I caught yet another documentary the other night.
It wasn’t planned. These things never are. You start folding laundry, or answering emails, or trying to quiet your brain, and suddenly you’re forty minutes into something that changes the temperature of the room.
This one did.
It was Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart.
If you don’t know her story, Elizabeth Smart was abducted from her home at 14 years old by Brian David Mitchell. He was a street preacher her family had hired for odd jobs. She was sexually assaulted and held captive for nine months before strangers recognized her and police rescued her in Sandy, Utah.
Even typing that feels heavy.
The documentary shows unfathomable cruelty. The kind that makes your chest tighten. The kind that reminds you how vulnerable children are. The kind that makes you stare at the ceiling afterward and wonder how human beings can do such horrific things to one another.
It’s disturbing. It’s heartbreaking. It’s infuriating. And yet.
Elizabeth Smart says in the film, “There are happy endings.”
That sentence stayed with me.
Because how does someone who endured that level of trauma even find those words?
What struck me most wasn’t just the inhumanity. Though there is plenty of that. It was the resilience. The quiet, fierce survival. The way Elizabeth rebuilt her life. The way she refuses to let what happened define the entirety of who she is.
She went on to become an activist. A voice. A force. She took something unspeakable and transformed it into purpose.
That doesn’t erase what happened.
It doesn’t soften the horror. It doesn’t make it okay.
But it does remind us of something essential. Humans can get through really bad things. Truly terrible things.
Not everyone does. Not everyone emerges whole. Trauma leaves marks. Scars don’t disappear just because someone smiles again. Healing is not linear. Strength doesn’t mean untouched.
But still.
People survive. People adapt. People find meaning. People build lives after devastation.
Thank God.
Watching stories like Elizabeth’s makes me profoundly sad. Especially knowing that children, every day, are forced to endure experiences no human should ever have to carry. It reminds me how much responsibility we have to protect, to listen, to believe, to advocate.
It also reminds me how powerful support is. How much it matters when communities show up. When survivors are heard. When causes are funded. When awareness becomes action.
Elizabeth Smart is an amazing woman. What she went through is utterly horrid and deeply unjust. But her courage, her voice, her commitment to helping others that is something sacred.
I can only hope people continue to support her and the work she does.
Because documentaries like this don’t exist just to shock us.
They exist to wake us up.
To remind us that suffering is real. That resilience is real. And that what we choose to do with that knowledge matters.
So tonight, I’m holding two truths at once. That the world can be unbearably cruel. And, that the human spirit, somehow, keeps finding ways to rise.
Both are true.
And both deserve our attention.
Categories: Children, Culture, mental health, Pop Culture, Psychology, society
psychologistmimi 
Overcoming Darkness Indeed Dear
Miriam Humans Have the Potential
To Pull Themselves UP by the SKiN
of Their Fingernails
Out of Real HeLL ON EartH
Even A Place Within Invisible
To All Other Humans Close or Far
Understanding How Low a Human
Soul Can Will And Does Fall into Rings
Of Frozen
HeART
With
SPiRiT
Descending
Into Nether Lands
Beyond All Feelings
And Senses Numb and
FRoZeN Cold Where Dousing
Oneself With Gasoline and Burning
Forever A Wish
For A Heaven in
A Hell for Real
Where Even
Demons Fear
To Tread
For Real
Yet How Do Folks
Understand Who Have
Never Entered ‘This Never Land’
Nope Not the Kind of Never Land
Where You Float About an Inch off
The Ground in A Heavenly FLiGHT
of Dance
As Feather
Becoming Wind Free
i Could Write Forever Yet
It Would Never Do Justice
To Both HeLL AND Heaven Within For
Real Far Beyond Words This Reality is
Ah Yes Some Folks Can Will and Do
Climb Their Way Out Every Inch Skin
Of Nails More
Yet Others
Seemingly Never
Escape the Place
of FRoZeN Cold
Pain and Numb Within
Like my Psychotherapist Used
to Say There is One Disorder She
Refuses to Attempt to Help the Other
Human To Heal Yes Border Line Personality
Disorder Yet Did She Hear the Stories They Confessed
of an Uncle With a Broomstick and Two Little Girls She
And Her
Sister Indeed
And What About
Her In Her Father’s
Bed in Her 20’s Taking
Her Life with Her Father’s
Revolver In His Bed With Loving Husband
Yes And Two Loving Children Back at Home
Indeed She Told me about the Unspeakable
Horrors of What Her Father Did to Her Many Years Before
Indeed ‘They’ Say Somewhere Around 25 Percent of Women
And Others Have Been Neglected and Abused ThiS WaY Yet
No From
What i’Ve
Heard in Life
At Least
Closer to
50 Percent
By Those They
Should Have Been
Able to Trust the Most
Indeed We Hear About those
Who Have Survived and Even Thrived
Through Unspeakable Horrors of Neglect and Abuse
Yet What About those Who Are Relegated as Unsalvageable
Even By Those Who Get Paid to Help Them Indeed Something.
i Consider
These Days
Before Thinking
About Throwing
Those Functionally
Disabled ThiS WaY Away
Or Yes Judging Anyone at
All as The Darkest Secrets
May Never
Speak at all
Is THere Any Room
For SMiLes in this Story
Hell No Yet
Heaven Yes
THere is
STill
Hope
Yes as
Humans Breathe..:)
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