“But I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.”
“Yes,” said Harriet, “but I am one of them. I disconcert myself very much. I never know what I do feel.”
“I don’t think that matters, provided one doesn’t try to persuade one’s self into inappropriate feelings.”
How many of us have heard ourselves called these things, either by others, or by the voices rattling around the chambers of our own skulls? Maybe we got lucky. Maybe no one ever said the words. But, I’m betting, most of us have heard the message loud and clear. There is a certain way of being, a type of person you are supposed to be. And you aren’t measuring up. Perhaps the message didn’t come in name calling. Perhaps it was more insidious. “That isn’t like you.” “I know you don’t really feel that way.” “That’s so out of character for you.”
Or, maybe the message wasn’t addressed directly to you, but you chose to accept it, to open the envelope, read it, and take it as yours anyway. Perhaps it came in the form of a criticism of people ‘like’ you – people who eat meat, or shun gluten, or are divorced, or who have multiple children, or have chosen no children; people who home school, who invest in private schools, who send their children to public schools; people who love more than once, people who love differently from the speaker, people between relationships; people who are creative, people who are outgoing, people who are shy…The list of ways of being that we learn are not okay is nearly endless.
And pointless.
No one knows who you are. Not always. No one knows who I am. Sometimes not even me. Why? Because, the person I am – the person you are – is an ever shifting tangle of feelings, traits, experiences, and inconsistencies. Forget layers. We are kaleidoscopes. We are shifting fragments of color, light, and shadow. Our patterns change with movement, with experience, and they change depending on who is holding us.
The person writing this blog right now is not the person who will be on the phone interviewing a source in an hour. Nor is she the person who went to bed last night.
So, is there a core person in there somewhere? Yes. Of course. I may be shaped by my experiences. Certain traits may leap to the fore depending on my company, the conversation, my level of physical well-being, and a host of other factors. But, somewhere underneath, below the shifting patterns, I’m still there.
Sadly, most of us get to be pretty good at hiding the core person. We’re social animals, and we mirror the cues of others for acceptance. Give me about 15 minutes, and your accent will begin to creep into my voice. Also, we live in a world that is remarkably intolerant of all things unique or inconsistent. Have you ever lived in a subdivision with that house on the block? You know, the one that was painted some color off of the earth-tone section of the wheel? Or where the owners tinkered with their car in the driveway, even though everyone else on the block parked in the garage? Do you remember that kid in school? The one who never listened to the music everyone else was singing? The one who talked about weird books and didn’t have a clue about the hottest TV shows?
Even societies that pride themselves on iconoclasm expect a certain level of conformity. Try living in certain “liberal” communities as someone who eats meat, refuses to attempt to bake gluten-free anything, and lets the kids watch Die Hard as a Christmas movie. No one will say it, not outright, but it is easy to get a sense that something about your way of being is not okay.
When it comes to feelings things get even more tricky. How many of us try to talk ourselves into the things we should feel? How often do we deny our own points of inconsistency – with society or with ourselves? Okay, I’m coming out of the inconsistent closet here. Feel free to add your own contradictions, quirks, foibles, etc. in the comments. Please.
I have devoted my adult life to the preservation of animal welfare, but I eat meat and believe in the humane slaughter of horses.
I have three children whom I adore, feel passionate about child development, and have absolutely no interest in kids I don’t know.
I don’t really find newborn babies adorable.
I would be fine with kicking our TV to the curb, but I’m the first one to turn it on after the kids go to bed.
I state a preference for being alone, yet I’m the one who usually suggests hosting a party.
I’m inherently shy, but refuse to dress in a way that lets me fade into the background.
I like to climb trees, dig in the dirt, and wear stilettos.
I believe in a divine power, but chances are I won’t discuss it with you, nor am I comfortable hearing about your beliefs – most of the time.
I hate Hallmark cards, but their commercials make me cry.
I consider myself the equal of any man, almost any time, but I still like it when a guy makes me feel delicate.
I’m big on balanced nutrition and seasonal produce, but I won’t take vitamin supplements and I think most “natural” remedies are for suckers. However, I only buy ginger to offset nausea or motion sickness.
The list could go on for pages, and I’m sure anyone who knows me well can think of two or three or fifteen points to add to the list. However, the point isn’t the individual paradoxes. The point is learning to accept what we really do feel. And perhaps, learning to be a bit more accepting of those things in others which strike us as “off.”
Today I’d like to tell you a story of four people, two girls and two women. Like all stories, this one speaks of more than the characters or events around them. But, it speaks quietly, and you’ll only hear it if you listen.
The first girl grew up in an era of Saturday morning cartoons, of city-sponsored sports leagues, and of herds of children roaming the suburban plains. She was tall and usually thin for her age. She wore coke bottle glasses and usually seemed to be looking somewhere else – somewhere that didn’t exist. She was the girl who was always picked last in PE, for any sport, even though she wasn’t nearly the worst at some, and was even pretty good at things like floor hockey. She enjoyed sleepovers with one or two friends, but at a slumber party, she would crawl deep into her sleeping bag with her pillow over her head, wishing for a light to read by, and praying that the ghost stories would stop. Whenever the teacher assigned a group project, she would sit quietly, barely participating, even though her report card held more A’s than anyone else’s. She didn’t hear her classmates make the wrong choices or assumptions. She didn’t hear whether they had good ideas. She couldn’t hear anything over the roaring in her own ears.
By all accounts, the red-haired woman was fearless. Tall and athletic, she could handle just about any horse, and would go toe-to-toe with the most cantankerous rancher. “She’s pretty tough.” “You wouldn’t want to get in her way,” people said. She organized educational seminars for horse owners, spoke to groups, and quickly became the public face for her clinic.
The second woman slunk into parties behind her husband, even though, in heels, she was several inches taller than he. Often low cut, always form-fitting, never frumpy, her clothes didn’t match her demeanor. You’d find her standing in a corner, clutching a drink, eyes watching the room, like a gazelle at a watering hole, waiting for someone to notice her. Eventually she would peel away from the wall, smile, and find a group of one or two sympathetic souls where she would stand at the edge, waiting for someone to let her in. She would talk and laugh with the others, maybe even share a story or two, but only in response to a direct question. She never asked questions of anyone else. She knew it made her look cold, like she didn’t care, but she didn’t want to pry, to ask something that might make it look like she wanted them to reveal too much. She figured that if someone wanted her to know something, they would tell her. After a couple of hours, she would grow quiet again, excuse herself to the bathroom, mention to her husband that it was getting late and maybe they should be leaving soon, or that she was so sorry but she was starting to get a headache.
The second girl is, like the first, tall and wiry, though more developed at the same age. She has a solemn face that can light into a dimpled grin. She was early to talk, and can wax eloquent on subjects that interest her, though the one word used by every teacher at the school is “quiet.” Sometimes they add “responsible” and “kind” and “maybe a little shy.” “She’s not like her brother, is she?” they ask. No, she isn’t. Her brother bounds through life, never meeting a stranger. Social isolation, even to do homework alone in his room, is physically painful for him. The girl, on the other hand, keeps her bedroom like a cave, door closed and curtains drawn. She gets good grades, and will sometimes surprise her teachers and peers with her passion on certain subjects, but most of the time, she complains that the teacher never notices her, and that the other girls never include her. She doesn’t try to join the groups or find areas of common interest. She waits, at the edges of a group, waiting to be invited. Outsiders are surprised when they see how fearless she is, climbing to the highest branches of a tree, or when they see her burly, outgoing brother defer to her instantly, or when, in a low voice, she rebukes or corrects a classmate and the other child listens. Parents and teachers comment in amazed voices at her performance after she holds the stage in a class play. They don’t see her as a performer, or as a leader. Because she stays at the edges, they assume she is passive, a follower. They don’t see the steel.
Maybe you’ve guessed it by now. The first girl and the two women are me. The second girl is my oldest daughter. We are introverts. Yes, even the red-headed veterinarian. There are more of us out there. In her book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain writes that one third to one half of the population are introverts. Yet, we live in a world that treats the introvert as an exception, an anomaly, or – most damaging – and oddball.
Cain does a far better job than I ever could of explaining the world of the introvert. Her book is impeccably researched, readable, and filled with insights that brought me to tears more than once. In fact, I probably could have met the needs of this blog post by simply typing – “Read this book.” Unfortunately, though, the people most likely to read Quiet are the introverts. And while it is a tremendous gift to read a book that helps you to understand that the things that you have always thought made you “not okay” are actually normal, introverts largely know who we are. Introspection is in our nature, wired so deeply into us that an introvert will often look confused when someone remarks on their level of self-awareness. Like most people, introverts tend to assume that there is nothing particularly different about our way of thinking.
This is where everyone needs to read Quiet. While we may understand, intellectually, that everyone’s brain works differently, and that our experience may not be that of someone else, we live in a world that wants to whittle every peg until it fits in the same sized hole.
You would think that for an introvert, raising an introverted child would be the easiest thing in the world. You’d be wrong.
The girl with the glasses got contact lenses, grew up, found people to whom she could relate, and learned to put on the superhero costume of an outgoing expert in professional settings. But, as a mother, she still sees the girl standing at the edges of the playground as a failure. She wishes that the awkward adolescent with the pale blonde hair had figured out earlier that she was just as entitled to be a part of the group as anyone else. She wishes that she had learned to fake enthusiasm, to master the code of “small talk”. She feels that she would have escaped a lot of pain if she’d learned these things when she was younger. She believes the message of her childhood and of the adult world, that to be quiet is to be passive, to prefer solitude is to be anti-social, to have a low tolerance for noise and crowds is to be shy. She believes, in short, that there is something “wrong” with her.
She sees her daughter – bright, eloquent, confident, and fearless at home or with one or two friends – hover at the edges of her peer group, wandering off with a book while the rest of the class chats or plays basketball. She sees this, and the little girl inside the woman cringes. ‘Look what you’ve done,’ the voice in her head chides. ‘She’s turning out just like you. You have to help her come out of her shell. You have to help her be more a part of the group. If she’d just join in more, they’d see how amazing she is.’ And so, in the name of tough love, I have pushed my daughter to join clubs or teams. Pushed her -- with the tight, angry voice that should tell me that this is about my fears and not about her at all – to sit with and practice with, and be a part of her basketball team rather than taking a few moments before the game to sit alone with her book. I have brought home pamphlets for theater groups, pushed her into activities because, “You know you’ll enjoy it once you get there, and you can’t stay home all the time.” Pushed her because I know that the real world eats introverts for lunch.
Fortunately, my daughter is far more stubborn and much less docile than I was as a child. While I was a shy introvert, living in fear of making waves or disappointing anyone, or – heaven forbid! – being “bad,” she knows exactly who she is, and has no problem being that person. What she does have a problem with, is people expecting her to be someone other than who she is. She honestly does not understand why girls who chatter about makeup and clothes, who bounce and flirt, are considered “bright” or “leaders.” She doesn’t see why the outgoing should get the prime roles in class plays even though they sometime have trouble memorizing their lines. She doesn’t understand why they are picked as group leaders, or why when group assignments are made, she is always placed with the kids who have trouble focusing or who don’t care about the assignment. In her head, thought is as important as action or words, and she doesn’t see why people should be expected to cluster in pods or all do the same thing.
She is right. And she’s wrong – I may need to buy her a book on understanding extroverts. At almost 13, she doesn’t understand that people can’t know your gifts if you never show them. She doesn’t see that it is impossible for her teachers or peers to know the depth of her knowledge or enthusiasm if she never lets any of it out.
But, she has grasped something that it takes many introverts decades to realize. She understands that she functions best alone or with one or two other people. She knows that when large groups begin talking, particularly all at once, her brain shuts down – overwhelmed by the stimulation. She already can verbalize the experience, common to introverts and unknown to most extroverts, of being drained by large groups, of feeling as though your energy is being sucked into the room and converted into all of that bubbling enthusiasm. She knows that she needs to be alone sometimes, that her only way to be herself is to wander away with a book. And she’s sick and tired of living in a world where the message is clear: ‘there’s something wrong with that.’
She loses by not making some adaptations to the social order of her class, yes. But the world also loses by not accepting the gifts of introverts when offered.
I have a bumper sticker, given by a friend who knows me well. It says:
Introvert*
*insufficient energy for small talk
Most introverts have had the following experience. (I used to think it was just me.) We find ourselves in a conversation with someone who seems sympathetic. We relax just enough. The other person asks us a question that happens to be about something interesting to us. We answer. In depth. In detail. In lots of detail. This is a thing to which we have devoted hours of thought and or research. The other person looks interested, for a minute or two, but then we notice something. We notice the eyes glazing over, the scanning of the room. We see it coming. Sure enough, the other person excuses him or herself and wanders away.
Both parties have lost. The introvert has just received yet another message that his or her way of being is not okay. And the extrovert has missed out on the insights and the opportunity for a deeper conversation. Yet, this happens all the time: at schools, in the workplace, at parties. We are living in a ten-second soundbite world that is not overly sympathetic to the documentary. And we all lose.
Okay, I’ve taken up a lot of your time with this post, and the introvert in me is squirming at my self-indulgence, but if you are still here, this video is from a TED talk given by Susan Cain. Listen. There are introverts among you.
“Shakespeare is boring.” I’ve heard the declaration throughout my life – from the agonized cries of my classmates in high school English to my peers (and even husband!) as an adult. Shakespeare is boring and hard to understand. Shakespeare is for intellectual snobs.
I’ve never gotten that. For me, Shakespeare wrote life – the entire range of human emotion and experience in gloriously shaded pictures of words. The man is called “the Bard” for a reason. He wrote language that sings, not to professors in dim lecture halls, not to the elite in paneled libraries, but to everyone. This week, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the actor giving us a backstage tour of the theaters in Ashland mentioned that it is estimated that in Shakespeare’s time, some 80% of London’s population crossed the Thames to see his plays. Can you imagine Hollywood’s glee if 80% of a city, any city, made their way into a theater for the latest blockbuster?
But movies, for all of their polish and effects, lack one element that pulses from the stage in a good production and binds the audience. Love.
It is possible – we do it every day – to be moved to laughter, tears, or thought by a movie – but, moviegoers will never feel the connection to the work and to the actors and to each other that comes from seeing a play performed. In Shakespeare’s time, people packed into cities in ways that made Manhattan look like an example of suburban sprawl. You could literally reach out your window and shake hands with the neighbor across the street. Today we fence off quarter acre lots in order to have privacy from our neighbors. We connect via boxes rather than face to face or hand to hand. Our entertainment is computer-generated, polished, censored, rated, and scrubbed. Sure, barring an extreme disaster, most residents of developed cities are unlikely to be felled by cholera, but we are often left trying to purchase connection, trying to fill an inner craving for which we lack the words.
I love Shakespeare, and I love my daughter’s 7th grade class. Still, I’ll admit, I had some misgivings about viewing Romeo and Juliet with a horde of 12 and 13 year olds, particularly when the viewing involved herding them back into cars for a 40 minute drive after they had suffered through the 7 hour, technology-deprived caravan from Davis to Oregon. As we took our seats in a matinee theater packed with junior high and high school students, I looked at the playbill and saw that the running time was over three hours. I regretted not bringing duct tape.
I was wrong. The production, set in the haciendas of 1840s California newly under U.S. rule, had the audience from the first breaths. Caitlin explained it best last night at dinner. “I was sitting next to Collin, and I looked over and he was just like this.” She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and her mouth slightly agape.
Mike asked, “You mean because he was bored, or enthralled.”
“Enthralled.”
It didn’t hurt, of course, that these actors knew their audience. I’ll admit it. I love the bawdy parts of Shakespeare’s plays. I love the raw sensuality of the double entendres that wink but are never coy. I love the language that shows us just how prurient our modern notions of decorum are. I love the sense, whether accurate or not, that there was a time when sex was considered as natural and complete a part of life as jealousy, anger, romantic love, or filial love. For all of our modern fuss and bother about birth control, movie ratings, sexting, pornography, sexual orientation, etc., we have lost sight somewhere along the line of the fact that our minds and spirits are tied to our bodies, and that the enjoyment of the bodies is as important to our experience as the enlightenment of the mine. Sorry, but it’s true.
But, “the play’s the thing.” (Yes, I’m mixing my quotational metaphors; deal with it.) This production ramped up the bawd – in word, expression, and gesture – to so perfectly balance the equal power of the tragedy, that the audience of teens and preteens was left nearly breathless from laughter (and yes) a few tears. For the parents, any brief hopes of the sort we experience when accidentally taking our young to a movie with more “adult” scenes than we would like, hopes that “maybe they won’t get it,” were quickly dashed. Elizabethan language or not, there was no question that the kids “got it.”
Something happened in that theater, though. Sure there were a few gasps and nudges and winks, but pretty soon, Benvolio, Mercutio, the Nurse, et al. had so caught the kids in the story, that the titillation of the forbidden gave way to honest enjoyment. And the “grown ups” gave up decorum and laughed along with the kids. And when Tybalt’s sword ran through Mercutio, we all gasped together.
Afterward, one of the boys – a kid who struggles with reading and language, and sometimes with the emotions not only of his peers but of himself – told me and one of the other chaperones, “I kind of almost cried. When that guy, the funny one with the whip…” (Mercutio carried a bullwhip coiled at his hip.)
“Mercutio?” I asked.
“Yeah, he was funny. I was sad when he died. I really liked him.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I was right there with you. I did cry. Mercutio and Benvolio have always been my favorite characters in Romeo and Juliet.” He looked a little surprised – those were not the scenes that a grownup, a mom, was supposed to like.
That’s the thing about Shakespeare, and about theater in general. It frees us from the “supposed tos” and gives us liberty to think, feel, and love. Each of the plays that our group experience this week showed the range of lengths humans will go to in order to experience love – from the tragic (Romeo and Juliet) to the miraculous (the Chinese legend of The White Snake) to the madcap (the Marx Brothers vaudeville play Animal Crackers.)
And as we walked the sidewalks of downtown Ashland in the grey wind, rain, and snow, as we clustered in the wood-fired buildings of the farm, and as we drove from farm to theater and back, I watched my daughter and her classmates and saw the weird and wonderful ways in which they love.
Love is a loaded word for that age – a word of whispers and painful self-consciousness. Love is a word they have almost outgrown telling their parents, and a word they are nowhere near ready to say to their peers. But it’s there nonetheless.
When a few of the boys emerged from the cars, after seven hours, speaking in British accents that they refused to lose over a four-day period and were not strangled, but were instead embraced, by their classmates, that was love. As they raced each other, heedless of coolness and their usual social order, up and down the grassy hills on the farm, burning the pent up energy of that first long car ride, that was love. Love showed in the off-beat, from the mixture of chagrin, irritation, and pleasure on the face of a kid hit in the face by a snowball from one of his classmates to the tattling for infractions such as climbing too high in a tree or the failure to brush teeth or wear jackets, to the silent and almost oblivious pairing off of introverts seeking a moment of solace from the mayhem.
There won’t be many more snowball fights for these kids as a group. Next year will be their last together as a class. There are only a few moments left before they begin to explore the more conventional definitions of love. As parents, we only have a few breaths to go before we have to hold our breaths, wondering exactly how much of Shakespeare’s double entendres they truly understand and whether that understanding has a practical foundation. The kids whose snow battles yesterday reminded me so much of their first snow trip together in second grade will soon find themselves increasingly bound by the constraints of society and expectation. But, for now, they are more real in their connections to each other than many adults.
We limit ourselves when we try to tidy the human experience. Adult life is often constrained by definitions of love, friendship, sex, pain, and joy. We use words that bind our emotions into tidy boxes – appropriate, inappropriate. And, in doing so, we cut ourselves off from that connection with our humanity. Shakespeare had it right – the human experience is a giant, sloppy mud pie of love, hatred, sexual tension, misunderstanding, laughter, and tears. We can roll around in the language and emotion, laugh, cry, and get dirty, or we can stay clean and safe and watch life roll by on a silver screen.
