Train Wreck To Freedom

THE OUTSIDER by Richard Wright is among the most powerful books I’ve ever read. I discovered the books of Richard Wright in the public library when I was an alienated teenager. Although the setting of my life was different from that of the author’s characters, they displayed for me, as if through a lens that magnified what I felt a million times over, the same conflicted emotions I saw in myself; transforming my disjointed angst into an existential purpose unto itself. Wright’s world was peopled with desperate, disenfranchised souls thrown into horrifying circumstances that not only brought them face-to-face with death, but also gave form and meaning to their lives. His stories were laced with pervading anxiety, rage, and guilt that could never be put right; dreams and nightmares that supplanted reality; and all of that resonated to a frightening place in my young mind never spoken to before.

In THE OUTSIDER, a frustrated postal worker named Cross Damon loses his overcoat and ID in a bloody train crash and winds up being declared dead, giving him the chance to become somebody else. Today Cross Damon’s story comes to mind as I consider the “train wreck” of betrayals that I’ve been through in the past few years. The worst betrayal forced me to flee without any of the psychological, emotional or spiritual tools I’d collected over the past 20 years and relied upon to identify myself. It was tough. Like surviving a fire that takes out everything you depend on, except the life that’s inside of you.

It’s funny that not until now did I think of Cross Damon making his way over broken steel and bloody corpses to walk out of that train wreck and become a new man, free of the frustration and bondage of his previous life. Perhaps today, like him, I’m standing in the sunlight after the train wreck I’ve been through; dusted off, grateful to be alive, and free to become a new person with fresh tools for the journey ahead.