vol. 6 issue 2
Greetings.
When I was ten, I kept a three-ring binder of beauty advice torn from the pages of ‘TEEN Magazine, Seventeen, or from copies of McCall’s or Ladies Home Journal if I were lucky enough to spot them in the trash. The binder was stuffed with clear, plastic sleeves filled neatly with whatever tips and tricks about looking one’s best made sense to my pre-adolescent self.
I wasn’t collecting the advice for me. It was for the girls I planned to be friends with at my new school. We were moving to Ohio from Florida. I was nervous, but it was the sixth move of my life, all of them in the South, and — what could be more exciting than snow? I was up for the adventure of trading one season all year for four.
What I hadn’t included in my towheaded calculus was how that cold and snow would impact my wardrobe. My purple denim Garanimal cut-offs and daisy-printed tee shirts became Villager wool cardigans with matching plaid skirts. And, then there were the saddle oxfords. It was the early 1970s; I epitomized “dork”.
Since no one wanted fashion tips from the new girl who looked like Charlie Brown as dressed by Madame Alexander, my plan for how to win friends and influence people bombed. I made one friend, but we moved again, this time across town, and I had to go to yet another school, so we didn’t get to see each other much.
Thankfully, I had a reprieve. We moved to Connecticut the summer before high school began. I redoubled my efforts to fit in through fashion. The irony in Lisa Birnbach’s The Official Preppy Handbook, of which I owned a dog-eared copy, sailed straight over my blonde coiffe, and I seriously dedicated myself to collecting grosgrain ribbons with green and blue, or maybe pink and yellow stripes down them, to tie into little bowties through the collars of my oxford shirts (definitely not shoes).
I wasn’t teased as I had been before, but I was still lonely.
I half-expected we would move again, given our history, but we didn’t, so I needed a new strategy to work on the same crowd. I reverted to letting others know I knew things. Not fashion this time, but hard, cold facts!
Despite my abject fear of humiliation, which was real, I persisted. I always had my hand up in class. Sometimes, to my horror, I would get the answer wrong, but not usually. I also challenged others’ versions of the answers and got good at debate. I would seethe and pout when others got more attention for their intelligence. It made me question my own: Maybe I wasn’t actually the smartest girl in the room, which was my quest.
To bolster my position, I collected information. All the information.
Ephemera I have memorialized in lists that fill dozens of journals and notebooks stretching back to the 1980’s, are proof of just how obsessed I was with knowing everything. Flight and song patterns of Eastern US birds; bits of poetry; verb conjugations in French and Spanish; handy Irish language phrases; which wine with which meal. If you had a question, I had an answer.
Four decades later, I recognize that what started as a naive survival strategy has morphed into a limited world view. I thought knowing things would make me safe; instead, it made me less safe, less stable, even.
Now, after examining this impulse, it also makes me highly suspicious of the motivations behind identity politics.
So, then, what is the alchemical agent that transforms the stasis of what we think we know into the dynamism of wisdom we might gain?
And how might that wisdom be protective?
My scheme to know everything in high school had a clear effect, if not the one I desired. One girl named me The Walking Dictionary, which made me beam, even if I detected sarcasm. The brass ring, however, was that I seemed to inspire a new superlative category for the senior yearbook committee: “Most Likely to Ask a Question”.
If ever I had a positive thrill in those four years of hell, it was when I saw that on the ballot, with my name topping the list of candidates.
As I had hoped and expected, the winners were the mouthiest, but clever, boy in our class, and me.
It soon became a hollow victory.
The day our yearbooks were distributed, I was actually happy. I looked forward to seeing my “achievement”.
The accompanying picture to the category printed in the yearbook featured a history teacher looking anguished as the two of us students talked at her from each side. The superlative now read, “Teacher’s Headache.”
It wasn’t the only unannounced edit. My name had been changed to Twitney under my senior photo. Other bits I had submitted to run with my picture were also edited into insults.
My fortress of knowledge crashed to the ground as my worst fear was realized: I was worthless and would forever be remembered as such. That meant alienation.
Although the instability of my childhood home life contributed to my fragility, it was this anonymous act of public humiliation that was the watershed moment of my psychic disintegration. This made it hard to pursue and sustain the work career I wanted.
One of the very few things I never questioned in my life was that I would be a writer. But seeing my name this way shocked me to the core. I became terrified of seeing my name in print.
When an opportunity came in my late 20s to author two books, I took it, but I used a pseudonym. I was in my 40s before I was finally able and willing to sustain a fulltime job as a reporter with bylines.
The sad irony was that I had become afraid to be a person responsible for knowledge.
A few days after the discovery, at the Senior holiday party when we were supposed to share our yearbooks and sign them, I sat alone in the woods. I felt insubstantial. Suddenly, I had the sensation of being stabbed in the heart. Then, I was aware I was floating above my body. I “returned” but couldn’t speak. I have no recollection of what happened after that. When I described this to a psychiatrist friend decades later, we agreed it was possible I had had a psychotic break.
Years later, I told my mother about it. She asked why it was that at the time it happened, I hadn’t told anyone or asked for the principle to investigate who had done this to me.
It was my shame, of course. I had no inner scaffolding supporting that know-it-all girl. A more normal, and I think even healthier, response would have been to immediately go on a rampage, find whoever had done this, and stomp the shit of that person.
What happened instead is that I became impotent, a victim wounded so deeply, I gave up having impact. No — I gave up taking responsibility for my impact. I became above reproach. Special.
Lately, I have been reviewing my thoughts and observations as I recorded them in Moleskines, and sometimes spiralbound notebooks, between the ages of 24 and 42 years.
Two decades of retrospective data! Yummy.
There are documented moments of love, and of wonder, almost always to do with nature or with being a mother. There are clear attempts to break free from my pain and anguish, but soon after an enlightened entry would come another one, filled with anger that I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong and why I couldn’t get my way.
In sum, it is a detailed chronicle of all the ways in which I have been unhappy, lonely, and unloved. Also, absolved. Jobs I couldn’t keep, the people I couldn’t get along with, all the ways I failed. Not my fault!
I have had a starring role in a show about the envious outsider who doesn’t get to have what others have, the distinct plotline stretching all the way back to age 10, that time when I sheltered a quivering flame of hope that I might be included in a tight tribe of little bff beauties.
If I hadn’t also been the one to live the life outside of these journals, I might never have believed this girl/teen/woman could be capable of happiness, compassion, or even kindness.
Yet, I know that my life is filled with evidence of the ways in which I have acted in good faith, met my deadlines, kept my word, been grateful, offered support and generosity to others. I also have risen above when people have been shitty to me.
I do not consciously think of myself as a dark soul, a gloomy or manipulative pain in the ass. Well, clearly others in my past have seen me that way, and some still do.
So, what is the truth?
Over the course of last year, I was confronted with seven people telling me how awful I am. They told me to my face, in emails, and over the phone. (My second ex-husband wasn’t one of them. Credit where it is due…)
Seven severances might sound like the basis of a Guy Ritchie plot, but it was less fun.
The reasons for these fallouts were various, and I have contemplated them all. With the exception of one person who set me up to be harmed, I can’t take them seriously.
But that is beside the point.
I’ve come to see that if my story of pain and alienation is to remain true, I need people to act like assholes. These seven folks just did their asshole jobs and I thank them. I’d like to think I was a stellar asshole in their own dramas.
What brings all this to mind?
The day I woke up and suddenly was clear that it was time to start publishing again, six people from six utterly separate chapters of my life contacted me to say that on that very day, I had popped into their minds unbidden, leading them to wonder how I was. And then, ta-da, I landed in their email box.
I hadn’t known what to make of the coincidence, but the outpouring of love and support by text, phone, and email was like a delicious feast with excellent wine (the latter of which I do miss here in Appalachia).
But I lost my taste for that pleasure immediately after the seventh communication arrived that day, this time from a person who historically has been supremely important in my life. This missive was not mean, but the bottom line was please go away, Whitney, you bring me nothing but sorrow.
Might it have been my victimhood, my entitlement, my need to be rescued rather than be self-reliant, my selfishness? Ouch. You get the picture.
And unlike the other haters, this person does have integrity.
A day or so after I recovered from being winded, I got to thinking about all of last year’s grief and fear. Was I wiser, or was I going to revert to being a victim?
Another watershed moment.
One of the magnificent seven of my said detractors is a lesbian activist, who last year shared with me that tall people who confess to having had difficult childhoods as a result of their height really piss her off. Or, she clarified, not just tall people, but anyone with stupid conditions they have the temerity to elevate into “real” problems, which I took to mean, like growing up a lesbian at a time when it wasn’t acceptable.
She, a white privileged person, had previously clarified to me my status as a white privileged person who needed to mitigate this condition, and so had given me books to read on how to do so. As such, what she would have made of my childhood trauma I can only guess, but I suspect it wouldn’t rate much.
If my pain isn’t important, then does that mean I don’t matter, either?
If this woman is to be believed, she has undergone some harrowing, shaming events as a result of being both a lesbian and an activist. I don’t think any of the violence she reports having put herself in the face of are situations I would ever be willing to endure, and, also to her point, given my “privilege”, probably will ever have to endure.
Yet, I recognize many do choose this path. I also accept that in this world of hierarchy, violence is a given, and some people will be more exposed to violence than others, whether or not they expect and/or welcome it.
But do the people who are beaten, raped, and maimed have a greater right to feel pain than I do? Than tall people do? Than anyone else with any condition? Does my relatively low risk of ever encountering this level of pain and terror make me less capable of perceiving it and empathizing with its victims?
I don’t see this woman as proxy for activists at large, but the ramifications of ranking people’s pain, as in a sort of sinister triage, disturbs me.
No matter how you answer these questions, the implication of her statement is that pain is political, not personal. And anyway, who gets to do the ranking? Nazis? Lesbian Avengers?
Pain ranking seems to me, the underbelly of hierarchy that thrives on convincing us of our specialness. It obscures the real foundation of democracy, that we are all equal but not the same. And we all matter.
I can never know what it is to be a lesbian, a black woman, a (fill in the blank), but I do know what it is to be unwanted, humiliated, and an outcast. Generally, that makes me empathetic. Empathy is inclusive. Is anger? It depends, I think. Not when the anger is wielded by someone who enraged they aren’t getting what they want, pretending they are outraged over mistreatment of others. They’re not the same thing. The former is self-righteous, the latter is compassionate.
Because I have carried a passport from the Nation of Poor, Pitiful Me for 40+ years, feeling entitled to be special ever since I chose to shellack my childhood traumas, of which there were many, with self-pity, I think I can be believed when I suggest that if we rank and sort people according to how special their pain makes them — in other words, give them a less-than identity that entitles them to more-than — we will not be compassionate to one another. We will just compete.
Competition over resources and compassion for those who need them are mutually exclusive. Prove me wrong if you disagree.
Meanwhile, what I am saying is: identity politics is a trap. Even if the stories backing up that identity are deeply rendered. At the global level, it is also true. Consider the wars of pride and property we now face.
The more willing we are to believe in how our particular pain makes us more special than anyone else, more entitled to resources, the more rapidly we will turn on each other, even more than we have already.
Identifying strongly with our stories anymore, it just seems to me more about manipulation than being present and authentic.
Anyway, what did I choose that day when told to get lost?
It’s been a process. I do admit at first, I was hurt, and when I am hurt, I eventually get angry. Which is what happened.
But what kind of anger was it? Was I enraged or outraged?
The arrival of the email had coincided with me reading through all those journals. As I encountered dozens of the less than flattering depictions of myself written in my own hand, I recognized I was not exactly enraged, but indignant. It’s a shade less than enraged, but of the same hue, and one I apparently know well.
But in a moment of grace, I became outraged — with myself. The truth was that I had been the one to choose the identity of “the one who ‘knows’ and who was hurt as a result” instead of the equally true, “the one who was hurt but who has also been loved, and so is forever rediscovering who she is, and who she can be…”
I chose the pain. Not at first, that was just fucking meanness by someone who to this day hasn’t copped to it. But after that, I chose it.
That’s been what I have been wrassling all these weeks since I first started publishing again. The fact that I am the instrument of my own pain because I have identified with it so strongly, it was what I “know” — and I am all about the knowing.
Except, while I am proud of and tender with the hurt girl I have been — she was just looking for a survival strategy and here I am alive and kicking to prove she succeeded — the hurt girl lives in the past. The future can't be the past, unless it's more of the same. Racism, sexism, binarism, ageism, all the isms, they are real, but they are generated in the past. Why do we want to keep sending them back from the future?
It has taken thousands of years, but the drama on the world stage to me indicates what we know is collapsing. The cognitive dissonance of trying to fit the cycles and equality of democracy on a straight, up and down line is ending. All the old way can offer us is pain because it is not regenerative, and it separates and alienates us. It is deathly. We are the ones who won’t let it go. Why?
If my own experience is indicative, I think it’s our addiction to being special, to thinking our identities will keep us safe. There is no pharmaceutical solution to this addiction. The only remedy is choice.
But first, you have to question your truths.
So, to answer my question, curiosity is the alchemical agent that turns knowledge into wisdom. But you can’t just be curious once.
Reading through my journals, I have been on the precipice of these insights before. But I wasn’t curious enough to explore how to ground them. I chose instead to see if I could be stealthily special.
This time, at this precipice, this watershed, I chose to let the indignation go.
I can grow up, heal that hurt girl, at last. I can have compassion for her, and for others.
Global war is coming, I believe. Not tomorrow, but sooner than we are willing to admit. When all falls down, what will we build in its place? If we remember that identities separate us, and emphasizes that separation, when the war ends, how will seek unity while allowing each human to express what is uniquely their own?
I keep going back to the abundant nature of our planet which gives of itself freely to us. Will we seek to continue our extractive, competitive ways? Or will we dream of something new?
Whatever may be, it will be our choice.
Well friends, I am pooped. This took a long time to think this through and write clearly. Tomorrow I am headed to Terre Haute, Indiana to experience the path of totality of the Solar Eclipse. And then I will be at work on something else.
All the promises I have made about rundles, books, more publications — they’re all in the works, but thanks for your patience throughout.
You are such an encouraging, thoughtful audience. Thank you for all the emails and continued support. See you all again very soon!
Peace,
Whitney
I'm glad you became a writer. You're really good at it. This was such a thoughtful interesting piece. xxoo.
Having to parse this excellently crafted piece by reading it twice, was essential Whitney!
Reflecting on life’s large and small lessons, has brought a level of clarification. Along with essential inner-peace. However I haven’t the knowledge to describe in such an intimate manner as you’ve described yours, thanks!!