by Stephanie Sides
Addictions come in many forms but they have one main function: to keep us complacent. They funnel strong feelings into self-destructive paths instead of outward, the direction they should go, to constructively address problems in the world that distress us all in varying degrees. I think this happens because we feel we don’t have a right, are afraid, think we’re powerless — or consider it pointless — to do the natural human thing.
Which is to speak out.
Given the climate in the U.S. these past seven years under the Bush administration, this situation has gotten worse. If you don’t fit into the considerably narrowed definition of a patriot, you’re a traitor. Or at least that’s the rhetoric.
We’ve lost a large portion of that middle ground where the most productive discourse takes place. The place that has been known in the past to keep us strong as a country precisely because it has allowed for all points of view to be heard. That’s what democracy was supposed to be about.
Because the natural human instinct for expression in the service of improving things has been stifled so effectively, it’s no wonder there are more “addicted” people in our country than ever. Consider where our democracy stands today.
The most discouraged cases commit suicide. I’ve long wondered what proportion of that group does so out of mental illness vs. plain unmitigated disgust with the world: hopelessness without possibility of remediation, without being able to respond in a way that might be heard and make a difference.
What about the increasingly common phenomenon of suicide bombers, in recent months now including young women and people in wheelchairs? I think that must too be a sign of hopelessness, powerlessness, not being heard.
The rest of us disgusted folk seek various coping remedies: “self-medication” (too much drink or drugs), excessive shopping, or psychotherapy, which often leads to prescriptions for antidepressant drugs. Remove the sheep’s clothing on the latter, and it’s revealed as just the modern update on self medication. It’s just another form of allowing one’s voice to be muted. It’s the au courant easy answer. I’ve done it, so I know just how easy it is to go that route. You walk into the doctor’s office, request a particular drug (as advertised on TV), and, bada-bing-bada-boom, you’ve got it and you’re out of there. But I also know how horribly hard – having visited the meltdown of withdrawal when my supply ran out and I cavalierly forgot to renew the prescription – it is to get off it. It’s a horribly rocky slope. Emphasis on horrible. Right thereafter I informed my doctor I needed a plan to get off it altogether. She said: three months.
It seems to me that ours is becoming an increasingly hard world to live in. What is keeping so many of us middle-class, well-educated, healthy, financially secure women miserable and disinclined to bring our voices together to try to change the world?
I think it’s because, individually, we have no voices.
Women forever have been trained to take care of everyone in their family circles but themselves. When you define your life in terms of those you serve, you, in effect, don’t exist. You have no identity of your own. You have no voice. This reality, once suspected, is too horrible to contemplate, opening the door to the more common types of addictions that cover it over.
I think most women are just too busy – and exhausted – managing the home front, working, and driving their kids to and fro to have the energy to put into changing the world, outside of possibly through their professional endeavors. Their focus is on the family, not the world outside. It just isn’t a priority. And the odds of making a difference there seem too small to take on.
Most of us sadly stumble against this reality sooner or later. Mine came at work.
And anyone who watches girlfriends get married and start to have children will notice their fairly common tendency to turn inward, in some cases for years. You could think of the notion of “family values” as the soma to keep women in exactly this kind of place. This is the way it’s always been; why should we expect, much less ask for, more? Family values provide an alluring cage because it’s socially acceptable; still it’s a cage nonetheless.
The good news about the Bush administration, though, is that the extreme polarization it has caused in the electorate has made things so intolerable that people are beginning to speak up and commit their energy in new ways. Witness the immense excitement about, and personal involvement in, the campaigns of the various presidential candidates. For the first time in my lifetime, people see an opportunity to express their values and affect the future of their lives. The cynic in me wonders how long this energy will last until we slip back into our old ways. Still I’m optimistic and rooting from the sidelines.
Like many women I know, I too drank the kool-aid. (I think mine must have been the concentrated variety.) I have been as devoted to not speaking up as to a younger, sickly sister, protecting her tenaciously even when she might be showing signs of improving health or wanting to stretch her wings. I think she underlies, and perpetuates, the more common addictions. Call it the addiction of all addictions. And it’s more insidious because it’s more subtle than the outward expressions it produces: the things we think of as addictions. The message is: The real addiction is much more fundamental.
I was trained from the earliest age to have no voice. I had no right to a voice. That meant everything from rarely having an opinion (I would listen for a long time before venturing out with what I thought, and then only tentatively) to something as simple as learning how to not speak up at the dinner table. Imagine that that has to be learned.
My role was to stay in the background, out of trouble. I bought into it because I was afraid of what might happen if I did speak up. It might provoke conflict and anger, situations and emotions that couldn’t be managed.
But my most basic fear was that of rejection. This proved well founded in a couple of incidents with my father after which he literally didn’t talk to me for six weeks. Which taught me the undeniably powerful, and sedative, influence of social acceptance. The message: One could be rejected and for the slightest of reasons at any time. So be ever so careful about not fucking up.
Moreover, I was taught that any kind of speaking was a bad thing. Best to not talk at all. When you’re taught to not talk, you have to stay to yourself. So I became a loner. Some of my sister’s friends just recently have mentioned about how I would hang out in my bedroom alone, when we were teenagers, hardly seen. It’s painful to hear. We’re now in our 50s.
I grew up in the 1950s in the haze of the mantra that children should be seen and not heard. My parents bought into this. I was the third of three girls – certainly not the ideal nuclear family back then: a boy first (of course), then a girl (if not, preferentially, a second boy), then others as the family wanted or could afford.
Was the post-WWII baby boom focused on over-procreating to compensate for so many “boys” lost in the war? In that era, so many families went for a third child – was it to get more boys (or just a first boy?) to prove they could procreate or produce more young men to fight the hated Fascists, then Communists by overwhelming them with more, apparently expendable boys that came along afterwards?
So my family tried a third time – with me, Exhibit A — to create a boy. This was all before the concern about overpopulation that China famously marketed: One child (yes, a boy) per family; that country is now facing the consequences of female infanticide: Men, no longer young and now desperate to get married, are unable to find not just “appropriate brides” but any brides at all. If, sadly, one has to produce an instructive lesson against misogyny, that has to be it.
Back in the mid-50s when the sex of the child was only determined at childbirth, my parents were convinced I would be a boy. I used to think statistics have to be with you at some point in this game, but I’ve recently been disabused of this notion by a more medically trained friend who’s told me that body/procreation chemistry can give some couples serious predilections for just-boy or just-girl families no matter how long they try. This may partially explain why I’ve had so many girlfriends from what seemed an inordinate number of five-girl families.
Because it had not occurred to my parents that I would not be a boy, they had given no thought to a girl’s name. It took them a full week: My mother would tell stories that “they’d expected a boy and needed a bit more time to decide on a name for a girl.” That was the nice face they placed on their disappointment for not finally getting a boy.
So I learned to live in the shadows. And dutifully. But it led to sucking my finger, bitten fingernails for many years, and scars resulting from mosquito bites scratched, then scratched again. I see all of this as inner-directed aggression in response to the frustrated need to speak, speak out, in any way possible. And to be heard.
Confusingly, I was encouraged to develop intellectual confidence at the girls’ boarding school I was sent to. (Ironically, the family lore maintains that my parents did this to get us out of Dodge to avoid the local “drug problem”; little did they realize how rife the problem was at the boarding school.)
But that was a private, very constrained sphere. Speaking out there was acceptable. I sometimes wonder if my sisters and I weren’t sent to this school so that my parents mostly wouldn’t have to deal with us speaking out, that is, growing up and becoming adults. After all, isn’t speaking out part of growing up?
But speaking our minds when I and my sisters came home was a different matter. My oldest sister, four years my senior, was the fall guy. She had just completed her freshman year at the famously liberal Oberlin College in Ohio. And, because of her outspokenness, she became labeled the “family Communist.” We only learned this from a family friend. How was it that speaking one’s mind became equated with Communism? It was just another way of stifling opinion by calling it something as noxious as Communism was considered to be at the time, in the post-McCarthy era, which lasted through the late 1950s. (McCarthy, like the Bush administration, became famously renowned for polarizing the country.)
By virtue of her position in the family, my sister had been targeted for the hardest-hitting parental influence, which tended to center on appropriate girl behavior: One of my mother’s favorite refrains was, “Be sure to always ask the boy about himself first. Be a good listener.” My sister struggled to rise above it. But later in college she told us she was gay. I wonder at the correlation.
Because I wasn’t entitled to an aural voice, I developed an early interest in a written one as a way to express myself, even privately. In a recent art class, we did an exercise to recall and share our earliest memory. And it didn’t have to be tied to creativity or self expression. The choice for me was obvious. I’m sitting on a tall, garishly bright blue stool at the bar in the basement in our house on a lake in Michigan. I’m four years old. And I’m scribbling on a small, light blue pad of paper. I don’t know the alphabet and I don’t know how to write, but I’m desperately pretending that I can. So the urge to express myself might have been muted but not impossible to stifle even then.
As we grew up, my mother was a grammar stickler, if a kind one, and we came to thank her for that as we all learned to write well. But it took me a very long time to appreciate the big gap that exists between writing grammatically correctly and expressing a convincing, if possibly unwelcome, thought.
Because I couldn’t suppress my internal need to express myself, in spite of the outward pressures to do so, I pursued a career in communications and writing. I was drawn to the world that would pay: science, engineering, and technology. There was always something to learn, so one had to stay agile. I learned to turn inadequacy into a selling point: I was the one who knew the least about topic x. That’s why, I explained unintuitively, I was in the room. And I could interpret and explain it for my organization’s general constituency better than anyone else. My language training in translation and interpretation no doubt helped.
But I got no name recognition: I never had a byline or was given credit for significant things I wrote, like annual reports, website articles, and proposals, several of which garnered tens of millions of dollars. In fact, when the issue of a byline was raised occasionally, it was literally met with bewilderment. Speaking of bewilderment, I note in retrospect that I still can’t avoid the use of passive voice describing the situation.
I had this job for 15 years. And it mostly worked for me. I was learning constantly, which now makes me wonder whether that wasn’t some kind of organizational anti-depressant: Get her to do what she’s good at so that she won’t ask for more.
I got promoted once, twice, a third time. The promotions were vague. The job descriptions didn’t change so much as the increases in salary. I was being rewarded for a good job, even if there was no career path ahead of me with more demanding responsibilities. Like a man would have expected. Insisted on. Or gone elsewhere.
Over time, in the mid 1990s, I became unsettled. A trusted academic from Stanford brought an interesting job opening to my attention. I didn’t think I was particularly qualified; still I was intrigued by his apparent vote of confidence. So I submitted an application. And didn’t hear a word.
Still, the exercise was a good one, as it opened me up to thinking about changing jobs. I wasn’t stuck, I told myself (at least I was talking to me!) unless I chose to be.
Shortly thereafter, a project fell into my lap to help a nationally respected colleague write a proposal for a new research unit at UCSD where I was working. He’d come to campus to be a research faculty member in computer science but somehow, through the arm-twisting of the charismatic dean of engineering, agreed to head up a new institute if funded. He was a friend of the head of my institute who wanted to help him be successful; so I was offered to him.
The results of the experiment were good, and he hired me as his director of communications. This turned out to be the pinnacle of my career — and my career ambitions.
But that job required me to be in the spotlight. I guess I thought that if I could land this, my perfect, job, I would rise to the occasion. But I didn’t. I was still in hiding.
I did that job for nearly seven years and resigned because I wanted to focus on my own writing. I think now, instead, that I had to leave the working world to get serious about finding my own voice.
In some ways, while that option offered more creative control, it again provided me a retreat to the shadows: There’s safety in never publishing. That’s actually a respectable place to be, given the seemingly impossible odds of getting your work published:
Your work could be great; they just don’t recognize it. That would excuse you from having any kind of a writing footprint.
That was about a year ago. I’ve been taking lots of art classes: watercolor, drawing, portraiture, pastel. That provides a voice but still a relatively private one.
I’ve also realized I need to hear my voice. So, when I heard the local NPR radio station advertise the need for volunteers to read newspapers over the air for the blind, it was clear to me that was the next step: Reading out loud and listening to oneself in the process. I still resist making the call.
In my creative work, I’m having a hard time deciding what to write about. For now I want to write only in the first person. Writing in the third person doesn’t yet feel authentic, even though the work is inevitably based on my own experiences and observations.
So I’m making progress, even if only by baby steps. But I find it sad that I’ve had to withdraw in some sense from the world to begin to sort this out. Not enough people have that luxury.