Picture This written by sixpenceeestories user @vincentvenacava
900,000 people are reported missing every year in the United States alone. You heard that number correctly. Don't believe me? Look it up: 900,000 people. A staggering 2,300 people are reported missing daily. Now, let's be clear; many of these cases are solved relatively quickly and I'm not talking about bloated corpses found floating in rivers or dismembered bodies turning up somewhere off the Jersey Turnpike.
Of the 900,000 people who are reported missing annually, around 850,000 of them are kids. Most missing children tend to fall into one of two categories: runaways who eventually return home safely or family abductions. The latter of which occurs when either the mother or father runs off with the little ones because of a domestic dispute or divorce.
As far as adults go, a large portion of missing cases typically involve people who are suffering from drug or alcohol abuse. These addicts have a tendency to go on benders, disappearing from their friends and families for days on end while they pump their bodies full of booze and illegal narcotics. A surprisingly high number of reports are concerning senior citizens suffering from Dementia or Alzheimer's. You'd be surprised how often they wander away from their caretakers and get lost. Usually it doesn't take very long for the police to locate the disoriented old-timer and bring them back to the nursing home.
Given these facts, we see the number of people (both children and adults) who are abducted by strangers is actually relatively small. Only about 150 of these kinds of abductions are estimated to occur in the United States annually.
Now picture this.
You were an artist – a painter who specialized in Impressionism.
You loved art all your life. You saw a coffee table book when you were 12-years-old that had a picture of "Blue Dancers" by Edgar Degas and you couldn't look away from it. You were mesmerized by the colors, the brush strokes, the way the girls in the painting contorted their bodies. To you, they didn't even look like dancers – they were a meadow of Morning Glories swaying in a gentle breeze. You knew right then and there that you wanted to create something as gorgeous and spellbinding as that picture.
You studied the greats: Renoir, Degas, Cezanne, and of course Monet. When you turned 15, you started taking art classes after school at the local community college, but you never shared your passion with anyone – not even your closest friends and family. You were afraid of what they might say. What if they laughed at you? What if they told you that you that your paintings were sloppy or ugly? What if they told you that you didn't have talent or that you'd never create your own "Blue Dancers" one day?
So you hid your passion from everyone you knew. Whenever you finished a piece you tossed it in the garbage because seeing your art in a dumpster was better than the possibility of hearing your friends make fun of it.
You wanted to study art in college, but society told you that only morons do that. Instead you opted for an engineering degree. Your parents were happy. You graduated from school and got a job where you sat in a cubicle and made $55,000 per year. You spent all day every day musing about what it would be like to wake up each morning and do nothing but paint. You tried to keep up with your art, but you never had the time. Your boss asked you to work weekends every chance he got and when you did have a second to yourself you were too tired to do anything but watch TV or surf the web. You started to hate yourself for being so spineless – for not pursuing the only thing in life that ever made you feel good. You fell into a depression.
Picture this
An estimated 1 in 10 adults suffer from depression. That means there are at least 31 million people in the United States who feel lost. Who feel hopeless – who feel like the world would be a better place without them and you were one of those people.
