LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – The woman, said Sharon Dawson, was “drop-dead beautiful.”
The photographic portrait Dawson created of her on the wall in her Middletown photographic studio said as much.
Dawson added that the woman is 28 years old and, the last she knew, was headed for Florida to begin working in a position in the arts, and gave her name as Michelle.
It challenged belief that Michelle hadn’t always been so attractive and, in fact, in her younger years was scorned by classmates so severely that she kept a “suicide kit” under her bed and had indeed contemplated dropping dead.
“She has a mix of ethnicity,” Dawson said. “She had the kinky hair of a Middle Easterner. So when her family moved into a white neighborhood when she was 5 years old she learned she was “weird-looking” by society’s standards.
“When she hit school there more kids and more teasing. She was horribly bullied. It got to where she grew her hair to hide her face and be invisible,” Dawson said. “She would hide some place to eat her lunch without being teased or tortured. She developed huge blisters on her face and the kids would say, ’Don’t touch that pencil; the leper girl touched it.
“Every day she would plan her suicide.”
Then, Dawson said, Michelle became involved in a theater and dance group whose participants “didn’t tease her, talk about her skin condition, her hair or her ethnicity.”
That’s one story that Dawson tells about the individuals she refers to as “Waves” in her year-old “Wave of Hope” project. There are at least 30 more and the list is growing.
Dawson founded the project a year ago in May. It is a traveling exhibition of portraits and personal stories that she plans to place in public places and on a Web site, www.awaveofhope.com .
She plans to launch the program on May 31 on the lawn in front of the Middletown Library.
Her first “Wave” of stories and portraits will consist of 20 Lake County residents.
“I started it because I got pissed off at the ridiculously high suicide rate in Lake County,” said Dawson.
According to the California Department of Public Health's new County Health Status Profiles 2014 report, Lake County is ranked No. 53 out of the state's 58 counties for its high suicide rate.
Since she originated Wave of Hope she has made several discoveries, Dawson added.
One is that most people don’t want to talk about suicide.
And because of the absence of dialog those who do contemplate doing away with themselves erroneously think they are all alone in those thoughts.
And, finally, there are individuals and organizations who are willing to help Wave of Hope achieve its mission.
“Konocti Lionesses and Six Sigma sponsored us,” said Dawson. “There were more than 100 people who (contributed) $5 to $100 and two $1,000 donations from people who believe that the dialog I’m trying to open matters.”
Dawson also has received some significant in-kind donations.
Imagine, Digital and Classic and Beyond, both of Middletown, helped her with the promotional material for the video and the Web site, and Studio 175, also of Middletown, did all the styling, according to Dawson.
“All this amounted to well over $10,000 if not $20,000. There is no way in hell I could have afforded it on my own,” she said.
“They believe in this. They really do. And they believe in me which gets scary sometimes,” she added. “But I can't stop and deal with my insecurities right now. It's not just me. That’s what people don’t understand. Yes, I conceptualized this. Yes, I created this. And yes, l put the legwork and $5,000 of my own into it. But these people are the ones who are putting their heart and soul out there for the world to see.”
Open communication, Dawson contended, is critical to individuals who have reached a point in their lives when they think they are alone in their misery.
“You get into a bad place where you think that you’re the only person (with a particular depressing problem) so you don’t talk to anybody,” Dawson said. “Maybe you don’t know how to talk about it or maybe you don’t have anybody to talk to and then it grows in your mind.
“If we all knew that we weren’t the only person who went through a hard time it would be better. But the stigma is most people don’t want to talk about it to the rest of the world. It’s alienating.”
Dawson is not a psychiatrist. She is a professional photographer.
“There is no one system and I am not presumptuous enough to think that what we’re doing with Wave of Hope is superior to what a psychiatrist or a counselor could do for people,” she said.
“What I am doing is something that they can’t because they have confidentiality restrictions,” said Dawson. “The people come forward to tell their stories about where they were, what they are now and what they would say to somebody who might be where they were.”
In terms of getting troubled people to understand they are not alone and tell their stories for the benefit of others, Dawson said she is succeeding.
“I want somebody to come up and read that story and say, ‘OK, I’m not the only person who’s felt this way. I don’t have to be ashamed because I lost my house, I don’t have to be ashamed because I was bullied, I don’t have to be ashamed because I suffer from depression, or that I’m on medication for bipolar or when I was 40 I was doing drugs.’
“We need to be done with that. We need to talk out loud.”
To ensure that her mission receives the widest scope of dissemination, Dawson said posters will be at bus stops, on the walls of public places, in bars.
“We’re going to be everywhere that people can get to,” she added.
Central to her project is creating the understanding that individuals who have contemplated suicide cannot be typecast.
“There is no common thread between these people. No economics, no age,” she said, noting her youngest “Wave” is 13 years old. “Almost anybody who’s lost somebody to suicide will tell you they had no idea. I’d say 90 percent say they never saw it coming.
“It doesn’t matter who you are. Everybody goes through hard times.”
Email John Lindblom at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .