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As a very educated man (degrees from both Brandeis and Columbia), Mitch Albom had a variety of occupations throughout his career that include novelist, sports journalist, radio talk show host, and even musician. Many of his most popular novel such as "Tuesdays with Morrie" or "Have A little Faith", have sold out to millions of readers. He was considered to be one of the best sports journalists of his time in the Detroit are earlier in his writing career before transitioning to writing articles in the newspaper and then finally to novels around the late 1980's. His novel "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" that I chose to read was published in 2003, six years after his last publication of "Tuesday's With Morrie". This novel sold over ten million copies and was transcribed into 35 different languages. With popularity that allowed for it to become a television show in 2004 for ABC and was one of the most watched TV movies of the year with millions of viewers.

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Ode to Nightingale by John Keats (1798-1821)

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Ode to Nightingale by John Keats (1798-1821)

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As I was researching for poetry that connected to my book, I was attempting to find a poem that would provide imagery of how love transcends death. Eddies connection with his wife Marguerite is cut short on Earth, during the time after her death he struggled with finding any meaning in his life. In the afterlife he is able to rejoin with her after his lessons with the other people he meets along the way but she waits for him at the end. The lines that I would specifically reference for this poems connection would be "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains. My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains", this opening line describes how the speaker is mourning the loss of his love and is in a state of self wallow similar to the sensation of being under the influence. As Eddie suffered on Earth without his wife, he saw no meaning in his occupation or life. Throughout this poem the nightingale song is almost annoying to the speaker as it is a sad reminder of the one that was lost. The theme of immortality is within the seventh stanza, "Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard. In ancient days by emperor and clown.", where I found that the connection of love and immortality. Marguerite teaches Eddie that her love is transcended beyond death, and this idea that the mourner sees no death as if they are immortal represents the love of a grieving spouse and awaiting their rejoicement in the afterlife.

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My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

But being too happy in thine happiness,-

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been

Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,

Tasting of Flora and the country green,

Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!

O for a beaker full of the warm South,

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

And purple-stained mouth;

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,

And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known,

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs,

Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,

Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

Already with thee! tender is the night,

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;

But here there is no light,

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet

Wherewith the seasonable month endows

The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;

White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;

Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;

And mid-May's eldest child,

The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain-

To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I hear this passing night was heard

In ancient days by emperor and clown:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn;

The same that oft-times hath

Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well

As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep

In the next valley-glades:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music:-Do I wake or sleep?

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Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats | Poetry Foundation

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My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

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When Eddie is in the living world, he resides on Ruby Pier, where he works at the amusement park and repairs the broken machines. But when he is in heaven interacting with the five people, the location changes with the individual. He begins at the Ruby Pier with the blue man, then the battlegrounds from his experience in WW2 with his captain, then the mountains, a series of wedding receptions, and a river. Although the setting is not consistent throughout the text, it is important that each setting relays the lesson and location that is trying to be related to eddie. This novel is written to be around the time period of the 1930's but was actually physically published by Albom in 2003.

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I found this collection of articles from the HuffPost where they started a new project to interact with their readers. It gave a platform to anonymously or personally share stories of their interactions with strangers. Many spoke about their experiences in the supermarket, on the street, or in some cases during an emergency. I found it really cool that it was a global interaction and that anybody could respond with a story. I read through over 30 of them and picked out a few that felt as though the idea that strangers have impact were very strong.
Here are some of theses examples:
1) Georgia, USA
Kidney donor, both were educators. After the surgery her daughter who was not a match vowed to pay it forward and then donated her kidney to a stranger in Ohio.
2) Ohio, USA
Illness left a senior in highschool to miss eight weeks of in class, a student made a second copy of their notes for every lesson to make sure they wouldn't have to scramble to catch up in time for graduation.
3) United Kingdom
Writers mother pulled over on the side of the road in downpour of rain and protected an injured elderly man and gave him all of her warmest layers, although they were struggling with money.

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Think about it: You've likely had an experience in which a complete stranger went out of their way to help you. Maybe it brightened your day when you needed it, or perhaps the gesture had a bigger effect on your life.

The world needs these stories. That's why we're creating The Good Kind, a new editorial initiative at HuffPost that will share instances about the unexpected kindness people have received from strangers.

Consider this project a "missed connections" for compassion. We want to highlight these anecdotes ― no matter how big or small they may be ― as a way to elevate the goodness that exists across the globe.

Take, for example, this story about a stranger who stepped in to fix a couple's crumbled wedding cake on the day of their nuptials. Or this Disney World security guard who asked a little girl dressed as a princess for her autograph to make her feel special. And there's this story about a bus driver who went beyond the call of duty to make sure a girl who was lost got to school on time.

We want to hear about a time a complete stranger showed you kindness when they didn't have to. It could be as simple as getting a special compliment when you really needed it, or something more dramatic, like a first responder who helped you out after an accident.

Fill out this form here to share your personal story. You can also hit us up at thegoodkind@huffpost.com to share your experience, with details on what happened and how it made you feel or the particular mark it left on your life. Please also include the town where the event took place or any location details you feel comfortable providing. Your experience might be posted on this site or our social media channels.

Let's celebrate the good kind of people we've encountered. Because we all could use a few more stories like this.

100 Ways To De-Stress

See Gallery

huffington post Good News acts of kindness the good kind

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Think about it: You've likely had an experience in which a complete stranger went out of their way to help you. Maybe it brightened your day when you needed it, or perhaps the gesture had a bigger effect on your life. The world needs these stories.

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As the images within this article show, a man decided to begin a trend of drawing strangers that sat across or near him on the subway. Afterward he would show them the picture and he would post it on the social media platform, Tik Tok, showing their reaction. Each drawing is very different and unique but almost all received positive reactions or shocked faces. I chose this collection of drawings from a popular current New York street artist because I felt it helped showcase one of the biggest ideas of my book, that the interactions we have with strangers throughout our lives shows impact in ways that may be overlooked. In these art pieces, a small connection is shared between strangers that may impact their day, subway ride, and possibly invoke a more positive reaction with someone you may have walked by on any normal day.

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Images: Courtesy @DevonRodriguezArt

The NYC artist that's gone super viral drawing strangers on the subway

Devon Rodriguez's sketches have brought moments of joy to commuters during anxious times.

Riding the subway over the last year has been a draining experience, with limited service, necessary social distancing and a pervading sense of anxiety throughout the system. However, one talented artist has worked to bring a sense of light into the underground tunnels, and his actions have catapulted him into super viral social media stardom.

Devon Rodriguez has been drawing strangers on the subway as part of his “Subway Series” since 2010 when he was a high school freshman in the South Bronx. Hoping to transfer to a different school in midtown, he sought help from his high school art teacher to develop his portfolio. The teacher showed him some subway sketches he’d done and Rodriguez began doing similar sketches himself.

“I’ve been doing these sketches since 2010 but they really just started taking off online in the last five or six months,” Rodgriguez says. “Six months ago, I only had about 30,000 followers on Instagram and now I have 1.6 million.”

At the beginning of the COVID crisis in the city, Rodriguez had about three months worth of commissions that he had to finish, but after that he was itching to get back down into the subway to capture this historic moment. Since then, he's created fascinating work capturing the face of the pandemic in the city's subway system.

“I just thought this would be a perfect way to cover this moment in history,” he says. “I love the concept of it and I like the idea of seeing my work before and during the pandemic. It was a no brainer to do it with everyone wearing masks."

Crucially, Rodriguez also started a TikTok account at this same time which helped him reach a much larger audience. Though he hadn’t done much video content in the past, he began posting short videos of himself creating his art which soon reached millions.

“I started doing them as drawings instead of paintings since they were faster and every video I put up was reaching millions and going viral.”

In case you’re hoping for some insight on which subway lines have the most interesting characters, you’re out of luck. Rodriguqez says he mainly sticks to the 6 train for his drawings—a remnant of his many years commuting between the Bronx and Manhattan. Currently, he’s averaging about one drawing a week, including a recent one which may have been his most viral yet thanks to its recipient’s teary, overjoyed response.

“I try to pick people who look nice and for the most part everyone’s amazed by it,” he says. “Most people appreciate the drawings or at least they pretend to appreciate them.

Though he says the subway looks a lot different in its current form, with its empty cars and nervous riders keeping their distance, he’s hopeful New Yorkers’ commutes will one day return to something that feels more normal.

“I hope everything goes back. I didn’t think it would last this long,” he says. “But whether it does or doesn’t get back to normal, I”m still going to be doing this.”

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The NYC artist that's gone super viral drawing strangers on the subway

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Devon Rodriguez's sketches have brought moments of joy to commuters during anxious times. Riding the subway over the last year has been a draining experience, with limited service, necessary social distancing and a pervading sense of anxiety throughout the system.

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I found that this example of the connection between strangers was important and representative of eddie's connection to the last of his five people in heaven, Tala. Tala was the shadow he saw in the tent the day in war that his captain shot him in order to survive. Simultaneously the captain died due to this sacrifice, and due to Eddie not being able to go and save Tala, she too also died in the war after Eddies troops started a fire in their village. In the NPR interview, a vietnam veteran speaks about his interaction with a kind stranger during a time where their return from the war was very unpopular. He speaks about how the only person to show compassion and reach out during his return was a little girl in the aisle saying "welcome home" and gifting him a magazine. This action and such little words gave him a sense of meaning that Eddie never received in the novel, and it shows how impactful every word, action, and interaction really is.

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On June 23, 1970, I had just been mustered out of the Army after completing my one-year tour of duty in Vietnam. I was a 23-year-old Army veteran on a plane from Oakland, Calif., returning home to Dallas, Texas.

I had been warned about the hostility many of our fellow countrymen felt toward returning 'Nam vets at that time. There were no hometown parades for us when we came home from that unpopular war. Like tens of thousands of others, I was just trying to get home without incident.

I sat, in uniform, in a window seat, chain-smoking and avoiding eye contact with my fellow passengers. No one was sitting in the seat next to me, which added to my isolation. A young girl, not more than 10 years old, suddenly appeared in the aisle. She smiled and, without a word, timidly handed me a magazine. I accepted her offering, her quiet "welcome home." All I could say was, "Thank you." I do not know where she sat down or who she was with because right after accepting the magazine from her, I turned to the window and wept. Her small gesture of compassion was the first I had experienced in a long time.

I believe in the connection between strangers when they reach out to one another.

That young girl undoubtedly has no memory of what happened years ago. I like to think of her as having grown up, continuing to touch others and teaching her children to do the same. I know she might have been told to give me the "gift" by her mother. Her father might still have been in Vietnam at that point or maybe he had not survived the war. It doesn't matter why she gave me the magazine. The important thing is she did.

Since then, I have followed her example and tried, in different ways for different people, to do the same for them. Like me on that long ago plane ride, they will never know why a stranger took the time to extend a hand. But I know that my attempts since then are all because of that little girl. Her offer of a magazine to a tired, scared and lonely soldier has echoed throughout my life. I have to believe that my small gestures have the same effect on others. And to that little girl, now a woman, I would like to take this opportunity to say again, thank you.

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On June 23, 1970, I had just been mustered out of the Army after completing my one-year tour of duty in Vietnam. I was a 23-year-old Army veteran on a plane from Oakland, Calif., returning home to Dallas, Texas. I had been warned about the hostility many of our fellow countrymen felt toward returning 'Nam vets at that time.

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As my driving question states, I was curious about the relationships between a stranger in comparison to a relationship that is more long-term (family, partner, child, etc.) and I found this article that researched about the predictor of happiness and well-being of social relationships. They found that over and over again research has proven that talking with strangers can "make us happier, more connected to our communities, mentally sharper, healthier, less lonely, and more trustful and optimistic". Although Eddie may not have known the five people in heaven like he knew his wife, the interactions with each and every individual was strong in some way whether it be physical, verbal, or even silent. In some ways, a connection with a stranger may be backed up as more meaningful and fulfilling.

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Nic spent most of her childhood avoiding people. She was raised by a volatile father and a mother who transferred much of the trauma she'd experienced onto her daughter. The combination left Nic fearful and isolated. "My primitive brain was programmed to be afraid of everybody, because everybody's evil and they're gonna hurt you, " she told me. (Nic asked to be referred to by only her first name to protect her privacy.)

Nic's fear isn't uncommon in a country where valid lessons about "stranger danger " can cast all people you don't know as threats to be feared, but she recognized it was unhealthy, so she took steps to engage with the world. As she grew older, she began to travel to seek new people out. At 17, Nic visited Europe for 10 days with her high-school classmates and noticed that people began starting conversations with her. "If people in Europe randomly talked to me, then maybe I'm not so bad," she figured. "Maybe I'm not gonna die if I randomly talk to them. " So she took more trips and connected with more people. She was anxious about these encounters, wired for fear and expecting the worst, but they always went well. She found that, contrary to what she'd been raised to believe, these strangers weren't dangerous or scary. They were actually sources of comfort and belonging. They expanded her world.
Read: Why do we look down on lonely people?
Today, Nic has a name for these types of conversations: "Greyhound Therapy." As she uses it, the term literally refers to talking with your seatmate on a long-haul bus but can apply to talking with strangers anywhere-at a restaurant, at a bus stop, in a grocery store. This form of connection changed her life. When times got hard, she found herself turning to strangers for comfort and "to stave off the loneliness," she told me.

"And it worked?" I asked.

"Oh God, yes," she said. "I would go home with some amazing stories-granted, nobody to share them with-but I still had the stories. They were mine."

Nic's experience is telling. A hefty body of research has found that an overwhelmingly strong predictor of happiness and well-being is the quality of a person's social relationships. But most of those studies have looked at only close ties: family, friends, co-workers. In the past decade and a half, professors have begun to wonder if interacting with strangers could be good for us too: not as a replacement for close relationships, but as a complement to them. The results of that research have been striking. Again and again, studies have shown that talking with strangers can make us happier, more connected to our communities, mentally sharper, healthier, less lonely, and more trustful and optimistic. Yet, like Nic, many of us are wary of those interactions, especially after the coronavirus pandemic limited our social lives so severely.
Read: A stranger helped my family at our darkest moment
These days, Nic is a successful nurse with an uncanny gift for connecting with her patients, and is happily married to a kind and sociable man. She still loves to travel, and on her trips, she'll size up her seatmate, or someone sitting alone at a table or the bar. If they have headphones on or appear uninterested, she'll leave them alone. But if they seem receptive, she'll say, "Hi, I'm Nic," and see where it goes. She's not reckless or naive, and she knows how to read people and detect trouble. But the conversations tend to go well, reassuring her that there is goodness in the world, and the possibility of belonging. She tells me that these experiences have taught her something invaluable: "Never underestimate the power of even the most minute positive connection."

In psychology, the sorts of exchanges Nic is talking about are known as "minimal social interactions." The psychologist Gillian Sandstrom had a similar epiphany about them about a decade ago.

She was raised in Canada by extroverts who loved talking with strangers. One day, Sandstrom, who had always considered herself an introvert, realized that she always looked down when she walked along the street. "I thought, Well, that's dumb," she says. So she started holding eye contact with people and found that it actually felt pretty good. Before long, she was talking with strangers too. She was surprised at how easy and fun it was. Once, on the subway, she saw a woman holding a box of elaborately decorated cupcakes and asked about them. "I don't know how the conversation got there, but she taught me that humans can ride ostriches," Sandstrom says. "I was sold. That was just a delightful conversation. I wanted to do it again." Later, during a stressful period in grad school, Sandstrom took solace in an even smaller routine interaction: waving and smiling at a woman running a hot-dog cart, whom she passed every day. "I realized that when I saw her, and when she acknowledged me, it made me feel good. I felt like, Yeah, I belong here."

Sandstrom decided to study this phenomenon. She and her Ph.D. supervisor at the University of British Columbia asked a group of adults to chat with the barista when they got their morning coffee. They had the idea that by not engaging with counter workers-by essentially treating them as insensate service modules and not, say, actual humans-we may be denying ourselves a potential "hidden source of belonging and happiness." As it turns out, they were right. The participants who talked with their barista reported feeling a stronger sense of community and an improved mood, as well as greater satisfaction with their overall coffee-buying experience.
Read: How to talk to strangers
Other researchers have come to similar conclusions. In a different experiment devised by the University of Chicago psychologist Nicholas Epley and his then-student Juliana Schroeder, a group of people instructed to speak with strangers on mass transit reported a significantly more positive, enjoyable commute than a group of those who didn't. On average, conversations lasted a whopping 14.2 minutes, and the talkers overwhelmingly liked the strangers they'd spoken with. People of all personality types had a good time.

By now, skeptics among us are thinking the same thing I was when I first read these studies: Sure, talking with strangers might be enjoyable if you're the one who started the conversation. But is the other person enjoying it? After all, every one of us has at one time or another been trapped in an enclosed space by a talker who proved agonizingly impervious to social cues that you're not in the mood. So to test whether both parties were enjoying these interactions, Epley and Schroeder created another experiment. Between tasks unrelated to the research at hand, participants took breaks in a waiting room. Some of these subjects were told to talk with the other person in the room and others were told not to talk; the people they were with were given no instructions. The ones who talked-both the people who started the conversation andthe people they talked with-reported having a significantly better experience than those who did not.

If talking with strangers is so pleasant-and so good for us-why don't people do it more often? That's a big question, informed by issues of race, class and gender, culture, population density, and decades of (sometimes valid) "stranger danger" messaging. But the core answer seems to be twofold: We don't expect strangers to like us, and we don't expect to like them either.
Read: The people who collect strangers' memories
In a study by Epley and Schroeder, participants who were asked to talk with strangers during their commutes worried that the strangers wouldn't enjoy the conversations. They predicted, on average, that less than half of the people they approached would talk with them. They expected that starting the conversation would be hard. But people wereinterested in talking with them, and not a single one was rejected.

A similar phenomenon has shown up in Sandstrom's work with another group of psychologists, led by Erica Boothby, called the "liking gap." Their research has found that experiment participants (especially the shiest ones) believed that they liked the stranger more than the stranger liked them. This misperception deters people from seeking out these interactions, and in turn deprives them of not only short-term boosts of happiness and belonging but also more lasting benefits, such as meeting new friends, romantic partners, or business contacts.

But a deeper force is at play here too. Participants in these studies expected very little from the conversations themselves. When Epley and Schroeder ​​asked commuters to imagine how they would feel if they talked with a new person versus remaining solitary, those who imagined talking with a stranger predicted that their commutes would be significantly worse. That prediction is telling. Why did it come as such a surprise that a stranger could be approachable, cordial, and interesting?

Part of the inspiration behind the subway experiments, Schroeder told me, was the idea that "it's fundamentally dehumanizing to be surrounded by people and then never interact and engage with them." It's dehumanizing to me because I lose an opportunity to be a social being-which is my nature-and it's dehumanizing to the stranger because I never experience more than a superficial glimpse of their full humanity. In cities especially, people tend to treat strangers as obstacles, Schroeder said, so we don't talk with them; because we don't talk with them, it never fully occurs to us that they are, in fact, really people.

This is the "lesser minds problem," so dubbed by Epley and the psychologist Adam Waytz in 2010. The theory is this: Because we can't see what's happening in other people's heads, we have "what appears to be a universal tendency to assume that others' minds are less sophisticated and more superficial than one's own," Epley writes in his 2014 book, Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want. Perhaps this is why we expect interactions with strangers to go poorly: because we subconsciously believe they just don't have much to offer.

Sandstrom had a different (and simpler) explanation of why we don't talk with strangers: She believed people just didn't know how to do it. So she set out to teach them.

In collaboration with the now-defunct London group called Talk to Me, Sandstrom ran a series of events that aimed to show people how enjoyable talking with strangers could be-and to learn more about why people were so hesitant to do it. She has since developed some techniques to help allay these fears. For instance, she tells people to follow their curiosity-notice something, compliment a person, or ask them a question. Generally, though, she just lets people figure it out themselves. Once they get over the initial hump, they find it comes to them quite naturally. "You can't shut them up," she says. "By the end they don't want to stop talking. It's fascinating. I love it."
Read: The club where you bare your soul to strangers
While Sandstrom has found success in these isolated events, she's run into a more insidious obstacle in her pursuit of lasting change: a social norm against talking with strangers-a belief that this is simply not done. In her experiments, participants would unfailingly have positive experiences, but "when you ask people about the next conversation, they're really worried again," she says. So she tried to engineer a situation in which talking with strangers, through sheer repetition, would become natural enough to people that they would simply begin to do it out of habit, free of all the usual fears. The trick, she believed, was "to get people to have a lot of conversations."

Using an app called GooseChase, Sandstrom created a scavenger hunt with a list of types of people with whom to strike up conversations: people who were smiley, people who looked "artsy," people trying to carry a lot of things, people who looked sad, people who seemed nice or fashionable or who were tattooed or wearing a "striking tie." The results, again, were undeniable. Participants found it was much easier to start and maintain a conversation with a stranger, and the conversations lasted three times longer than they predicted. About 80 percent said that they learned something new. Forty-one percent said that they exchanged contact information with someone. Some participants made friends, went on dates, got coffee. And true to Sandstrom's prediction, their pessimism about the prospect of talking with strangers was eased. A week after completing the scavenger hunt, participants were more confident of their conversational abilities and less afraid of rejection. And the way they thought about other people changed as well. As one student wrote in their survey response: "Strangers are generally friendly and helpful."

As I read through the other responses from Sandstrom's study, I kept coming upon what seemed like a subtle undertone of relief-which I recognized, having wondered myself Why do I feel a sense of relief after a pleasant exchange with a stranger? When I asked Sandstrom about this, she said something that took me back to the story of Nic, her fearful childhood, and her experience with Greyhound Therapy. "I think that relief might just be the feeling that we're sold this message that the world is a scary place," Sandstrom said, "and then you have a chat with someone, some random person, and it goes well, and it's sorta like, Maybe the world isn't so bad after all. "
This article was excerpted from Joe Keohane's book The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World.

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university of chicago psychologist nicholas epley

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The Surprising Benefits of Talking to Strangers

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Nic spent most of her childhood avoiding people. She was raised by a volatile father and a mother who transferred much of the trauma she'd experienced onto her daughter. The combination left Nic fearful and isolated. "My primitive brain was programmed to be afraid of everybody, because everybody's evil and they're gonna hurt you, " she told me.