I was hanging out with A2, my lower east side girlfriend. We got into a discussion about how we handle similar situations quite differently. She is very much a social extrovert, and when she feels hurt, betrayed, mistreated, or abandoned by people she regards as friends, it is her instinct to seek them out one-on-one and try to settle up emotionally, to let them know her issues with how they’ve behaved and attempt to get a reconciliation with a acknowledgment or an apology. Often this has the result of her being hurt by them a second time, as she makes herself vulnerable to their dismissive scorn or exasperated disinclination to discuss a behavior they don’t feel like defending.
That is so totally not my inclination at all, I told her. “When someone hurts me, my first reaction is to withdraw”, I explained. “Unless it’s a really special relationship with deep trust, I am quick to think I was silly to believe they really liked me in the first place, and there’s more dignity in a quick retreat, or at least waiting to see if they’ll reach out in a friendly way without me prompting them to reconnect. No way I’m going to corner them and tell them they hurt my feelings, they might already be laughing at me as it is!”
There are a lot of insights to be gained from having someone in your life who isn’t like you, who doesn’t think like you do. Although I started off thinking of myself as giving her advice and recommending my way of handling these situations as an improvement over how she does it, it quickly got me to examining my own, and how defensive it is, how carefully I’ve walled myself off from emotional risks (at least with casual to moderate friendships), and whether my approach is indicative of some pathological adaptations, you know?
Today’s blog post is about the damage done to me (and, by extension, to similar people with similar social experiences and histories) by years of being a social outcast and misfit. So it’s an elaboration of sorts on why I’m doing all this, why it matters.
As hinted at above, when someone hurts me, I am quick to think it wasn’t accidental and wasn’t because of unresolved stuff with that person that we should discuss and work out, but instead means that I was SET UP. That’s rather paranoid, isn’t it? And it means I’ve made a quick leap to the worst possible scenario, since if this is true it means there was no real friendship at all, I had just been fooled into believing there was – for the sole purpose of making me look ridiculous.
How would this setting-up thing work?, you may ask.
Well, in 5th grade you could get invited to a birthday party along with some other kids, but when you show up everyone ridicules you for thinking anyone would want you at their birthday party, and they make fun of the gift that you brought and they tell you you can’t play the games they’re playing, and they make fun of your clothes. And you can decide to keep pushing yourself forward, jumping into the swimming pool anyway (perhaps to get your head held underwater or your eyeglasses hidden) or you can wonder why the heck you thought you wanted to spend time with these people anyway and grab your things and quietly leave, killing time reading comics at the 7-11 so your folks don’t realize you left the party early.
In 8th grade you could let the other kids convince you they’re trying to normalize you and include you, to get you to conform and be like them, and you let them lead you to where they are playing spin the bottle, and it only gradually dawns on you that the real game is to discomfit whatever girls ended up having to kiss you, so as to tease them later, “ha ha you kissed him you kissed the weirdest kid in school”. You notice that if you act playful or interested, she – whoever she is – goes even farther out of her way to express an attitude of “just get it over with”. And maybe you wonder if there wasn’t some genuine attempt to include you and get you to join the others and be more normal, but everyone’s so used to mocking you that if anyone does, everyone else will laugh with them. Being more sophisticated than you were in 5th grade, you are learning options that fall between flouncing off and expecting to be included, and you become good at participating without investing much trust or hope.
In 10th grade when your neighbor is going to be picked up by friends to go off to a pot party, and you ask if you can tag along, you end up waiting in the driveway for an hour before deciding they aren’t going to swing by and let you hop in. The best way, the most mature way to handle these things is to just be accustomed to it and not get upset or surprised or hurt, because what’s the point? Some people don’t want you around. Some people don’t care and would include you but more often than not they’re going to place a higher value on the connections they have with the ones who don’t want you around.
There’s a movie that came out in the 1990s, Dogfight, the premise of which was that a bunch of guys were to compete with each other to see who could bring the ugliest girl to the dance. The main character in the movie is a nice but not conventionally attractive (at least as dressed and made up and styled) girl who initially believes the Marine who invites her to the dance. I recognized the experience when I saw it: yep, that’s being set up. Different specifics, same game.
The damage that gets done to a person is that they learn not to expect much. If a possibility seems attractive and interesting, there’s a suspicious reaction that cuts in before any enthusiasm: what’s the catch? where’s the hook and how does it get set in this one? Over time, that kind of suspiciousness becomes a standoffishness. I’ve often referred to myself as a “shy snob”. A casual and cynical contempt takes root, in which one expects the worst from people and wants less and less from them. Learns to need less and less from people. I tend to think that even some of my facial agnosia (not readily recognizing people’s faces until I have seen them many times) and my difficulty learning people’s names are side-effects of this. A long habit of keeping people at bay.
I wasn’t always that way. There was a time before. I think the last time I made a real effort to be outgoing and connect with people, the last time I set out to shine socially – and be popular, even – was 5th grade. I hadn’t made many friends the previous year, which had been my first year in a new elementary school, and during the summer before 5th grade I made my preparations. I was going to show them who I was and they would like me.
The little things I’d not paid much attention to before, like being taken shopping for new school clothes and 3 ring notebooks and so forth, became things I cared about. I remember picking out a 3 ring notebook that looked like it was made of leather, and had nice subject pockets inside in subdued variations of shaded gray with a pebbled texture. The paper was college ruled. You can tell a man by the little things like the tasteful choice of his notebook. I picked out a comb to keep in the tray under my desk seat so I could keep my hair combed. I selected a miniature appointment book in the same design as the notebook to keep in my back pocket to put notes and appointments in. I obtained a pack of Clorets breath freshener chewing gum for after lunch so as to always have fresh breath. I picked out nice plaid shirts each of which was to go with a specific pair of solid twill pants that they coordinated with. I changed from my typical choice of boring black leather shoe to a rich brown suede Hush Puppies shoe. I was ready to unveil the new me on the first day of class.
All year long, it seemed that the more I tried to show off a bit and be an interesting non-wallflowery character, the more ridicule and hostility I provoked. It was awful. The lesson sank in and I never did that again.
I learned to step back and get out of people’s way. I learned never to ask things of people, lest they blast me with contempt for daring to do so. I unlearned things too. I forgot how to remember names and faces. I forgot to expect good outcomes, pleasant encounters, fun. Then, later, I had to unlearn or relearn all that even though the reasons continued to apply a good portion of the time.
Then there’s the Big Worry, that’s the other primary damage that gets done. You see, I knew, after a few additional years of this, that I was Other, that I was Different. But I didn’t know what made me Other. I wondered about it, I thought about it a lot: was it intelligence, was I just unusually smart and the other kids were so much less so? I wanted to believe that, for presumably obvious reasons, there was a lot of compensatory ego stroking in that particular explanation. But I wasn’t so intelligent that I never encountered other kids who were as smart or even smarter (at least in some ways) and not all the smart kids were singled out for this kind of treatment. Well, was it because I was a nonconformist and everyone else was a fad-following conformist sheep? Oh, I liked that one, too. All that pressure for everyone to be like everyone else, and for what? Why were kids making it practically a moral imperative to have your hair cut the same way or wear the same style of clothes or listen to the same music?
Among all these considerations of what might be making me Different was the fact that I was more like one of the girls than I was akin to the other boys. Yeah, of course I knew that about myself, but it didn’t stand out to me yet as The Reason Why. Kids are verbally abusive and much of what they call each other is chosen not because it fits accurately but because it is derogatory, chosen merely because it is an insulting thing to call another kid. So, yes, I was called faggot and queer, but I was also called things like retardo and skinny little toothpicks and square and weirdo. And keep in mind that not fitting in means not seeing yourself as others see you, at least not very clearly.
So the Big Worry that got planted and grew within me was “something is WRONG with me”. Something unknown, unspecified. Something I could never dismiss because it could be anything, really, from an infinite array of negative traits or impairments or character defects that I hadn’t considered or admitted to myself yet.
A2 says that although I don’t have a multitude of friends, I have very good friends who care a lot about me, and that I have picked well, they are very good people who are kind and intelligent and fun to be with. Like so many social impairments there are flip sides to my situation, strengths and advantages to the shape that my character has taken. And I am who I am in large part because of what I have been through, and I do like being who I am.
I’m still working on my trust issues. I have a pro forma trust approach, I accept the risks and accept in advance whatever may happen. But my expectations are still colored dark. I have had to learn to suspend the paranoid suspicion of being set up. That too is pro forma. I tell myself often that my species is damaged.
I less often confess to the damage that was done to me but yes I want these lessons to cease to be taught.
This is a repost of a blog entry. Cleared with the mods in advance.