When the day-to-day stresses start to get to me, I find that I take comfort in taking little trips down memory lane, to times when I felt safe and loved. Most of those times revolve around my Dad and my Nana, or fun times with friends. Because I am a glass half-empty personality, I sometimes battle to keep focused on the good aspects of memory lane, rather than the sad and disturbing memories that try to creep into focus. It took me a look time, and some rather painfully pointed criticisms from friends, to realize that I was so terribly immersed in the sad and depressing parts of my childhood, rather than the good, that I only told sad stories. From that point on, I tried to keep the sad stuff inside and only talk about it in the context of spinning it into a funny story, but that only made me feel isolated and at times deeply depressed. So, there is the constant yin and yang of trying to remain positive, while not stifling the negative, that I still wrestle with every day.
One of the things that we have been talking about on our show is the isolation and loneliness of some of the scam victims we have met, and how that made them so vulnerable to being scammed. I can completely empathize with their quiet desperation, because there were dark times in my life where I was very lucky not to have fallen victim to one of these people. While my mentally ill mother was still alive, and I was her legal guardian, I lived in a state of constant worry about her health, her behavior, her money situation, and what new fresh hell the people in the social services agencies would dish out under the guise of helping her. In short, I’m pretty sure that I was a misery to be around. I was so consumed by this stress and anger that I had been wholly saddled with this seemingly never-ending burden, that I became deeply depressed and started to avoid the comfort of friends, for fear of them rejecting me and my deflated disposition. There is nothing like the kick in the pants of feeling down, and then being able to tell that people are tired of your complaining and are avoiding you.
I can truly put myself into the position of these women (I know there are male victims, but I will focus on the females now), feeling isolated, burdened, worried and lonely, when suddenly this beautiful stranger, a knight on a white horse, comes into their lives and is interested in listening, validating and loving her. The human heart will overlook many warning signals when love seems to be in reach, especially when you are at your lowest ebb. The kind of people who scam people through the love scams are the most heinous to me, because of how them catch people at their lowest and slither their way into their lives and bank accounts. It is a retched fact of human life that there are sub-humans who have no sympathy for their victims. I count my blessings that I didn’t come across one of these disgusting scammers during my lowest periods, or I could easily have been one of the women we are interviewing.