“All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing.”  -Edmund Burke

It’s amazing how much you can learn about someone, who they are, from what you experience of them online.  Yet how you do anything is how you do everything, even on the internet.

The truth of someone’s being – their life, their personality, their likes and dislikes – does not sock you in the face upon your first imeeting but is rather revealed; a mystery unfolded over time.  Almost as if the catalogue of our activities, the preference of our politics, the face in the mirror are hiding our truest selves.

Through this digital venue we only have to reveal as much of our ’selves’ as we choose.  When I first started, I didn’t even reveal my gender and it wasn’t until recently that I even posted a photograph.  Yet, even with the lack of information, I couldn’t help revealing my soul.

It has been fascinating,  this discovery of your respective ’selves’, all but in one instance.

The more I learned about the writer of SanityFound, the more troubled I was.  Over the weeks and months, little pieces of her existence were laid bare, for but a moment.  Yet her humor, her good nature, her rampant positivity made me doubt what I had read.  Could it possibly be that bad?

The divulgement of her story was excruciatingly slow, but no less dramatic for the time elapsed.

Her mother was the only parent in the picture and, clearly, was not a stable women.  When SanityFound was 14, her mother just left the country (South Africa), leaving her to care for her 7 year-old brother.

She didn’t find out this important piece of information from her mother.  Rather it was the administrators of the boarding school she attended who told her.  Still they managed to eek out a meager existence on the weekends…until her mother decided she needed some money.  Still out of the country, SanityFound’s mother sold the home out from under her.  When she protested, SanityFound was confounded by the ‘just suck it up and stop whining’ attitude her mother had.

So she was homeless.  When times were good, she stayed at the homes of her friends, fending off advances from their fathers.  When times were bad, she slept in public toilets.  She scrambled to do anything she could to ‘earn’ her way, since she felt completely guilty about accepting the kindness of others.

Using this hard-scrabble work ethic, she became a Jack-of-all-trades.  She knew a lot about a lot, and figured that which such a variety of skills she would never be disposable again.

Never again would she ever have to live off the gifts of strangers.  Never again would she have to live at the whims of another.  Never again would she be in a position where her choices were completely circumscribed by others.  She vowed, never again, to feel so worthless.

The exigencies of life, however, threw her back into her mother’s lap.

Though SanityFound had grown into a self-sufficient woman, a woman who escaped the land of her birth, a woman who was (strangly) completely happy as a recruitment agent – her temporary work visa expired and she was disposed of yet again.  9/11 didn’t just affect us in America, the effects of that act of terrorism reverberated throughout the globe.  In a post-9/11 world, South Africans were all suspect and so was she sent back.

Back to a place where a more subtle, insidious form of reverse apartheid is being practiced and being white, she was on the wrong side of the ‘color’ divide.

SanityFound’s mother has little changed from the days of her youth.  She is still unstable, now coupled with a physically and emotionally abusive man.  When SanityFound isn’t trying to conform to the outlandish rules and directives of this monster, when she isn’t trying to sidestep his sexual advances, when she isn’t trying to make herself invisible so that no one will continue the constant barrage of negativity – she is being held emotionally hostage by a mother who threatens to commit suicide if SanityFound isn’t suitably compliant.

She was trapped, emotionally and physically.  It was emotionally draining simply to see the barest glimmer of this situation, much less live it.  Yet SanityFound managed to buoy her confidence and rally her emotional defenses.  When she isn’t posting jokes or inspirational songs, she tells funny stories.  She doesn’t dwell on the tragedy of her life, but the divine spark that is life.  Instead of closing in the face of this torture, she has opened her heart even further – expressing gratitude that the life she lives is a blessing compared to the dangerous existence of her good friends in Zimbabwe.

It isn’t through living hopefully in positive circumstances that is important, it is maintaining a life affirming outlook even in the depths of overpowering anguish.

And never, thankfully, has she been alone.  Thanks to the power of the online community, she has met people who have emotionally sustained her courage.  People who have befriended her as she has befriended others.  People who, on July 27th, asked for help on SanityFound’s behalf.

Amber didn’t need to be asked or convinced to help a woman who lives on a completely different continent.  Amber, a woman who suffers from an extremely debilitating disease, looked past her own substantial pain to try to heal the wounds of another.  Two of the most amazing women I have ever ‘met’ are supporting each other in the most incredible ways possible.

This online family is a ‘weird’ little family.  Especially since it is this online family that managed to raise enough money for a plane ticket to England, something her ‘real’ family couldn’t care less about.

The biggest challenge through this all, strangely, has not been her incredible forbearance, but her extreme aversion to accepting help of any kind.  To look out on the sea of humanity with such hope, even with depravity and malevolence at your side, can it be any wonder that part of this sea looks back in kind?

Created by SanityFound

Created by SanityFound

To find out more about these incredible people, go here.