevehein@hotmail.com
Subject : Nobody is without insecurities. (Long but please DO read)


Steve,

I guess because you help out teenagers all the time I thought that you were one of those slightly removed people who are fairly comfortable with themselves. But the truth is that if we didn't see ourselves as flawed we wouldn't move forward. The main problem is when people's perception of themself is completely controlled by what other people do and say towards them.

You are Steve. I don't know you, which might be why in my eyes you're pretty much perfect. But perfect doesn't exist. Perfect is one of those silly concepts that has no relevant meaning. And perfect is a matter of opinion. Which means that you are perfect and great, because people think that.

You are special the way you are, and nobody else needs to tell you that (even though I am now!)

Reading your website is so inspiring. I wish I could make you feel as peaceful as all this stuff makes me feel. That's what it is. Peace. And like, the trains of thought that it all gives me make me feel like... it's hard to explain. You know how people have an image of how they want to be and then there's how they are, and the further from th real thing your image is the harder life tends to be? I reckon my image has started matching me in the last few days.

We have parts to play in the world. The most amazing thing is just taking in everything that this beautiful torturous world is made up of, and knowing that I am truly part of something so much bigger, and nothing would be the same without me. And without you, I wouldn't know that. And I'd still be standing on the balcony right now like I used to every night, wondering when I was finally going to stop caring and just jump. I think that making a difference to someone, like you are, is worth fighting for.

I don't want to be needed and I don't need to be loved. All I need is to be, I think. I am. You are. We live.

Isabelle.

P.S. If I ever get an alias, can I pretty please with a chocolate-covered coffee bean on top be "Cara"? -Iz
--

Note from Steve... I'm crying now.. I made it this far in re-reading her letters as I copy them here. I just copied what she said about the ideals she lost and put it on my stevehein.com page, then I read this and started to cry. The world is losing people like Cara to suicide. The world is losing people like Cara, and Ocean and Loo to drugs, to universities. Yes, that's what I said. To universities. Where there hearts will be further killed and adulturated - they will become more like adults and less like the beautiful 12 and 13 year olds they were. Maybe we have things all wrong. Maybe nature prepares 12 and 13 year old females for motherhood because that is when they are still idealistic and uncorrupted. Maybe we should be trying to learn from 12, 13, and 14 year olds instead of trying so hard to teach them.

ps I apoligize again to Cara for not putting more time into her letters. The thought she might have killed herself because I was the last person she turned to and I was too busy with other people and other things, really scares me. Somehow, reading these letters now gives me this feeling of her being gone. And I guess a part of her is gone. I wonder if I still inspire her to be herself, if anyone does. It is a lot of responsibility to be a person on another continent who has so much influence on someone they have never been able to give a hug to when they were crying and most needed it. There were times I couldn't handle the responsibility. I can't handle it now for many people. But Cara, Cara is worth trying just a little harder for.

Wednesday, September 13, 2006 7:29 AM
To : stevehein@hotmail.com
Subject : Isabelle's constantly growing list of quotes.


These are things that made me smile, things that inspired me, but overall they are things that stuck with me. (Get this, my Dad is under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office! Funny! He hasn't done anything wrong but one of his clients is definitely going to jail for dodgy dealing).

"I have looked death in the face, and in my opinion it needs to seriously consider plastic surgery" -Isabelle, attempt at humour after half-hearted suicide attempt.

"Need precludes love, or it trumps it. It takes priority, it pushes love to the back burner. Neediness sucks." -Steve Hein, September 12 (September 13th in New Zealand).

"Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose, but young men think it is and we were young" - from 'Here Dead We Lie' by A.E Housman.

"Do you not see I am a woman? When I think I must speak!" William Shakespeare.

"If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same..." -from 'If' by Rudyard Kipling.

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear." Quoted by Anne Hathaway in "The Princess Diaries"

"Marriage has taught me housekeeping. When I divorce a man, I keep the house" -Zsa Zsa Gabor

""

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear; Our presence automatically liberates others." -Marianne Williamson, commonly misattributed to Nelson Mandela who quoted it in his inauguration speech.

"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. " -Oscar Wilde

"I am not young enough to know everything." -Oscar Wilde

"I want my funeral to be a celebration of my life, of what you loved about me and of what was. Not a mourning ceremony for what might have been." -A friend's suicide note. She is still alive, yay!

Bye for now. If you are on the net on friday night I can msn you, it will be midday saturday here.

Infinite x's and o's,
Isabelle.

im gonna take a break from copying now... sph. june 12, 2007