Supernormal. Мэг Джей
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Название: Supernormal
Автор: Мэг Джей
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Личностный рост
isbn: 9781782114956
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• What it is like to be recognized for your good deeds or accomplishments while who you are underneath may not be known to anyone, even to yourself.
• What is it like to seem invulnerable and invincible such that few seem to realize that you are human.
• What it is like to manage a secret identity, and to grapple with how much to reveal about yourself and to whom.
• Why some supernormals are afraid to be partners or parents, sometimes missing out on experiences that have the power to make things right.
• Why supernormals’ greatest, and often last, battle is not between good and bad out in the world—it is between good and bad on the inside.
• Why for supernormals, in the end, it is the ordinary that may feel truly extraordinary.
Ralph Nichols, probably best known as the father of the field of listening, said that “the most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and to be understood.” It is my hope that, after reading the chapters ahead, supernormals everywhere will better understand their lives and themselves—and they will see that there are countless others who can understand them, too.
***
One of the most often repeated, but perhaps inaccurate, sayings about families is this one by Leo Tolstoy: “Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Those who grew up in unhappy situations may look different from one another from the outside, yet on the inside they have a great deal in common. Up until now, though, much of the conversation and research about childhood adversity have taken place in silos, which inadvertently keep supernormals separated from one another. Children of alcoholics feel they can only be understood by other children of alcoholics; sexual abuse survivors imagine they may find support only at sexual assault resource centers; research on emotional abuse is read mostly by other researchers. And while at any given time, about one-third of my practice is made up of men and women who were unhappy at home not because of their parents, but because of their siblings, their struggles are rarely included in discussions, or even counted in the estimates, of childhood adversity at all. When we include the narratives of many different adversities and individuals together—between the front and back covers of a single book—perhaps we can see there is a bigger story here. It is the untold story of a diverse group of women and men who are united by the experience of striving and thriving outside the so-called average and expectable. It is a story that begs the question of what normal—or average and expectable—even means.
Supernormal is that untold story of adversity and resilience. It is the tale of those who soar to unexpected heights after hardship and heartbreak in childhood. It shows the world that fighting back against one’s past is as courageous—and complex—as are supernormals themselves. The supernormal adult is an everyday superhero, and sometime antihero, who has strength and secrets that even those closest to him may not now. Donning a cape in the service of others, he may use his powers to be good and do good even as he struggles with exhaustion. Wearing a mask in service of himself, he may live with incredible alienation even as only relationships can save him. Ultimately, Supernormal will take seriously the questions of whether life must be a never-ending battle, whether good can win out in the end, and where exactly love fits in all this. But first, we begin where such sagas always do—with an origin story. There is a moment or a circumstance that sets everything in motion.
CHAPTER 2
Origin Story
I don’t really miss God, but I sure miss Santa Claus.
—Eric Erlandson and Courtney Love, “Gutless”
The sound of hangers scraping woke Sam up. It was a familiar sound, one he had heard through the thick haze of sleep on weekday mornings for as long as he could remember. Sam’s father was a businessman—a manager of some kind—at a paper mill in the next town over, so he started his day sooner than the rest of the family, pushing and pulling his suits and shirts along the metal bar in his closet as he chose what to wear. By the time Sam got out of bed to get ready for school, the only evidence his father had been in the house at all was a nearly empty cup of coffee that sat at the head of the breakfast table. Cold when he got to it, the coffee was sweet with sugar and rich with cream and Sam loved to start his mornings by drinking it up.
This time when Sam heard the hangers, it was different. It was too dark to be morning, and the screeching and scraping went on for longer than usual. Plus there had been that fight—one that seemed worse than usual—between his parents the night before. When he heard his father walk out of his bedroom and start down the hall, Sam knew he was leaving—not for work, but for good. He padded to the doorway and peeked out, just in time to see his father moving through the last few feet of the shadowy corridor, his brown hard-sided suitcase in hand. As he watched his father go, Sam thought about calling out and saying something: maybe Wait, don’t go!
Instead, he said to himself, It’s for the best.
Betraying his more complicated feelings, Sam tiptoed to his sister’s room where he knew his mother would be sleeping, and he shook her shoulder until she grunted a groggy “Huh . . .”
“Dad’s gone,” Sam whispered to her, feeling someone should be informed of this significant turn of events.
“Go back to bed,” was all she said.
Sam did.
He was nine years old and it was a school night.
***
Every resilient child has an origin story. This is a story that does not begin with “I am born”; instead, like Superman’s being sent away from his home planet Krypton or like Spider-Man’s spider bite, there is an event or a circumstance that places the child on his desperate and courageous path. In the words of pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, “a change occurs which alters the whole life of the child.” Something happens that is so consequential that life simply cannot go back to the way it was, and the way it is now feels broken somehow. “My seven-year-old world humpty-dumptied, never to be put back together again,” writes Maya Angelou about being raped as a child. Sometimes, though, there is a circumstance that is not like a spider bite at all in that it is there from the start, such as when a baby is born into extreme poverty or to a parent who is mentally ill. For the supernormal child, in one way or another, continuity and connection are splintered: There is a before and an after. Or a then and a now. Or a me and an everyone else.
Most often, changes that alter the life of the child take place over months or even years—such as when a sibling becomes ill, when a town deteriorates, or when a parent starts drinking—but the changes feel abrupt and cataclysmic nonetheless. “No one hired a skywriter and announced crack’s arrival,” rapper Jay Z remembers about growing up in Marcy Houses in Brooklyn. “But when it landed in your hood, it was a total takeover. Sudden and complete. Like losing your man to gunshots. Or your father walking out the door for good. It was an irreversible new reality. What had been was gone, and in its place was a new way of life that was suddenly everywhere and seemed like it had been there forever.”
For Sam, his father’s leaving was that total takeover, that origin story. When he thought about his life, the story always started there. That night was not Sam’s earliest memory, but it was his first memory—the first moment—of his irreversible new reality. It was the change that rearranged Sam’s family and the roles his family members would play for decades to come. And as he stood there in СКАЧАТЬ