Desperately Coping with Loneliness

I saw a video about this guy, Jeff Ragsdale, who in the height of the breakup-related depression, just posted flyers around Manhattan asking people to call him. He was so lonely and on the brink that he just printed a bunch of posters with his phone number and put them up across the city, hoping someone would reach out to him. Well, someone did not reach out to him - MANY people reached out to him and soon his desperate plea for companionship went viral and became a global show of solidarity. As he says in the video, a city like New York, even with all the hustle and bustle, can be a lonely place and having lived across the pond myself, I know big cities, even with all the stuff going on around you, can really feel like a lonely and empty place. I think many people managed to relate to his poster.

Now while I am not sure whether I would post a flyer around the place inviting the unwashed masses to call me, you can certainly understand the need for an ear, a comforting word, when one feels like the last and only person in the middle of a busy metropolis. And it speaks to the basic human need for companionship and solidarity.

In this case, this guy, who apparently has suffered with depression and other related issues all his life, found a lot of comfort in the voices of strangers, many of whom called from outside the United States. I am sure he is not sad and depressed today, as he has just launched a book based on these calls and the various experiences people shared with him - some consoling him, others looking to be consoled.

This entire story just highlights a couple things - people are still amazing, even as the world news, on a daily, even hourly basis, paints humanity as money-grubbing, selfish cretins; and secondly, you can make money from just about anything in the US of A. Even from a book about phone calls.

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Katie Holmes: 2012's Tina Turner

Katie Holmes - free and single in NY

The hoopla around TomKat - the Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes divorce will resonate for years with people offering their own theories about the marriage and the faith that seemingly caused its birth and destruction. At the end of it all, there was a sigh of relief when 33 year old Katie Holmes, after 5 years of being married to one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, walked out of her marriage. What struck me is that she did  so, by media accounts, with a lot of guts and a very shrewd mind - using a disposable cell phone to make plans, out of the reach of his Scientology handlers, getting three law firms involved, putting them on standby, contacting Nicole Kidman for advice and going to her dad, a divorce lawyer to ensure she would get out of this thing "alive".

Not only did she get out of it "alive" but she also showed the world that she was not just a trophy wife and after years of being little more than an appendage, she rose to being her own person once more.

While there is certainly no evidence of physical abuse, it is clear that she was under the hold of her husband and his church, a kind of mental and emotional abuse that made her seem older than her years and less exuberant than the Joey Potter-esque Katie the world had known prior to the union. In the middle of all the hoopla, much is being theorised about Scientology and I have no comment on that. Instead I want to say that  Katie came out of this gracefully, with little more than a 2-week period of negotiation to settle the divorce, and not a years-long battle in courts with Tom Cruise brandishing his Hollywood and Scientology power over the little woman. Katie is the winner here and though she did not run out of a hotel room screaming like Tina did, she is a survivor. Props to her.

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