"Space" Suffering and Change

After Carol experienced a near death experience, Jesse began to suffer from horrible depression. Her mom was not a mom at all, addicted to Valium, smoking and drinking, she slept and watched T.V. all day, rarely speaking or eating. Jesse says "I disappeared inside my own body. I had the sensation of walking around and looking at my feet and my hands as if they were only remotely connected to anything I would call myself" (268). She had begun to feel that it was easier simply to retreat into herself, ignoring everyone around her. She had lost all felling of self identity, she was just floating through life trying to block out all the pain, suffering and hardships of everyday life. Despite her father hardly being home at all with his work at the junior college, he even began to notice Jesse's behavior and decided to take her to group therapy. However this really didn't help at all because she felt that what she had done was nothing to the stories of the other teens in the group. So, not wanting to look out of place, she "started to lie" (271). She mad up horrible stories, she even seemed to be outdoing the others, real life stories. Despite the lies, she learned from the experience that she never wanted to do the things that the other people told stories about. Or the things that she made up lies about doing.
In one two years everthig seemed to change. Carol went off to norhern florida to go to College, Jesse, after graduating from high school a year early began attending the junior college where her father worked. She maried a boy she met at college at 17, her father and mother got divorced after her fathers health began to fail. Then Jesse said "We got a divorce. My parents, both ill, both living on my fathers's pension in separate rooms in my rented house, decided to remary" (318). Putting it lightly, her life was a mess. Shortly there after, he father died of a heart attack, and her mother then died just over a year later. However, despite how horrible it all seemed, it was not until all those terrible things had happened that Jessa was really able to move on in her life and make something of herself. Jesse said that "After my parents died, that all change" (322). She had been working menial, low wag jobs, but after their death she got a job as a perfessor, began writing books, remaried, and had a daughter. The think to learn from Jesse Le Kercheval's story, was that no matter what stands in your way, there is always a way to move o and make something of yourself.