Human's of New York and Healing

"Sometimes it feels like I'm not part of anything. There are so many people
here, you'd think that I's be able to make friends with on of them. But it
always seems like everyone has go their own thing going on, to their own
group of friends that they hang out with. Most weekends I just take a long
walk, or go to a restaurant by myself. I've dine some neat things alone, and
I'm glad that I did those things, but I'm really getting to the point where
I'd also like to experience things with other people. Everyone tells me:
'You should do this,' or 'You should do that.' But nobody says
'Let's do this,' or 'Let's do that.'"

I’d like to take a page (perhaps a whole research paper) to talk about the trending blog, Humans of New York (HNY) and it’s effects on healing. According to it’s creator, HNY is “an exhaustive catalogue of New York City’s inhabitants”. The blog has 10 million social media followers, owing much of it’s success to humans just like you and me. People are fascinated by a stranger’s life. In my future paper, I would look at comments on portraits left by social media users to show HNY’s healing influence on the public as well as the subjects themselves. 

Photographer Brandon Hony aimlessly walks about the city streets and takes pictures of random passerby. He posts the photos via social media each with a quoted caption that delves deep into that person’s life. The photos range from 2-year-olds wearing tutus to elderly couples holding hands. Not all photos and their attached captions reveal a subject’s personal conflict or life trauma, but the ones that do remind me of everything that we’ve discussed in class (and possibly more).

There’s a feeling of ambiguous intensity when looking at a person, but that feeling turns in to empathy and wonder after reading their story. You feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable. It’s that kind of basic human vulnerability that we all find familiar, but it’s somehow surprising when we notice it in others. It’s an open question as to why we have such public confidence, and such private doubts, anxieties, and dreams. 

"My mom left me with my grandparents so she could prepare
a way for us in America. But my grandparents passed away, so
I came to America before my mother was ready. There were eight
of us in one apartment. In my mind at the time, I thought that if I
began to mis behave, I'd be sent back home. So one day I got in a
fight at school, and when the teacher tried to restrain me, I hit her
with a chair. I was only nine years old, but from that moment on,
I became a system baby. My mom gave me up and I went to a
foster home, then a boy's home, then jail, then prison. When you
go to prison, they make you strop naked, spread your ass cheeks,
and cough. I refused to do it. So they beat me and threw me alone
into the box. And I remember sitting in there alone, reflecting on
my life, and where it had ended up. I started thinking about the
other members of my family. My sister was a registered nurse.
My grandmother owned two houses. I realized that success was in
my DNA. For the first time, I developed a thought that prison was
not a place that I belong." 

When you think about it, it’s kind of sad that you’ll never really know what other’s are experiencing. Even though we all have eyes that can make out a face and body, the true image of who we are is often softened and distorted. The portraits of HNY shows a kind of psychological exoskeleton in all people. These faces hold anxiety, trying to protect themselves from the pain of the past. These faces have had years of cracks and hollows but grow back again and again, until they develop a more sophisticated, often mysterious emotional structure. Some portraits are passive, default expressions—like their strong emotion is buried under the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

HNY gives you this moment of awareness that people have a private and mysterious other life they’ll never know about. It gives you just a peak of that complex and vivd story, reminding you of the smallness of our perspective, making it impossible to draw any meaningful conclusion about people, their pasts, and their resulting life. If I were walking on the streets of New York and passed one of these faces, I wouldn’t ponder their past. These portraits and quotes resonant a certain connection, while still getting a morsels of their human experience. 

In my research, I would take a closer look at each portrait to define a connection with healing. In essence, it would resemble The Clothesline Project essay, finding several groups of portraits and separating them into categories of healing according to voice and even expression. 

"I had a rough time in high school. I was in a very deep depression.
I've always been on the heavy side, so I got bullied a lot because
of my size. I didn't have any friends. There wasn't a male figure in my
life to talk to. Some people cared about me, but I blocked them out of
my life. Someone told the school guidance counselor that they'd heard
me talking about suicide, so I got sent to the psych hospital for nine
days. I was the oldest one there. I met kids who were a lot younger than
me, and who'd been through a lot worse things. One of the girls had
been raped. The younger kids would come to me for advice, and for
the first time I felt like a leader. I left the hospital with a different
mindsent. I realized that I wasn't on earth to be helped,
but to help others."