This is Not Normal, OR Quirky Kids and One Idea about Reducing Social Isolation

My daughter and I participated in the March for Our Lives this past Saturday.  While we know and love several gun owners, we also think the safety of our kids and society in general should be addressed in a variety of ways, which would include more regulations on the way guns are procured and who can get them.  In a discussion of good will I have on an ongoing basis with a good family friend, he let me know that he is most concerned about the mental health issues facing anyone who might use guns for ill and how can we better address that aspect (since I am a mental health professional).

It makes me think of one of the signs at the March on Saturday, it read:  This Is Not Normal.

Well, what does that mean?  What is not normal?  The number of students killed in school shootings in 2018 so far?  The number of deaths by suicide in which a gun was used?  A President who, to put it mildly, seems to have disdain for women?  A population of people who are so angry and afraid of one another that they can't speak and listen like grown ups?

You guys know me - I am a big advocate of paradox.  As a therapist, I am often one to say, "There is no normal."  There are so many variations of brains and bodies and hearts and souls and that is one of the most beautiful and astounding aspects of being human.  But also, sometimes it helps to have some kind of range.  I had a therapist who used to repeatedly ask me, "If we were watching the movie of this, what do you think the audience would be saying?"  (Her implication was that the audience would be like "oh shit, this is NOT normal.")  It helps to have perspective.

So when my friend asks me about mental health and helping people on the fringe - adults, kids, white, black, and mostly male, I think it takes a lot of nuanced and mature thinking to parse through it.

Another friend talked to me recently about her "quirky kid."  She worries about her kid who is not 'diagnosable' and does not look different on the outside but relates to other people in a different way.  My friend worries about her kid being socially ostracized.  She worries about her child's boundaries and vulnerabilities.  She worries about her child's current and future struggles.  And my friend has gotten her kid every intervention known to parent-dom.  This is not a kid who hasn't had support, love and resources.  This is not about getting the quirkiness out of her kid, this is now about helping create a world where the child's quirkiness may have a place.

What is or is not normal?  How do we relate to those who are not 'normal'?  As adults?  As youth?  What do we model to our kids about this?

It seems like being 'normal' is the lowest bar in kid-dom.  In kid-dom, a lot of people actually want to be better than normal.  I remember in 7th grade, a girl I looked up to a lot was just COOL.  (Yes, Stephanie, it's you.)  She could write bubble letters without practicing, her jean jacket collar stayed up at just the right angle, her hair always looked good and the song lyrics she wrote on her folder were effortlessly perfect.  I had to study and practice and really, really think about all that she did to get even a fraction as cool as she was.

I think about how this kind of dynamic permeates through to adult life.  Some people are cool, some people don't care and are still cool, some people try and are not cool, some people don't care and just really don't care.   We have PTSD from being kids, in a way - no one wants to have cooties, but we also often remember the kid with cooties.  It's a terrible part of 'normal' childhood and it probably continues on in a muted form to adulthood.

In the end, I think both of my friends are worrying about social isolation - one very personally, and one from more removed point of view.  What can be done to prevent social isolation?  To 'treat' social isolation?  I don't think it's right or realistic to think everybody should 'just be friends.'  We can't force genuine relationships.

As I've been writing this, I've been going over in my mind how 'quirkiness' is seen in adult world and I am relieved to notice that there is a wide range of quirkiness that I think just doesn't matter in adult world and/or you can certainly find friendships even if you say...love poetry or something really weird like that.

But what I think continues to trouble adults and I also remember it from being a kid, is how to relate to people who have different boundaries.  Perhaps different physical boundaries - they touch or talk close up, they might talk too long in meetings or after church service, they might not have typical hygiene, they might seem angry or sullen but have outbursts that they want others to acknowledge at times that aren't convenient.  I think these are the kinds of quirks that even wise adults struggle to understand and have compassion for.  But I think this is the challenge we are asked to undertake now.  Both for our selves and to model for our children.

We need to be empowered to be both courteous and straightforward.  To ask more questions and voice our own needs and wants in a compassionate way.

For example, if I interact with an adult who is talking too close to me, it would be very difficult, but I actually think I need to say, "Could you please take a step back."  Or to say to the colleague who is might be having a monologue at 5pm, "I need to get home now, the end of the work day isn't a good time for me to talk."

I think when we become more comfortable saying what we need or what boundaries are ok for us, we also model this for our kids and we take away the stigma or fear.  Sometimes I think we humans act ugly toward others when we are afraid...afraid we don't know what to do or how to handle a situation.  I think being ignored and brushed over might be the worst part of social isolation.  Honest, compassionate communication is a form of connection, to me.

When I worked in hospice, I learned that you could just about say anything to a person, it just depended on how you said it.  I talked to people about everything - from how they pooped to how their body would shut down when they died.  I know we can do better with one another, but we have to be willing to look at what makes us uncomfortable.

Maybe it is looking at our own fears, our own shortcomings, our own lack of knowing the answer.

Here is something I do know  - I'm not so worried about 'normal.'  I think it's a better tool to use to ask, "If we were watching the movie, what would the audience be saying?"  I think the audience would know that many factors contribute to gun violence and social isolation is only one of those factors.  I think the audience would also know that social isolation is the result of yet again, many factors.  Sorry everybody...this is a complex world.

One aspect of social isolation is our aversion to our own weirdness and our own fear that we don't know how to address other people's weirdness.   That's ok.  We can work with that!

My bubble letters may never be the right amount fluffy, but I am going to keep practicing compassionately and courageously setting boundaries, knowing that honest communication is one way I can show deep respect for another human being.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, Or Why You Can't Really Rescue Anyone

As I've been working on my book about loss and grief and what we make of these experiences, I thought I would periodically share that writing with you.  Some of the book is about hospice and death and dying, but some is about loss and grief in a more general sense.  A bit of what I have below is reflective of that:

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I fell in love with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn when I read it for the first time the year I knew my marriage was falling apart.  Despite poverty, cruelty at the hands of other children and adults, and a father who died by 35 from alcoholism, Francie’s recollections of the Brooklyn of her childhood hold exotic details like free Christmas trees that are thrown at children who are strong enough to catch them on Christmas Eve, or ferry rides in the Summer sponsored by the Democratic party machine, or what it feels like to read a book all day on the balcony of your apartment as you watch the people of the neighborhood shuffle about in their Saturday routines.

Maybe the neighborhood, the streets, the creeks, the town of your childhood is magical?  Maybe it’s a universal – because even if it’s terrible (like in The Glass Castle, etc) – it’s magically terrible? 

I feel that magic when I think back on my childhood, which was not terrible or wonderful in any extreme way – but it was my childhood and my neighborhood  – a suburban subdivision where kids ‘popped wheelies’ on their bikes freely in the street, where the Sno-Cone man drove around in a dirty old car and ‘ripped off’ kids for 50 cents a cone.  Where we crossed a creek on the way to and from school, and once – a jaguar got loose from the zoo, so none of us were allowed to walk home that day.

Like any neighborhood – the characters were known.  There was Mr. R who kept Penthouse and Playboy in the garage and the kids would all sneak in to peek at them (Penthouse was really bad…way worse than Playboy).  Mrs. T, the sweet grandma with a cuckoo clock in her kitchen, the Brooks boys – all three teenagers, who made out with their girlfriends in the summer twilight as they leaned against their cars.   Even the pets were known and sort of collective.  Sinbad was a outdoor cat who technically belonged to the family on the corner.  My mom said he was mean, so I didn’t pet him when I was out playing.  I was just four years old, but in those days, you were allowed to play outside alone for hours at a time – you were allowed to walk back and forth to different friends houses in the summer.  My mom would step out the front door and call my name, alerting me of dinnertime.  “Katy!” she shouted, and I had better come running or risk eating dinner cold and alone.  (It happened once - beef stoganoff, cold.  Gross.)

One summer evening the moms were outside talking as the kids ran around our cul-de-sac – we lived at the very bottom of the street, centered on the circle.  I noticed Sinbad skulking around his yard, looking different, something about his face – did he have a beard? I wondered.  I went to take a closer look.  As I approached, I saw that Sinbad had a baby bunny draped out of his mouth – alive, I thought.   I walked over and took the rabbit right out of his mouth into my tiny open palm.  The bunny limp, panting.  I petted him as I walked to my mom – she would fix this situation, I was sure. 

My mom and Mrs. Green looked at me with surprise and then looked at one another, “what’s this?”

I explained and very certainly said that we needed to save the bunny.  “Yes.  You did save the bunny,” my mom assured.  “What a brave girl you are to take him from Sinbad.  He would be dead, if not for you.  We will put him in our backyard by the irises and feed him carrots and lettuce and he will grow big and strong and have a family there.  Hurray!”  And as far as I knew she put the baby bunny, who we blessed in our nightly prayers, in the iris patch.  And I believed, every bunny in our yard from then on was either my baby bunny or one of his descendents. 

This is how you begin to create an identity as a child.  What my mom reflected was the beginning of something I built on that brought havoc, wonder, beauty, and many miscalculations to my life.  I felt very powerful as a child – I do the brave thing!  I do the things that are hard to do.  Sometimes I even save someone.  

The way we see and define ourselves influences many of our decisions. 

We all have these identities that are bestowed through experience and stories - I find that people who had RESPONSIBILITY as a child take on particular identities as adults…maybe your mother was sick and she relied on you to take care of her and clean up around the house.  Maybe your family struggled financially and you took it on yourself to 'make it.'  Maybe your brother was a druggie and you tried your best to be no bother to make things easier for your folks.  When our story becomes that we can save or protect people (or animals), we take on something that is not ours and it will surely bring us heartache.

I wonder if thinking I am brave is one of the reasons I was drawn to hospice work.  I wonder if on some level you have to have stupid balls to do such a thing.  I knew it wasn’t rescuing anyone, but maybe there was something like that in it.

When I started social work school, my uncle cornered me one Christmas Eve and told me that, 'No good deed goes unpunished.'  He gave me a book, Miss Lonelyhearts, that he said exemplified this, and he told me the story of an imprisoned man who wrote to him (my uncle was a lawyer), saying he was wrongly convicted.  He had done research, he had a legitimate case.  My uncle took the case on, pro bono, and got the conviction overturned.  My uncle 'saved' the man, in some sense.

The man my uncle helped was killed in an armed robbery within two weeks of his release.  The man my uncle helped had been the robber.   My uncle, years later, felt deeply conflicted..."what did my good deed do?"

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I don’t know how old I was when I realized my bunny died.  Maybe in my teen years.  And when I matured, I found that there was truth and there was a story.  The truth was that I didn't do the good, brave thing I intended to do.  The story was a kind story, though.  A great story that my mom created for me:  Katy is brave and strong and helps helpless things.  

For me, now looking at this episode from childhood, I wonder what my adult self would do in the same situation.  Was there a greater kindness?  To let Sinbad eat that bunny up with the swiftness of a predator or to let that bunny slowly die in the patch of iris, starving and cold?  Maybe death in the wild is always wild, so there is no ‘kind’ or ‘unkind’; there is no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – it will be over swiftly or it will be over more slowly, but the dying will eventually be done.

Maybe you are reading this and thinking, "Thanks, that's depressing"  My daughter read that last bit and said "Ethics."  But I think one thing I've learned in this life is that it is both scary and hopeful.  If you think you are helping or saving your child, parent, spouse, friend, it can be so hard to know your limitations.  But this is the essential thing.  Don't despair.  Even though it is terrifying, you must let go of running about the world thinking you have more control than you really do.

Some people we love will save themselves.  Some people we love will not.  But, we can never know the ripple effects of all our actions; we don't know what's best, kindest or right in every situation.  I know some people reading this are saying, "Well, I kind of do." (You know who you are. )

Toward the end of my marriage, I remember getting my brain and heart in knots about what would be best for my kids.  I didn't want to get divorced, in part, because I was sure that it would doom them to some dysfunctional fate.  But I also remember standing in the living room and this thought hit me like a bolt of lightening:  God wants me to be loved.  In that moment, I felt the beginning of an idea - that my getting divorced would not hurt my kids.  That seeing me not be loved would hurt my kids.

At the end of my marriage, I so wanted to save my husband, my kids, my family as I knew it and my history, but in the end, I had to rescue myself.

I think that's what belongs to us.  Our own life.  And that's the only thing that is truly and deeply ours to take care of.