Once I spoke with a girl who told me a friend had invited her to a pool party, but she didn’t want to go because the friend’s mom had HIV.
I told her that this was a common concern, but HIV can’t be transmitted by sharing a pool, and in fact HIV is such a weak virus that it can’t even survive on a table for more than a few hours, and it can be killed entirely by bleach.
She asked me, “if you can kill HIV with bleach, why haven’t we cured it yet?”
I told her, “because we can’t put Bleach into people without killing them”.
She said that this was interesting, but she still wasn’t going to go.
(We did not become friends.)
The other day, I saw a group of teenage boys climbing all over an electrical box in town.
I walked over and asked if they were aware this was an electrocution risk.
One of them asked what I meant. I pointed to the large yellow image of a stick man with a lightning bolt through its chest and repeated, “it has an electrocution warning on it. Don’t get blown up.”
The kid laughed and said, “hey, play at your own risk, right?” And went back to his buddies.
I went back to what I was doing, but kept an eye out, and did notice that within the next five minutes, the whole group had removed themselves from the box and were now gathered several feet away from it.
I can’t make people do things. I can inform, and support, but I cannot make their choices.
This is something that is hard to learn.
The second story is also a great example of the way people can seem completely resistant to what you say to them, but with a bit of time away from you they take it on board and act on it. I work in guidance and sometimes see this happening, but often you don’t get to know what lasting impact your words have on someone once they go their own way.