The Great Hurdle

Humans, being social animals, have a dread that surpasses all others, including death. It’s the dread of becoming an outsider. Getting over this hurdle is the foremost task of our lives.

Outsiders despair of finding a social niche. They’re not like prison convicts in this regard. Convicts find acceptance, albeit dubious, in their own populations. Nor are outsiders like those we ostracize. An ostracized person has been deliberately excluded from the company of others. Outsiders are people who simply drift away from social norms, like an unmoored boat that gradually moves into the open sea. The most common word for them is loner. The cruelest among us prefer to say loser.

Sadly, many do not clear the hurdle. Their fate is suicide, the second leading cause of death in America for 10- to 14-year-olds and 25- to 34-year-olds. Those who do clear the hurdle owe their lives to strong psychological defenses, perhaps complemented by some just-in-time therapy.

For both groups, the challenge to their selfhood presents itself in the same way. As preschoolers, the value of conformity and popularity become disturbingly clear. Adults coach us on the rewards of “going along,” but they needn’t take the trouble. Then comes the terrible realization that social acceptance is far from certain. Some kids reject you because of something “off” about you. Some are just plain mean. Sometimes neighbors are too, like the old man who curses at you when your ball rolls into his yard. Even teachers can be openly unfriendly. They’re doing “hard time,” and therefore so should you. That’s when our defenses kick in. Most of us see we’re not the only ones who are hurting, and alliances form. These are what I call affiliations of the wounded.

Along with the affiliations comes a nascent identity, an assemblage of descriptors we sort into “that’s me” and “that’s not me.” The sorting requires a painful self-assessment. To soothe the pain, we attach our identity to palliatives. They are calming, habit-forming behaviors that are introduced to us by our affiliations. Their effects can be constructive or destructive, or they can be harmless quirks. They take hold of us for a lifetime.

To make these ideas more concrete, let’s look at a couple of lives that are open books. The photos below show Joan Rivers and Bobby Fischer as adults and as children.

Joan was a pretty, bright little girl who no doubt delighted her family. I imagine that she loved to entertain them, and they rejoiced in her efforts. She was intensely competitive and troubled that some girls were prettier and more talented. Comparisons only grew worse when Joan began to gain weight.

She developed a neurosis known as body dysmorphia, distress from imagined flaws in one’s appearance. She dealt with it by using a couple of behavioral palliatives. One was self-deprecation, a way to entertain and gain sympathy at the same time. The other was a biting wit, a way to bring down the beautiful and pretentious. Sadly, she gave in to a destructive palliative, plastic surgery. She traded a perfectly formed nose for one that became Michael Jacksonesque. Then she acquired pixie eyes and a grotesque smile. Her natural face was gone.

Bobby was also precocious, but was raised only by his mother, who scraped by with a nursing job. His older sister occasionally played games with him, but for the most part, he spent his days alone in their apartment, at the edge of a crime-ridden neighborhood. He had only chess books for company and entered adolescence with a pittance of social skills. School bored him, he ignored his studies, and he made no friends.

Chess was his palliative, his monomania. He joined the Brooklyn Chess Club when he was 8 and began his formal training. In a matter of years he was playing with Grand Masters, and he became World Champion at the age of 29. One might say he was a successful adult, but his isolation and woeful education left him alarmingly ignorant.

In his heart, he must have accused his Jewish mother and invisible Jewish father of desertion. His mother was a politically active communist. It’s no coincidence that he developed a loathing for communism and Judaism. He also had contempt for doctors and medicine, possibly a reaction to his mother’s medical career. His contempt cost him his life. When he developed a urinary tract blockage in 2007, he refused medication, dialysis, and surgery. He died of degenerative kidney failure the following year.¹

Now let’s turn to a couple of adults we don’t know. Their childhoods are a mystery, and I have only adult photos of them, but I think we can still make some accurate inferences about the kinds of hurdles they faced.

I’ll refer to the person on the left as Anomalous and the person on the right as Animalus.

I’m guessing that Anomalous was assigned a female at birth, so I’ll hesitantly go with she/her pronouns. Her gender dysphoria determined her destiny — the name of her hurdle would be What sex am I?

She’s fortunate to have been born into Gen Z, likely the first generation in which people with gender dysphoria were spared the burden of declaring to be a trans man or a trans woman. They could identify themselves as both or neither or some other exotic category. I think Anomalous chose to be questioning or nonbinary. So the answer to What sex are you? was pretty much Fuck you!

Her palliatives are piercings and tattoos. They project the message, I do not conform. This is beautifully ironic. So many people have them now that their message has become, I’m trying to be hip (conforming).² Somehow they suit Anomalous quite well. While rejecting gender labels — very nonconforming — she embraces body decorating — very hip. Anomalous is confused but completely indifferent about it.

In his adolescence, Animalus chose a way forward in which identity and a palliative have effectively merged — bodybuilding. It’s an ingenious way to escape the stress of body dysmorphia, maintain good health, become confident and self-disciplined, and improve attractiveness. All this plus entry into a ready-made support group, the worldwide society of gym rats!

Of course, there are always problems if palliatives are used to excess. Animalus seems to be unaware of this. After his youth is gone, he’ll face tendinitis, back pains, shoulder pains, and other joint problems. These injuries will likely worsen with time and can even become crippling. The trick seems to be extending self-discipline to include moderation.

My thoughts about the Great Hurdle lead me to a number of recommendations:

• Many cultures have recognized it as a critical passage and formalized ways to cross it. Anthropologists call these “rites of passage.” The Jews have Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, the Amish have Rumspringa, and Hispanics have Quincenera, for girls only.³ None of the these is capable of dealing with the crises adolescents face in a modern, multicultural society. We have to adopt a body of rites-of-passage knowledge based on the best research that psychologists have to offer. So far, the American Psychological Association has failed in its mission to become a resource to the American public.
  
  
• The proverb “it takes a village to raise a child” is a societal truth. All adults should see themselves as child advocates informed by the rites-of passage knowledge base.
  
  
• Every county should have a child abuse and neglect hotline. It should have a web presence and be advertised in televised community messages.
  
  
• People who teach preteens and adolescents have always tried to minimize their roles of socializer and disciplinarian. I have little sympathy for them. They are avoiding their “it takes a village” responsibilities. Teacher training and evaluations must change in recognition of these responsibilities.
  
  
• The FCC has been irresponsible in overseeing the activities of social media. It hasn’t offered a uniform standard for monitoring content or a uniform process for removing content. Nor has it required social platforms to disclose their monitoring methods, if any, or data about the volume or kind of content they’ve removed. In no sense are social media regulated. This must end.

But alas, my recommendations all share a fatal flaw. None of them is politically feasible! Parents would argue they have complete autonomy in raising their children … “No society of pinheaded ninnies is going to give me guidelines for doing what is intuitive and natural. Neighbors better not come knocking with advice about raising my kids. It’s none of their goddam business. And if they report me to a hotline, they’d better run for the hills. The same goes for teachers. They don’t dare interfere with my parenting. I’ll get the bastards fired.”

The FCC would be defended by a different political argument … “In America, we try to use a light hand in matters of regulation. Otherwise we acquire bureaucratic fiefdoms that drain initiative and efficiency out of our capitalist system.”

So what do we do to help our kids navigate the most consequential time in their lives? For now, we can only recognize our challenge and their distress, and let them know they are not alone.

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¹Fischer has many biographers. Some say he was paranoid or schizophrenic or both. I’m skeptical of these claims. The facts of his upbringing seem sufficient to explain his behavior.

²Some readers will surely disagree with this assertion. They’ll say tattoos are often expressions of love or fundamental beliefs or artistic impulses. But I see that practically no one with a tattoo (or a piercing) has just one. Therefore, I have to classify tattooing and piercing as palliative habits.

³A tribe in the Brazilian Amazon forces its adolescent boys to suffer the stings of biting ants. Extraordinary, but a small price to pay when the adults say, “You’re in!”