Supernormal. Мэг Джей
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Название: Supernormal
Автор: Мэг Джей
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Личностный рост
isbn: 9781782114956
isbn:
This is how secrets—and those who keep them—can be quite misunderstood. Skeletons in the closet. The dirt swept under the rug. Where the bodies are buried. We think of skeletons and dirt and bodies as information we willfully, tactically hide from others, when sometimes, and maybe even usually, secrets are automatic and multidetermined. Fear leaves us speechless. The lack of labels and categories leaves us without words. Those around us hint, or insist, that some things are better left unsaid. Supernormals rarely set out to fool others, and in retrospect they often realize there was a great deal that they kept not only from other people but even from themselves. Dostoevsky makes this distinction when he says, “Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.” The problem is that having many such things stored away in your mind may not feel all that decent, and it can produce a vague, unshakable sense not just that one has secrets but that one is living a lie.
Journalist Charles Blow recalls this feeling of lying in his memoir, when he reveals how he managed to go on behaving as usual in his home after he was sexually abused by a relative: “I had to resort to the most useful and dangerous lesson a damaged child ever learns—how to lie to himself . . . There is nowhere to hide in a small house. I had to make room within the rooms, a safe place midway in the mind, behind seeing and before knowing . . . That’s what people in this town and in our family did with secrets. No matter what it was—not a word. No good could come from giving voice to vice.” Blow could not be safe in his house, so he survived by finding a place in his mind where he was safe from the knowledge of what had happened to him. He says he learned to “lie to himself” but really what he articulates so beautifully is the muddle that exists, for children and for adults, as secrets and lies and not knowing become all jumbled up.
***
Back in California in 1976, the children from the bus kidnapping returned to school that autumn, and the majority showed not a dent in their academic performance. Unbeknownst to others, however, many began to fantasize about being heroes or, to be more exact, about being better heroes next time. They imagined scenarios of revenge or escape should they ever be confronted by kidnappers again. Some secretly prepared themselves, with exercise or even weaponry, to be more decisively triumphant in the future—that is, to summon the fight or flight they had not been able to muster right away on that summer day. Although inwardly, many of the children would view the kidnapping as the origin story of their lives, outwardly they preferred not to be reminded of or known for the incident. Later that year, one of the boys was recognized at Disneyland, and some curious parkgoers asked if he was a student from the bus. His reply?
“No, I don’t live in Chowchilla.”
CHAPTER 4
Fight
I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It’s so fuckin’ heroic.
—George Carlin
In 1955, on Kauai, Hawaii’s “Garden Island,” psychologists Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith inadvertently began what would become a groundbreaking and decades-long study of resilience. Their subjects were 698 infants—all of the babies who were born on the island that year. These infants were from Asian, Caucasian, and Polynesian families, many of whom were struggling with multiple adversities. Some lived in chronic poverty and were undereducated and underemployed. Alcoholism or mental illness ran through many of the homes. Werner and Smith hypothesized that the more difficulties these children were exposed to when they were young, the more problems of their own they would have as they grew. This was a commonsense proposition, to be sure, but it was also one that had not, by the 1950s, been empirically demonstrated in a large sample, much less from the cradle and then across time. To do so, these nearly seven hundred brand-new citizens of Kauai were followed, from birth into middle adulthood, by psychologists, pediatricians, public health professionals, and social workers.
Unfortunately, Werner and Smith were somewhat right. Two-thirds of the infants they labeled as “high-risk”—those who grew up alongside four or more adversities—had serious behavioral or learning problems by age ten. By age eighteen, they struggled with their own delinquency or mental illness, and many had become pregnant. What Werner and Smith did not expect, however, was that, despite their troubled beginnings, one-third of the high-risk children went on to become “competent, confident, and caring adults.” They earned educations and held better jobs than their parents. They sidestepped the substance abuse or divorce or domestic violence they had once known, found supportive partners, and built loving families. They were, in Werner and Smith’s words, “vulnerable, but invincible.”
This startling discovery turned Werner and Smith’s work on its head. What was intended to be an inquiry about the devastating impact of early adversity became a seminal work about the possibility of transcending it. How exactly had these vulnerable children managed to make themselves invincible, if they were indeed so? There is no formula, of course, but decades of further research—both in the Kauai sample and in other studies—point to adaptations and conditions that facilitate one’s “overcoming the odds,” the title of one of Werner and Smith’s books on the topic. Perhaps most notably, when Werner and Smith asked these “vulnerable, but invincible” adults how, in retrospect, they understood their own unexpected success, the answer was not all that surprising: The majority reported that determination—a fighting spirit—was their most important asset.
***
Paul looks like a superhero. Or to be more precise, he looks like a superhero might appear on his day off. Behind his glasses, he is handsome in a boy-next-door kind of way, and right now he appears to be about that age superheroes always seem to be, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five. His muscles strain a bit against his T-shirt, not so much that his bulk seems strange or steroidal but enough to give the impression that, underneath his casual exterior, Paul is surprisingly strong. He comes across as squeaky-clean and friendly, but he is guarded, too. Paul seems like the kind of person who would fare well in an emergency, like he is fit to take on the world, and in a way he is.
Paul is a nuclear engineer and a young officer in the navy. He found his way to me after he read a book I wrote on the importance of one’s twenties, on the value of making a bold and courageous start in adulthood. He felt validated by the notion that all the hard work he had put into his own twenties would pay off, but he had questions, too. He wondered sometimes if other people his age—especially those not living in barracks or on submarines—were free to enjoy their lives more. They traveled for pleasure, he imagined, and they spent time with their loved ones while he left his partner—a young artist with an alcoholic father—back home alone. He wondered how he could be there for the woman he loved and the country he loved at the same time. Perhaps like many others in service, Paul sometimes looked around and СКАЧАТЬ