Put In My Place

Currently, I am sitting in my hotel room in Dallas, Texas. I'm out here to film a documentary and I drove 23 hours with my husband on borrowed money and faith this will work. I'm putting all of my faith in this documentary being something great. So much faith I took out a "parent" loan just to get here.

Though the drive was long, it was very interesting. Driving from LA to Dallas let me see many extremely small towns. I still have no idea what would make someone live in those types of places. I would run away immediately to the city. Ugh. Driving through those towns reminds me of a documentary I saw called, "The Education of Shelby Knox" which is about sex education in a small town. Kids in Lubbock, TX have nothing better to do than have sex and do drugs. Seriously, why would you want that? (No offense to anyone who lives in a small town. I'm just a city girl through and through).

Lately I experienced a bit of stress surrounding my financial situation. I undershot my budget by quite a lot. So I'm sitting here trying to figure out if living off of cheap homemade sandwiches is enough nutrients to get me through an entire day of filming, when I get a metaphorical slap in the face.

While outside discussing the budget with my husband, a random man walks by us. My husband does the courteous thing and asks how he is, and he tells us. He's a very nice late twenties Texan who has his 3 months premature twins in the hospital under intensive care. His boy twin is pulling through like a champ: he's off the ventilator, and other life support with only an IV left. The girl twin, on the other hand, is not doing so well. She is on a respirator because she has a hole in her heart that is causing blood to go into her lungs causing infections. They tried to operate but her heart couldn't take it so they had to stop the surgery. They're going to try again next week, but the respirator that is helping her breathe is also causing infections in the lungs which make surgery more difficult.

This guy not only has two twins in the hospital, but he also has a 10 month old baby now. Here he was walking around outside because he was bored of just sitting in his room. He needed somewhere to go and someone to chat with and here we were. My little worries about sandwiches made me feel extremely selfish. Here is a man probably spending more than he has on saving the lives of his children. It just made me realize in this world, while I freak out and worry about little insignificant things, there are people experiencing true trauma and sadness. I know that we get told this all the time, but it is amazing how powerful it is to get a first hand example.

Let me just say I was put in my place.