If you had ever asked me if I cared what anyone else thought of me as a parent, I would have honestly answered no. This is because most of my time as a father has been spent in the privacy of my house, where there are no relatives or strangers to offer opinions or shoot critical looks my way. Moreover, though it may take a village to raise a child, my relationship with my sons is wholly private. In fact, though we share nearly every thought that crosses our mind about our boys, my wife’s relationship with our sons is hers, and mine is mine because I cannot be her and she cannot be me.
Which is why I would have said I do not care what anyone thinks about me as a parent. Except I am not a shut-in. I must occasionally leave my home, and I sometimes take my children with me. Out and about in the world is where I most often sympathize with the autistic impulse to retreat into myself. I read recently about a woman who had had a profound near death experience that left her able – in her words – to read everyone’s thoughts. She spent most of the rest of her earthly life holed up in her house, protected from the ceaseless stream of other people’s interior lives. Hers, it seemed to me, was merely an extreme example of what everyone can experience in some way or another. Though I cannot read minds, I can read the shifting inner weather of any friend or stranger I meet. I do not know the true cause of these shifts, but I sense them just the same, and I have learned – slowly – that to be happy in the world I must not concern myself with anyone else’s storms or even sunshine. They are not mine; they are as private as my relationship with my sons. This is much easier to do when I am alone. But when I was with Sawyer in particular, and when as a boy he would run and flap in stores or on the street, or begin screaming because I would not buy him this or that, I felt my focus exploding outward. All at once my mind was filled with the thoughts of other people. That I was not hearing the thoughts but actually thinking them for these friends and strangers was irrelevant. Now I was living in a storm of shame and self-consciousness. How appealing the autistic bubble seemed just then. The power to inoculate myself forever from the influence of other people even at the expense of love or friendship seemed well worth it. It did not matter that the storm was entirely within me. It was triggered by the combination of Sawyer’s behavior and the presence of another human being whose mind, for whatever reason, I could not trust. If only, like my son frequently seemed capable, I could simply go about the world as if these people did not exist. If only I could ignore them completely I could dwell forever on a sunny island, isolated but storm-free. I am happy to report that I have chosen not to maroon myself. I do not need to isolate myself, but only remember myself. Though it is easy for me to become lost in the dream of other people’s thoughts, to find myself even in the most crowded of public squares is to return to where I have always lived. There I am home, where all relationships are in their proper, private order. There I am home, where other people are free to visit or not, and if I listen honestly there has only ever been the sound of the sea.
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Today I am pleased to open this space to a special writing guest: my wife, author and illustrator Jennifer Paros. I cannot think of a better companion for the journey that is parenthood than Jen. I hope you enjoy this piece as much as I did when I first read it. Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it. ~ Lily Tomlin When my youngest son was three years old, at the suggestion of his concerned preschool teacher, we agreed to a state assessment of his “needs.” But after the evaluation, the specialist’s observations sounded like a scientific field log – as though she’d been in the bushes with binoculars. The subject thumped his chest repeatedly and ran back and forth. The more she shared, the clearer it was that the observed facts were only leading her further from understanding him. What I learned in the next round of evaluations was: if my son was disinterested in doing what was asked of him and opted not to do it, the observer concluded he was unable to do it. I learned that what he did at home, he wouldn’t necessarily perform during a test at school. I learned that the observer and the observed have an influential relationship on each other that affects results and data. And I learned that, though his behavior seemed to be the problem, observing, labeling, and trying to alter that behavior did nothing to serve him, because the focus wasn’t actually on him, it was on identifying what was wrong with him. I grew weary of the facts, and of the conclusions drawn from those facts. Beyond observation, there was something more important about my son and his story that would never be grasped through a pair of binoculars. I felt confounded by the contrast between my knowing sense of him and external evidence of his behavior. The process of “facing reality” was leaving me out of balance and feeling unstable – not because I had a son with a diagnosis, but because stability comes from the inside, and all my attention was on the outside. There is an exercise for improving one’s balance. It involves standing on one foot with eyes closed. This is challenging because a big part of what we usually use to stabilize ourselves is the visual field. This exercise, in which observation is eliminated, is said to build the greatest balance. It’s been my experience that the only true way to regain my emotional and mental balance and stability involves no longer trying to use external reality to stabilize me but in finding it within myself – eyes closed. Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world. ~ Edward Hopper If I think about how others might perceive what I’m doing – or me – I lose my footing in what I want to create. There is no quicker way to get confused in the creation of anything than to look outside us (reviews, “likes” on Facebook, editors, spouses, experts . . .). The guidance we need to create whatever we want comes embedded within our drive to create. No external feedback can ever be as relevant as our personal vision and feeling of connection to our work. This personal reality is the necessary litmus test for all incoming commentary, advice, or constructive criticism. We are the ones who know our (inner) worlds. It is up to us to align with those realities. And when we don’t, our equilibrium is compromised, for it is investment in our inner reality that balances our perspective on our outer experiences. J.D. Salinger, famous for his writing, reclusiveness, and dislike of publicity, said “There is marvelous peace in not publishing . . . Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.” Salinger didn’t like fame, the concept of which focuses solely on the attention of others; he didn’t want his attention out there, and so strove to block out anything that might inspire his focus to stray. In his way, he did his best to “close his eyes” to the world and find balance and stability from within. We don’t have to hide, protect ourselves, or seek externally to find balance. Balance is achieved through deliberate attention to our personal truth. It took me a while, but I came to understand that what was distressing me wasn’t the reality of my son’s behavior; it was my own lack of attention to the experience of my personal reality of him. The feeling of instability always cues us to close our eyes and find our center where it actually exists. The seed of what we want is present in here where the vision for our creative work – whether a project or a relationship – always exists first. A couple years ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Michael Neill on my weekly Blogtalk radio show Author2Author. Michael is a life coach, author, and all around inspiring guy. At the time I interviewed him he had just published The Inside-Out Revolution, based on his work with something called The Three Principles, which, among other things, connects how we feel and what we perceive to the thoughts we think.
When Michael came upon The Three Principals he was already enjoying great success. He had published two books and was a much sought-after teacher and speaker. But, like a lot of spiritual writers and thinkers, his journey to inspire and help others began with a desire to understand his own despair – which, in Michael’s case, expressed itself in periodic thoughts of suicide. In our interview he described how the techniques he had once used to deal with his despair seemed to do little more than stave off a waiting darkness. He said that during this period of his life, despite being married to a woman he loved and doing work he loved and for which he was generously compensated, he felt as though he was always two very bad weeks away from wanting to kill himself. Then he found The Three Principles, which taught him that there is a big difference between thinking you would like to kill yourself and actually wanting to kill yourself. This was a great relief to him because, as he said to me at the end of this story, “I realized I wasn’t broken.” Which is why this blog and the coming book are called No One is Broken. Michael is one of those writers and teachers from whom I have learned much. He’s funny, insightful, compassionate, and thriving. And yet not so very long ago he lived with the quiet and persistent thought that he was broken. I do not think he is unique. I think the persistent thought of brokenness follows everyone in sometimes quiet and sometimes very loud ways. I also think that there is nothing worse we could ever think of ourselves than that we are broken. I began all this when my son was diagnosed with what is called Autism, but I have long known that this work really has nothing to do with that word. Autism itself is just a thought, a word we invented when we saw some people behaving differently than we had expected. Yet just like a sentence on a page, a thought is either in service to the story of our life or it is not. If it is not, then it must go, and because it is nothing, because it has no teeth that can bite us or claws that can hold us, it can exact no revenge for its dismissal. It was never really here in the first place. I believe the thought of Autism is destined for this erasure. It has never served us, linked unconsciously as it has become to the concept of brokenness. It is not an evil word, however. It’s just a first draft of a thought, an impulse response to our fear that some of us are just not as good as the others. When it is gone, we will perceive the empty space reserved for the answer that we had been asking for in our grief and despair. That too had been following us, sometimes quietly, sometimes quite loudly, waiting for its chance to be heard above the din of an old and useless story. Standing on the brink of age fifty, I have never been happier with the work I am doing and the life I am living. But if you had told me when I turned forty that in ten years I would be writing a blog called No One Is Broken, and that I would be coaching clients and interviewing writers and editing a magazine and homeschooling my son, I would have thought you were describing the life of some strange Bill Kenower lookalike. At that time I still had one plan and one plan only – to become a novelist. I had been preparing diligently for that job since I was twenty-five. Having a firm and dedicated plan, it seemed to me, is how one made his way in the adult world.
Yet here I am. The path I have traveled over the last decade has been anything but direct, and has unfurled step-by-step as all my myriad plans came and went. What has surprised me most about where I am now is not the content of what I am writing, nor that I am homeschooling my youngest son, nor that I have clients, but that all the while I was living life as I thought it should be lived, life itself was preparing me for the life I would most want to live. My hours spent wondering idly about what makes me human prepared me for this blog; my early frustration with traditional schooling prepared me for homeschooling; and my lifelong preference for the confessional intimacy of one-on-one conversation prepared me for coaching. I do not think there is anything unique about my story. In fact, I think it is the only story. A human could no more meaningfully plan his life than a gardener could construct a flower molecule by molecule. The movement of life and the gravitational pull of love operate independently of any nearsighted human plans. This is a particularly poignant truth for parents whose children have been diagnosed on the spectrum. In many ways, our fears for these children are a reflection of the scripts we have unconsciously written for their future and our inability to perceive how the life we imagine for them can be reached from where they are now. But how exactly am I supposed to know what Sawyer’s life as he is living it right now is preparing him for the life he will lead if I could not know what my own life was preparing me for? All I know as I look at him is that the organizational properties of love, the constant and faithful guidance of preference and curiosity, are as operative in him as they are in me. Life excludes no one. Life abandons no one. This is not an indifferent game won or lost by the toss of some genetic dice. Which is to say, in those cramped and dark hours when I begin to worry because I do not know how he will be okay somewhere out beyond the limited horizon of my perception, I must remind myself that it was never my job to know how he would be okay but that he already is okay. This I can always see if I choose to look for it. It comes disguised as whatever’s happening at exactly that moment, life so ordinary it is easily unrecognizable for what it always is. Several years ago the book The Dyslexic Advantage by Drs. Brock and Fernette Elde came across my desk. The idea behind the book was quite simple: Dyslexia is not a disease but an orientation with its own inherent advantages and disadvantage. It had only been treated like a disease because A) we gave it a name; and B) parents and the therapeutic community had focused solely on the disadvantages, such as struggles with reading.
It is perfectly natural to focus on what we perceive as disadvantages. I do this all the time with myself. Something I want is not coming to me effortlessly; in fact, it may not be coming to me at all. At times it seems as if this thing that I want is all that stands between me and happiness. That being the case, I focus more and more of my attention on this desire that became a challenge that is now becoming a problem until I have forgotten all those parts of my life that are not a challenge and it seems as if my whole life is nothing but a problem in need of fixing. This is also sometimes called “self-improvement.” Reading The Dyslexic Advantage I was reminded of a conversation I had with Sawyer years ago. His pretending, I explained, was like a superpower. It was as if one of his hands possessed immense strength. With this hand he could grind rocks into dust. Unfortunately, lacking fine control, that same hand shattered glasses whenever Sawyer tried to take a drink. Because drinking a glass of water is more common and practical than crushing rocks, this superpower was most often seen as a disadvantage. Our goal then was not “cure” him, but to help him learn to harness his power. Sawyer was uninterested in this explanation when I offered it to him nearly ten years ago, and he is largely uninterested in it now. He is uninterested in it for the same reason most of us are uninterested in it: because he is unhappy when he runs up against those challenging parts of his life. He wants something and he cannot have it. He is unhappy that he cannot have it. He wants to be happy. What is wrong with him that he cannot have that which would make him happy? Don’t talk to me, he says, about challenges and superpowers and learning and evolution, just give me that damn thing so that I can be happy! And I think, welcome to the human race, my son. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that we will never cure autism or learn what causes autism because it doesn’t exist. What we call autism has spread like an epidemic because our definition of it has spread from people who would not talk or respond to touch to people like my son as we have begun to recognize the connection between the two, once too distant to see, now increasingly apparent. Perhaps a day will come when we will all be called autistic, when we recognize within everyone the temptation to retreat from others, to turn away and avoid the glare of attention, to think only of our own needs and not the needs of others. And should that day come, just like with a fatal disease, perhaps something within all of us will die. Perhaps if we all believed we had caught autism, it would be the death once and for all of our belief in broken people. |
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
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