Apathy Jack writes:

So I'm getting the latest gossip from one of my girls. As it transpires, one of my other girls was dumped by her boyfriend. The boyfriend dumped her because he was interested in another guy – one of my boys who has just come out of the closet.

I remember back when I was in high school – In the interests of breaking my friends out of their homophobia, I considered an experiment pretending I was gay. I never had the nerve to go through with it: I could handle the certainty that I would lose a friend or two. What scared me more was the fact that I couldn't guarantee that my friends wouldn't just kick the shit out of me before I had a chance to tell them I was kidding.

As my girl continues, I find myself smilingly slightly at the fact that the unthinkable has happened: The world has changed ever so slightly for the better.

A minute or so later, my girl is hiking up her skirt to show me the fresh cuts on her thighs.

See, her brother tried to kill himself. Made a pretty good stab at it, too. Rather than rally the family in this time of stress, my girl's mother decided to blame her, for reasons that are a little vague beyond "Mum's like that".

What she's sad about is her own hypocrisy. She's always denigrated cutters. She knows that the emotions from that night will fade in months or even weeks, but the scars will be there for years.

Every day this job makes me so happy I can barely contain it. And every day it finds another way to break my heart.