Many of the writing clients I work with have spent some time in workshops or MFA programs where writers gather around and talk and talk and talk about each other’s stories. All the attention in these environments is on The Manuscript. What is right with The Manuscript and what is wrong with The Manuscript? Is this sentence over the top, or stylistically daring? Should a character be dropped or a new one introduced?
Typically, these authors arrive with their manuscript in hand, ready to get to work. Typically, I will not even look at that manuscript during our first session. I certainly understand the impulse to focus exclusively on the manuscript. If this thing were what it should be, if it were polished and engaging and ready to be published, they wouldn’t need me. The problem is the manuscript. Let’s fix the problem. But the problem is rarely in the manuscript, and is almost always within the author. It is impossible for an author to tell the story he/she most wants to tell if that author simultaneously believes no one reads this sort of story any more, or the market is too crowded, or they aren’t smart enough, or talented enough. The list goes on. Clear away these useless thoughts, and the manuscript usually finds its form. The same is true for parents of kids on the spectrum. How easy it is to only focus only the kid, the kid, the kid. The problem is the kid. How do we get the kid to start doing this and stop doing that? What therapies should we try? Should we use drugs? What about vitamins? What about gluten? What should we do about the kid? If only I could fix this kid I could know that he is going to be all right and I could be happy. There are nights that happiness feels like something I have necessarily deferred until the question of the kid has been answered. Isn’t this what it means to be a good parent? I have decided for myself that it is not. I cannot think of one instance where I have received a clear and enlightening answer to the question, “What should I do about Sawyer?” Likewise, all my attempts to fix him – and there have been many – have failed. Though I am his father, I have no actual power over him. His will is precisely as free as mine. If I forget this, he will remind me. And so the best question I can ask myself is: What if no one is broken? What if I am not broken and he is not broken? What if all the people I disagree with and fear are not broken? What if no one is the world has ever been or could be broken? What would I do then? To ask this question is to correct the only thing I have any power to correct – namely, my perception. I could no more fix Sawyer or myself than I could teach a mouse to fly. But if I believed that mouse were a bird, I might heave into the air and mourn its violent return to the earth. What a tragedy. The world of broken people is a tragic world, a world where true happiness is won through the roulette wheel of talent or genetics or indifferent coincidence. It is a world where no one is free, and extinction is the only certainty. Who would live in such a world by choice? No one, or course, and yet I must choose everyday, with every action, with every thought, where I wish to live.
0 Comments
A friend who reads this column recently pointed out to me that I sometimes represent myself as possessing Buddha-like compassion. She expressed distress that she usually does not feel about her two sons the way I appear to feel about mine. A mother’s guilt can be profound enough every time she loses her temper or thinks, “I wish they would just act normally!” but add to this the idea that someone you know is doing it better, and so in this world of comparison your feelings of failure are now empirically justified, and you might wonder why you bother getting up in the morning.
I was both disappointed and relieved to hear this. Disappointed because I never want to misrepresent myself. I am, in fact, not Jesus. I have a temper, and no one in my life has been a greater recipient of that temper than my youngest son, Sawyer. Not my parents or my brother or sister; not my wife or my oldest son; not a coworker or neighbor or boss. Without question, I have never been angrier than I have been with Sawyer. Sawyer’s greatest strength is that he does not want to do anything simply to please other people. I applaud this in theory, but in practice it makes the job of parenting stupendously challenging. How I want him to just stop or start doing something because I said so, because I’ve been on the planet longer than him, because I am certain that if he would just do what I told him his life and most importantly my life would go better. That would be the simplest thing. It is simple to know what I want; it is more or less impossible to know what other people want. It has never, ever worked, this telling him what to do. It didn’t work when he was six and I was telling him to stop humming and flapping and talking to himself because normal people don’t do such things and how can I have a relationship with someone who is always humming and flapping and talking to himself; and it doesn’t work now when I tell him to stop playing video games and take a shower. After all these years I am still affronted when he tells me to leave him alone. After all these years this hot, violent thought still spikes in my mind: I cannot leave you alone because only I know what is right. That’s usually when the yelling starts. I say horrible things to him, he says equally horrible things to me, until we exhaust ourselves of our respective horribleness and there we are. And where we are is where I actually wish to be. Which is why I was also relieved. The only thing that has ever worked with Sawyer is compassion. Not yelling or rewards, not therapies, really—only compassion. Everything else is just a tortured and complicated road back to compassion. Compassion, however, is not a point on the map. I have only ever understood that what is mine is yours, that what I think of others I think of myself, that your good is my good and my good is your good as a feeling. Here at my desk, alone and away from the lights and circus of life, I can find and stay with that feeling more easily and so write from it. To feel it and to write it and to read it is to remember it, and to remember it is to practice it. There is no other way to unlearn the idea that someone is better than another one or that a person could possibly be born not knowing what is right for himself. I’ve been teaching a lot of memoir writing recently, which is always a lively mix of craft and therapy. The memoirist usually begins believing she will tell her story; in fact, her actual work is to learn to retell her story. Inevitably, she comes to learn that the old story she had told herself filled with villains and victims, with bad things and good things, simply will not do. She must learn to see her life differently in order to tell a story about it that will be both interesting and of use to other people. This new perception nearly always includes forgiveness. I don’t know anyone who has not at some point in their life felt wronged. The absent parent, the abusive boyfriend, the schoolyard bully. Such characters seem to wield enormous power—the power of cruelty—a power so great we are forced to condemn them in our imagination to the prison of villainy. In real life, they won: they beat us, or ignored us, or mocked us; but in our imagination we arise victorious, for we are virtuous and they are forever evil. To forgive them would be set them free and lose all the power we claimed by their imprisonment. Yet forgive we must, because it is not their freedom that is at stake but ours. A world full of villains, of broken men and women bent on cruelty for cruelty’s sake, is an unsafe world. Yet the act of forgiveness is not to decide not to hate cruel people, but rather to learn to perceive those people we called cruel as like ourselves. Or in other words, forgiveness is the act of learning to see people as they actually are, not as what they have done. Once it became clear that Sawyer was going to need some kind of special attention, I had to begin my forgiving. First, I had to forgive life itself. It is easy enough for me to call life unfair, to see it as a cruel engine of chance doing this and that to me for no reason. This was not a life with which I was interested in living, and so I had to forgive to see life as it was. Next, I had to forgive Sawyer. I was constantly forgiving Sawyer. When we say a child is “on the spectrum” we are always talking about behavior, or what he is doing. If I only looked at what he was doing, Sawyer could turn into my enemy, an inscrutable child whose actions left me feeling like a powerless failure. Day after day after day I taught myself to focus the lens of my perception past the flurry his behavior to the stillness of his self. I am still teaching myself to do this. Finally, I had to forgive myself. I had to forgive myself for ever hating him, for ever wanting him to just act like everyone else, for ever not knowing what to do. I say finally, but all the forgiveness in the world is useless without this foundational forgiveness. If I am wrong, if I am broken, then the world and all its inhabitants are wrong and broken as well. I am the prisoner and the warden, locking myself up and setting myself free as the lens of my imagination turns. I welcome feedback and questions. Feel free to post any comments or questions below, or contact me directly.
Most people’s concept of brokenness is abstract in the same way most people’s expression of racism is abstract. That is, I have known people who have said that black people, or white people, or Chinese people, or whatever people are this way or that way. It is as if they are in an antagonistic relationship with this abstract other, a relationship that feels real enough to them that they will spend considerable real time and attention to avoid that group. Meanwhile, they sometimes find themselves in a specific relationship with a black, white, Chinese or whatever person. If the relationship is very brief – change from a cashier, companion on a bus – it can remain in the abstract; but if it takes any kind of root, if there is any kind of conversation, inevitably that antagonistic abstract idea of the other is replaced by an actual human relationship, a relationship based on what that person said or did specifically. Now, we might even hear, “I don’t like black people, but John’s okay. He’s not like the rest of them.” Our brokenness is as insidiously abstract as racism, because of course what we call racism is yet another expression of brokenness. Black people are broken because they are this way; or white people are broken because they are that way. They can’t help it. In fact, it becomes a form of weird compassion. I had a driving instructor when I was twenty who said of a group of boys who cut in front of us on their bikes, “It’s okay. It’s not their fault. They’re just black.” As odious as that sounds, he was actually reaching for compassion, the exact same concept of compassion often applied to kids on the spectrum. One of Sawyer’s elementary school teachers, a woman who asked to have him in her class because she so adored him – adored the specifics of the relationship with him as one person can only adore another—this teacher insisted that his most difficult behavior was not his fault because it was beyond his control. In this way, to call him anything but broken, to believe it was his choice, would actually be to accuse him of something worse, of choosing to talk to himself, for instance, instead of doing math. Better to say he has to talk to himself and feel sorry for him. It is tempting to despair when I see the disparity between the abstract and the specific. I know that just as the abstract idea of brokenness can lull a teacher into viewing a child as incapable of choosing different behaviors, so too abstract racism can become real immigration laws, or lynchings, or The Holocaust. How can one not despair given such atrocities? My despair is not a choice but a consequence. Yet to despair is to believe in the broken boogieman we have all invented, a monster that would annoy us or disrupt us or harm us because it is incapable of choosing otherwise. In my despair, I become the boogieman himself, the one who has lost the power to choose his own happiness. I welcome feedback and questions. Feel free to post any comments or questions below, or contact me directly.
What do I mean when I say that no one is broken? What is the difference between a broken person and an unbroken person? It is hard to describe a broken person definitively because to do so is to describe an illusion and illusions can be anything. Actually, reality and illusions are similar in that reality is one thing that can take many shapes, whereas illusions are nightmares looking to take any shape but reality. I cannot help but to speak in these terms because in parenting Sawyer I often found myself questioning what I had once thought was real. For instance, Sawyer hated to take tests. No, this isn’t even accurate. Sawyer declined to participate in any test he was given. Kids like Sawyer are always being tested, and so I had watched many times as this therapist or that expert asked him to do something or answer some question. Usually, Sawyer wouldn’t do the task or answer the question. Instead, he would flap and talk to himself, and the therapist or expert would note the results on her clipboard. This is the sort of behavior that got him labeled autistic, but it would take me many years to understand that the behavior made its own kind of sense. Sawyer didn’t give a damn about the test. He was not interested in jumping through the hoops these kind and well-intentioned women had set up for him, but the experience of being asked to jump was uncomfortable enough that he did what he always did when he was uncomfortable – he retreated into himself where he could focus on what was interesting to him. It may seem small, but when I finally understood what was happening it was like seeing reality turned on its head. If someone put a test before me, then by God I was going to pass it. I may not have enjoyed taking the test, I may not have cared about the test, but under no circumstance was I going to fail that test. I was like a trained dog. Show me a hoop and I would jump. Until I saw Sawyer declining to participate in the tests. Why, you don’t have to take a test if you don’t want to. How obvious. Who cares what they write on their clipboards? What would the world look like, I wondered, if I only jumped through those hoops I deemed worth my time and attention? In this way, my view of tests was an illusion, while Sawyer’s was reality. Within my view was the quiet thought that there was something wrong with me if I did not pass every test. And if there was something wrong with me, then I could not be happy. This describes every broken person in the world: someone who lacks what they require to be happy. It does not matter whether you are broken because you are autistic, or fat, or stupid, or talentless, or addicted to heroin. There are as many reasons to be broken as there are people on the planet. All that matters is that somehow you lost at the roulette wheel of life, you came up short and lack just enough of something to be as happy as you would like to be. Meanwhile, unhappiness is its own proof. I must be broken because I’m unhappy. If I was good enough, pretty enough, smart enough, normal enough, I wouldn’t be this miserable. Misery defines my reality. What if, however, happiness is the only reality? What if all misery is nothing but humanity believing its own nightmare? These are the questions Sawyer compelled me to ask again and again, and that I am still asking to this day. Happiness, after all, is not some fixed point on a grid. It is a place I must find within myself with every thought I think. To lose all sight of it is to be lost in a dream, and to find it is to awaken to myself. I welcome feedback and questions. Feel free to post any comments or questions below, or contact me directly.
|
William Kenower
I am the author of Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write with Confidence, and Write Within Yourself: An Author's Companion. Learn more here. Archives
July 2016
Categories
All
|