A girl who was never meant to survive | Hacker News Reader

A girl who was never meant to survive

bbc.co.uk

102 pointsgadders30 comments

I'm always impressed how people manage to go to "why not me though?" after thinking about "why me?". It's a sign of a strong and life-aware person. We usually gives us reasons why we shouldn't do something and then there's no guilt not to think about why we should do it. It's sad because there could be so many more stories like this one if more of us had will to go to positive side first or at least after thinking about the negative side.

I think a lot of which direction a person goes when faced with adversity has to do with their upbringing. I feel that, had she been left in Vietnam in an orphanage, it may have been a much different story with regard to her outlook.

I've noticed lately that a lot of the "heartwarming" stories I read have a common thread: religion. People do good things not because it makes objective sense, but because their faith compels them to do the right thing. I'm sure plenty of non-religious people do great things too - but I wager the percentage is higher for those who are devoted to something "higher than themselves". (I say this as a person who is, at best, considered non-religious)

According to the book Enlightenment Now, the difference isn't faith. It is being involved in a community organization, which churches happen to be.

Religious people who do not go to church are no more likely to volunteer than non-religious people. Non-religious people who are involved in community organizations are no less likely to volunteer than religious ones.

How can ever parents do something like this. I can't imagine how did she survived, not just physically but emotionally.

Kids can be surprisingly durable in pretty much every way imaginable.

Edit: We're talking about one bad event early in childhood here, not spending an entire childhood with abusive parents.

Yes but then you meet them as adults and they exhibit (and unsuccessfully try to hide) tons of mental issues due to messed up childhood. Usually revolves around trusting others in relationships and this trickles down to many aspects of their lives

Yeah, I've seen it both ways. Some people have learned to bottle up their negative childhoods, leading to various outward behavioral clues, while others seem like they were able to get past it somehow and live truly without that baggage holding them back.

Recently, I was reading Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina. IIRC, he said that normally people will have permanent psychological damage and but a few humans seem to get past childhood trauma. There are some genes which seem to make children more resilient. So resilience might be partially hereditary.

It's possible that a specific genetic makeup or upbringing may also play a role in the outcome.

But it helps if you can somehow see your tragedy as also the thing that eventually lead to a better life. The type of "every kick in the butt is one step forward". I've met many people (close friends included) who are genuinely at peace with certain tragic/life altering events from childhood or adulthood because without that they would have or be less than they do now.

Of course sometimes you simply can't see that event as bringing anything remotely good in your life and have to wrestle with those issues for a long time.

Trauma, abuse, sexual assault, etc, that children undergo is linked to a lot of problems later in their life, in all aspects of their life. They might live through it, but the quality of their life will suffer.

People can endure incredible amounts of pain, some of them even get used to it sadly.

Depression is a mfer.

Based on my thankfully brief flirtation with it, I can say this:

At the bottom of the hopelessness barrel, you end up valuing everyone else’s life as little as you value your own, sadly.

This is one of the best descriptions I have ever read. Thank you.

I don't have chronic depression but I did have a period where getting kicked out of Cornell was my impending doom. I remember realizing what I described, and also like... it was like I was wearing the opposite of rose-colored glasses, the feeling covered EVERYTHING in a facade of feces, basically.

If you DO suffer from depression... Get help, the world is actually OK, but you must take initiative

(I did end up graduating Cornell... 8 years later)

It sounds like she "was" meant to survive.

On mobile as you scroll through it cycles through some large photos, breaking the flow of the text. I had to stop trying to read it.

Give this a go: https://outline.com/e3h5H2

Even on desktop I find this style of presentation distracting. It looks cool, I get it, but it doesn't feel conducive to story telling to break up the text with a screen filling image every N paragraphs.

It does some curious things though. It makes reading online an interactive thing - you have to 'flip pages' quite deliberately and quite often. That would have a significant effect on engagement I would think. Perhaps (older?) folks like us are put off; but I can imagine a crowd that would be more likely to finish the article, once they got going/hooked?

This has everything I dislike about documentary videos. But many people like those, are happy to go along with the narrator's pace, absorb the pictures and wait for scraps of information.

The outline.com version posted nearby is to me vastly superior, and an interesting comparison: https://outline.com/e3h5H2

I don't feel like it makes reading interactive, so much as it makes reading laborious. Regardless of the quality, context, or merit of the picture, it's still a large, obtrusive break in the narrative. Paragraph, paragraph, paragraph, and then a couple of long drags on the mouse wheel until the structure resumes. If anything, this actually keeps me from getting hooked as my concentration and attention are being interrupted every couple of minutes. And I don't think this is related to my ripe old age of 34, either. I appreciate what this style of presentation is trying to do; look like a magazine. But reading in a browser is a much more linear experience than a magazine, where text is often in columns that split and resume on the same page; that's a design pattern we have had a century (or more?) to get used to. Further, in a magazine, we usually have the option to ignore the pictures at our leisure, which is simply not an option here. It looks cool, I'll grant that, but it's otherwise a distraction.

Yes some story-telling from BBC's website is very UI-unfriendly. But please do take the time to read the story.

Thankfully someone posted an outline.com link which makes it more readable.

And thanks to the outline link, I was able to read the article to conclusion. Very powerful and very interesting.

I have mixed feelings. It certainly feels like a different experience from most articles (especially BBC ones). Some of the photographs were especially compelling, and I think they'd have had less impact as a sidebar.

It's clear that the goal is to capitalize on the browser medium's differences from traditional print media. It's definitely new/different. I don't think I liked it the first time I saw it but in this case it struck me as notably beneficial.

> Some of the photographs were especially compelling, and I think they'd have had less impact as a sidebar.

To me the point of an article is to provide textual information; I find most of the innovations get in the way of actually getting the info into my brain. (I originally put "innovations" in scare quotes, but they are new ideas, just for me bad ones. But that's the nature of experimentation).

The thing about reading is that, like recognition of 2D images, it's a learned behavior though one (more than image recognition) that appears to hack into some deep structures in the vision system. Breaking the text up like this ironically subverts those mechanisms which likely impedes understanding.

On desktop the text feels like a supplement to the pictures more than the main part of the content.

As I looked at the pictures, scanning the text for callouts and deeper information, I found myself becoming very emotional.

The linked article tells a very powerful story through images, a story that touches upon love, adoption, middle America ("the heartland"), family, and race.

That all? Mine jumped around all over the place (iOS).

Either make your little UI experiment work flawlessly across all devices, or not at all.

This article is one of a very small few that have made me cry.

It's worth the effort.

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