I had just moved from my home in Toronto to a small town in the U.S. midwest. I had a Canadian accent, naturally curly completely unruly red hair, and a healthy collection of stuffed animals. I did not play with dolls. If given one, I ripped it apart to see what made it open and close its eyes or speak when squeezed. I wore boys’ shorts and I liked to play with boys, particularly football, the kind where you tackle and might get hurt and most certainly got dirty. In fact I was a baby dyke, but I didn’t know it then. The girl who was supposed to befriend me, forced to do so by her parents who were friends of my parents, wore dresses, played golf, had perfect hair and a boyfriend. She most certainly knew something was different and wrong about me and she let me, and others, know it.
I had not had this experience before. In my circle of friends in Toronto I was central, leader of the pack of girls, and fully integrated into the world of my brother and my best friends, both boys. Naively, I expected the same would be true in my new home. And so, after finding myself shunned at school and parties, I confronted her on her front porch. I was then still capable of being angry, still not broken into conformity, and so I raged, demanding to know how she could treat me this way, insisting I be noticed and included and treated differently.
Of course, it made no difference. Indeed, it made things worse. Two years of misery followed until, moving to a different neighborhood, I found a different group of girls whom I loved then and still consider friends, though many are gone in one way or another.
Last week I arrived early to a meeting and chose a chair that gave me a view of the outside. Looking at branches helps me center and quiet and concentrate on the matter at hand. Others came in, but no one took the chairs next to me. As time passed and late-comers arrived, people began taking chairs in the back of the room though there were still empty chairs by me. This, of course, made sense. Late-comers did not wish to interrupt the meeting in progress.
I found myself, however, reacting with rage, real honest-to-goodness table-pounding heart- racing rage. I wanted to scream: There’s nothing wrong with me. I don’t have a contagious disease. I’m a good person. Why will no-one sit by me?
I had to withdraw from the business at hand to calm down. But underneath the pounding was curiosity: why was I so full of rage at actions that had nothing to do with me? And then I remembered an encounter I had one late fall morning on the front porch of a house on the main street of Franklin, Indiana some seventy odd years ago and it felt as if it what triggered that encounter was happening that minute in this meeting.
I was alternately impressed with the clarity of my answer and appalled at its implications. For how terrifying to think that something that happened so many years ago might be determining my behavior today. How terrifying to think that we all might be ruled so powerfully by our past and not by our present. For in this instance there was nothing in people’s choices of seats that had anything to do with me. I could see that, I could know that, but I could not feel it. And so I had to wonder how much of my life today was being managed by experiences I had when I was ten or perhaps five or even two or as an infant.
I was grateful to recall in such vivid detail a day from my past. I was glad to see my ten-year-old self again. I was glad to be able to tell her that I admired her for speaking up in her own defense even if it didn’t make a difference. I was glad to be able to comfort her and to tell her I was o.k. now.
I was equally grateful to have acquired, somewhere along the way, enough sense to sort out the past from the present in a situation like this and at the right time to be able to invite people to join me at the table. Nevertheless, for the rest of the meeting I simply sat, rocked to the core by the force of that feeling, and remembered.
I remembered that, despite our culture’s toxic promotion of individuality over connection, connection is essential to healthy humanity. Consider that we consider the worst possible punishment to be solitary confinement. Consider that we consider shunning to be a primary form of social control, as witness our approach in the past to women who were pregnant but unmarried (see Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter). Consider that despite our separateness we are creatures whose well-being, indeed whose very existence, is predicated upon belonging. People who are shunned often go mad for it is, in effect, a form of major disconnection..
No wonder I went temporarily mad on that front porch in Franklin. No wonder I remember the experience so clearly. No wonder the fear and the rage came back with such force when triggered by empty chairs on both sides of me.
I am not going to start being late for meetings, but I may pay more attention to where I choose to sit.