Supernormal. Мэг Джей

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СКАЧАТЬ health among adults in the United States.” This is because the chronic stress puts us at risk for all sorts of ailments down the line—from ulcers and depression to cancer and autoimmune diseases. And make no mistake, resilient children and adults are not impervious to this kind of stress. They may be more successful than others at battling back against it—at putting together a life in spite of it—but here is the rub: Battling back is stressful, too.

      A 2017 article in the New York Times titled “Why Succeeding Against the Odds Can Make You Sick” profiled the work of scientists who study resilient strivers, those who worked to overcome childhood disadvantage. The more likely strivers were to agree with statements like these—“When things don’t go the way I want them to, that just makes me work even harder” or “I’ve always felt that I could make of my life pretty much what I wanted to make of it”—the more likely their health was to suffer, leading one researcher to suggest that, when it comes to our health, resilience may be only skin-deep.

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      So here we are in the twenty-first century, some fifty years after the accidental “discovery” of resilience. What began as a quest to follow some superkids and uncover their superstrengths became a journey that researchers surely did not anticipate, one that offered no simple answers but did reveal some important truths: More of us face early adversity than not. Many of us use the ordinary powers at our disposal to fight back against them—and some triumph. And such victories are almost never as easy or decisive as they may appear. These days, few people refer to resilient youth as superkids or invulnerable or invincible or supernormal, but maybe those early researchers were onto something with their superhero comparisons. Because let’s not forget, superheroes are complicated characters.

      The world’s first superhero—Superman—is an iconic American creation, an enduring symbol of the American Dream. Rocketed to Earth as an infant from his home planet of Krypton, Superman first landed on the cover of a comic book—shown in all his red, yellow, and blue glory—in 1938. He is “faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.” And of course he can fly, too: “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman!” Only a chunk of kryptonite from his home planet—a piece from the past—can bring him down.

      Yet as the world would also come to learn, it is not so easy to be the Man of Steel. An orphan and alien, Superman is taken in and cared for by some good people—the Kents—but still, he feels different from those around him, because of his history and the special powers even he does not understand. As he comes of age, he hopes to use his abilities to help others, and to this end he moves from Smallville to Metropolis, where he begins a long—and thus far unresolved—struggle to make the world a better place. As much as Superman may like to live an everyday life as Clark Kent—and maybe even find love with Lois Lane—the world just keeps calling him into action. Peace, it seems, can only be found in his Fortress of Solitude.

      Those who are resilient may not be Superman but maybe they are supernormal—a word that means “exceeding the normal or average.” If, as sociologist Erving Goffman wrote in his classic, Stigma, “the normals” in a society are those who do not depart from the expected, then maybe “supernormals” are those who depart from the expected in oh-so-many ways. Their daily struggles are above and beyond what we think of as “average and expectable,” and their subsequent successes exceed expectations, too. Beating the odds, they live improbable lives, and after decades of academic study no one knows quite how.

      In the pages ahead, I lean on this word—supernormal—and I use it as both an adjective and a noun to refer to those who are resilient. This is meant to be an empathic choice rather than a clever one. I wanted to play some with language—and with the concept of normality—and to choose a word that resonates with what it feels like to be resilient, to live one’s life outside the average and expectable. It is my experience that many of those, like Helen, who most deserve to think of themselves as resilient do not identify with the term—yet. What they do often identify with, as we will soon see, are the stories of superheroes and other daring figures.

      Superman was the prototype for almost all superheroes to follow, and the defining features that are common among most can be found in the lives of many supernormals, too. Like superheroes, supernormals dodge bullets and leap over tall buildings in their way when so many other people around them—even those who have been presented with fewer obstacles—do not. They fight back against the dangers at hand with what looks like ease. Yet as Helen suggested on that first day we met, this is only half the story. Many go on to achieve what feels like high-flying success only to wonder how long they can keep going, or when it all might come crashing down.

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      As the culture that imagined both Superman and the American Dream, we romanticize upward mobility in all forms and sometimes forget about its difficulties: exhaustion, vulnerability, loneliness. Naturally, we are amazed by those who are resilient, yet as we have focused on How do they do it?, we have forgotten also to ask, How does it feel?

      In the chapters ahead, Supernormal uses science and stories in an effort to take up both of these questions together.

      How do they do it? Resilience is most certainly a phenomenon: a highly individual experience that we will never be able to reduce to a formula or algorithm. Yet after decades of study, social scientists do know something about how resilience works, and supernormals everywhere deserve to know it, too. The supernormal feel alienated—“not normal,” as Helen said—at least in part because they feel like curiosities not only to other people but also to themselves. They do not have words for what they have seen, for how they have coped, or for who they are. In the following pages, then, readers will learn the little-known facts about the most prevalent childhood adversities, as well as the latest research on how we adapt to them:

      • What fear does to the brain, and how this results in keeping secrets.

      • How chronic stress leaves our fight-or-flight mechanisms switched on, and how this contributes to our going through our days with remarkable vigilance and determination.

      • How supernormals use anger to feel empowered and optimistic—and how self-control is a powerful weapon, too—but why both must be wielded with intention.

      • How, as children, supernormals escape danger without leaving their homes or neighborhoods, and how, as adults, they use second-chance opportunities to get away for good.

      • How the armor of achievement deflects slings and arrows from the past.

      • How supernormals change their brains, their health, and their communities by forming secret societies, both big and small.

      • Why doing good in the world is good for us, and why love might be the strongest—and most elusive—superpower of all.

      How does it feel? As I worked on Supernormal, the question I was asked most often was this one: “Where will you find people to write about?” Part of the myth of resilience is that the truly resilient are outliers who need to be tracked down or who are in no need of help. The supernormal are all around us, and many have populated my private practice—and the community clinics and lecture halls where I have supervised and taught—for nearly two decades. In the chapters ahead, I tell the stories—in a disguised fashion—of everyday supernormals with whom I have had the privilege to work. The narratives that follow have been chosen not because they are the most shocking, unusual stories of hardship one might find. Rather, they are stunning examples of just how powerful and poignant our most prevalent adversities are, the ones that millions of children and teens wake up to each morning:

      • How hard times divide the world into “insiders” and “outsiders,” and how they split СКАЧАТЬ