When we first meet Sophie, we can't understand her. We can't understand her present condition, because we don't yet understand the past that brought her to where she is now. It is only when Sophie's story is slowly revealed that we begin to understand, and I think that's the same for all human beings. It's all too easy to judge a book by its cover, or judge another person's story by the way our own story has unfolded, but to truly understand we must take the time to learn the personal history that shapes and defines (and even sometimes confines) a person's present life story.
My weekend in Mesa Verde included a side trip to the BLM visitor's center about 10 miles north of Mesa Verde. They showed two different films in a beautiful little theater: one of the films was about the history of Mesa Verde, but the other was a spiritual film of Native American descendents of Mesa Verde and their plea for the rest of humanity to walk through their history with grace and respect. But the one part that continues to stand out the most is how they talk about time. For these indigenous people, they are not even concerned with the future, because they believe that it is their history, their past, that defines who they are in the present.
A person without their history, without the stories of their past, is a story that is completely out of context, thus subject to dire misinterpretation.
I think it's all too easy to judge and pathologize another person's "odd" behavior and ask ourselves what is "wrong" with them. But the truth is that for most of us with "bizarre" behavior, there is actually nothing wrong with us at all; we simply were shaped by invisible and incomprehensible histories that the rest of the world can't possibly understand, and so they sit back in judgment and wonder what is wrong.
On one level I'm very grateful for the way my life was shaped by the dark stories imposed upon mine because I am not afraid of walking through hell with another person. My personal history (and my journey to walk through my own personal living hell) helped me to understand the "emotionally disturbed" foster children on my case load. I was able to take the time to understand the personal history that shaped and defined their "odd" behavior because I had taken the time to understand my own. And once I took the time to understand the invisibly embedded why to the very visible what, well, their behavior wasn't really all that odd, at all.
There is a statement in the very beginning of the DSM (diagnostic manual for psychological/mental disorders) that makes it very clear that if there are envioronmental circumstances going on in a person's life that better explain the behavioral symptoms, then a diagnosis of a mental disorder should NOT be made. To clarify, this means that a mental disorder does NOT exist. This is all too often never read or understood by clinicians of all professional pursuits, but this single statement was my saving grace in grad school because I scruffed and muggled endlessly over the idea of diagnosing people with mental disorders when I could so clearly understand why they were behaving the way they were. And very often, once the environmental conditions are changed, then miraculously the behaviors automatically change themselves, because they're no longer responding to disordered environmental conditions (which is the real problem in the first place).
So, yes. . . .I understand Sophie, and I also love that she has at least one person in her world who loves her in spite of her history, and doesn't judge her pain. But it takes time to understand a personal history, and that is a luxury that most of us do not have, or that many even want to take. And as for me, I have a very small cluster of friends who have taken the time to understand me and the personal history that continues to shape and define who I am, even with my "bizarre" emotional behavior that makes the rest of the world wonder at times what is wrong with me.