DOMESTIC VIOLENCE & SURPRISE

I've never been witness to domestic violence and never been a victim. Or so I thought before the miracle I shared about yesterday. Consider something I just learned. I learned another way of thinking of surprise.

²surprise (From Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary)

Function: verb Date: 15th century

transitive verb
1: to attack unexpectedly; also : to capture by an unexpected attack
2 a: to take unawares [police surprised the burglars in the store] b: to detect or elicit by a taking unawares [sometimes surprised a tragic shadow in her eyes — Willa Cather]
3: to strike with wonder or amazement especially because unexpected [his conduct surprised me] intransitive verb: to cause astonishment or surprise [her success didn't surprise]

What I learned from a Landmark Education Wisdom course I am taking on DISCOURSES (the study of how conversations and systems of ideas get across) was that we tend to under-report the actual thing in time and space that is a surprise and we over-report the impact of it.

When it comes to Domestic Violence we definitely over-report the impact and under-report the surprise like what happened yesterday in front of my apartment in Brooklyn.

The surprise was "That B*tch ain't gonna take away MY parental rights" (more or less Earl's words). If I had ignored it as I tried to, and not intervened and interrupted, as I did courageously, I might be over-reporting a domestic violence incident I overheard from the news. I might have been saying "That was the brother outside my house" with great regret and guilt.

I hadn't thought about the "domestic violence" per se when I was confronted by Earl's surprise yesterday. It was only in sharing what happened (over-reporting) with a coach/friend who said "THANK YOU, KYRA! THANKS FOR YOU COURAGE TODAY!" She then shared about losing a close friend to domestic violence in the last six months. Her husband went into a rage. He killed her in front of their young child. Left the scene. Dropped the child off at the grandparents. Drove to North Carolina and hung himself. Both parents dead. :-(

Surprise!