you’ll still be waiting in your grave.” You don’t punish anyone other than yourself by keeping hate inside you. Other people are other people. You are you.
Wrong direction
Your self-worth is not found inside the minds of other people.
Applied energy
History can be a comfort. It helps us understand our place in time, and to appreciate what humans have done and lived through in the past for us to end up here.
Discovering the human stories of the past, in particular, can give us a kind of strength. Knowing what human beings achieved, what they survived, and that some of them managed to make the world better for us to live in today.
Have you heard of Nellie Bly?
She was one of the most inspiring journalists ever to have lived.
Nellie Bly was in fact a pen name. When she was born in Pittsburgh in 1864 she was christened Elizabeth Jane Cochran. After her father died when she was fifteen, she and her mother and fourteen siblings were left with little money and so Bly went out to try and earn some.
At a time when women were a rare and actively discouraged sight in journalism, Bly managed to get a job for her local newspaper, earning five dollars a week. However, she was told she was to write only about domestic things like childcare and housework. Despite that, the popularity of her column allowed her to start writing in a more investigative way, and she moved onto meatier issues such as the impact of divorce laws on women.
In 1887 she moved to New York and managed to meet the famous newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer. She wanted to work for his publication, New York World, but in a test of her commitment he said that her first piece would be an investigation into conditions at Blackwell’s Island Asylum, a notorious “lunatic” asylum for women. The catch was that Bly would need to go undercover. In other words, she would need to pretend to be insane and get committed there.
This was no easy task. She checked into a boarding house called Temporary Homes for Females and stayed up all night to give herself a drained and disheveled appearance. Then she put on a wild-eyed act of insanity, and—following psychiatric evaluation—was sent to the asylum.
There, she experienced and witnessed hellish conditions. Bullying staff. Mentally ill women tied up together with ropes. Rat-infested wards. Rotten food. Dirty drinking water. Shared bath water. Hard benches. Cruel punishments. One of the things she quickly noted was that many of the women didn’t seem insane at all yet were treated horrifically. Bly believed that a few hours of being there would test the mind of any sane person.
From the moment she arrived Bly dropped her act of insanity and acted as she normally would. Yet she noticed that every normal thing she did—like ask the staff if they had taken her pencil—was treated as further proof of insanity: “The more sanely I talked and acted the crazier I was thought to be.” She also witnessed the most severely ill patients being actively provoked.
It was ten days before the New York World told the asylum the truth, and that their reporter should be released. It was a harrowing assignment. Yet by witnessing and writing about her experience, Bly helped shift the American public’s view of asylums and mental illness.
As a direct result of her two-part article “Ten Days in a Mad-House,” the state department in charge of the asylum had its budget raised by a million dollars. Even more impressive, her list of recommendations was taken on board by the Department of Public Charities and Correction, and this resulted in the closure of the asylum a few years later.
Nellie Bly became famous. And helped usher in a new age of intense, undercover journalism.
She went on to report all kinds of dramatic stories, a far cry from the kind of domestic fare she had initially been encouraged to write about in Pittsburgh. She covered everything from government corruption to baby-buying scandals.
In 1889 she became even more famous as the person who broke the fictional record set by Phileas Fogg in the Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days, when she embarked on a 24,900-mile trip around the globe and completed it in a whisker over seventy-two days. While on the trip she met Jules Vernes in Paris, visited a leper colony in China, and journeyed along the Suez Canal. She traveled on boats and trains and even the occasional donkey.
The remarkable thing