An aerial view of a road winding through a dense forest in the spring.
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This story is part of the My Unsung Hero series from the Hidden Brain team, featuring people whose kindness left a lasting impression. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
A few words offered without judgment can change the course of a life. Decades ago, a stranger’s quiet acceptance gave one woman a way forward when she needed it most.
In 1978, at 21, Stacia was deep in severe depression and survived a suicide attempt. She asked that NPR use only her middle name because she was sharing sensitive details about her mental health.
After the attempt she was taken to a hospital in a small college town. Staff removed her shoes to keep her from leaving and later, when left briefly unattended, Stacia slipped out the door. Shoeless, she walked until she reached a road and stuck out her thumb for a ride.
“I was very obviously lost,” she recalled. “Not in the sense of, ‘I didn’t know where I was,’ but lost in the sense that I had no direction or purpose and I had just gone through a traumatic experience.”
A woman in a convertible pulled over. The backseat was full of canvases, which suggested the woman was an artist — a detail that put Stacia at ease. The driver asked one simple question that stuck with Stacia for nearly 50 years: “Where do you want to go?”
“No judgment, no expectations. Just acceptance,” Stacia said. The question relieved her. She didn’t want to discuss what had happened; she wanted to go home. She got in the car and they talked about calming things — nature, music and art. After about 40 minutes, the woman drove her home. Stacia never learned the stranger’s name and never saw her again, but she never forgot the feeling that single act of compassion created.
“What I experienced that day — a single generous act of compassion — has stayed with me ever since and it shaped the life I went on to live,” Stacia said.
In the years that followed, Stacia built a career in human services, working with high-risk teens, people with disabilities and their families. She made a practice of meeting people where they were and treating them without judgment, trying to give others the same sense of worth the stranger’s kindness gave her.
“And I could really pinpoint it back to that act of acceptance from that person in my time of need,” she reflected. “It’s meeting people where they are and letting them be who they are without being judgmental.”
She admits she wasn’t perfect over four decades, but she adopted that moment as a guiding principle. “I’m not going to say that throughout 40 years I never made a judgment or jumped to a conclusion,” she said. “But I made it a tenet in my life that that’s not how I wanted to be treated and I don’t want to treat other people like that. And that’s the way I want to feel that I can contribute in this world.”
My Unsung Hero is also a podcast — new episodes are released every Tuesday. To share your unsung hero story with the Hidden Brain team, record a voice memo on your phone and send it to [email protected].
