I grew up doing things like a girl. I threw like a girl, ran like a girl, cried like a girl, and in my teenage years I slammed doors, waited by the phone, and pined after unrequited crushes – just like a girl.
I got trained to make the bed, shovel a walk, set and clear a table, brush my teeth twice daily and many other important lessons. My parents taught me how to be organized and focused; they taught me delayed gratification (no TV until my homework was completed). And since my teenage years were in the ‘70’s, I was told I could be anything I wanted, to use education to have any career at all. I could be a doctor, a lawyer, any type of professional I wanted to be (except for ballerina, but that was my doing, really, as I lacked grace, fluidity and a thin wispy build, so quite early on I switched to tap). For all these lessons, I’m forever grateful. But something was missing, and I realized it when reading a book about how to help boys through their adolescence.
Boys, according to this source, must be trained, by men, how to experience anger and fear – how to understand and overcome and move through the blackest of emotions. It is this training, they say, that will keep boys from becoming irresponsible, bullying, womanizing, intimidating and shallow men who are afraid to commit to the arduous tasks of adult life. Traditional rites of passage, so often overlooked in our culture, were the ways this was accomplished – older, wiser men taking younger, inexperienced boys and leading them on a some version of a Vision Quest, teaching them skills and then leaving them alone in the wilderness for three days, facing danger and fear, panic and hunger, the anger at the old men and the tribe and the whole damn world for making this impossible quest – then living through all the crazy/scary/inane contents of one’s head and heart, and finding the part of oneself that continues to exist after the fear and anger and danger have ended. In the process, these boys became men, having learned how to handle powerful negative emotions and emerge stronger because of it.
As soon as I read this, it clicked. Yes, train them up. I’ve no doubt boys are desperately in need this training. But what about girls? I don’t think I know of a woman who was trained, as a teenager, in what to DO with anger or fear or insecurities or sadness that would have been effective or satisfying or in any way useful. In the absence of positive training, we just felt these feelings, over and over, and attempted all kinds of ineffective strategies. In the absence of effective training, here are some things that I learned to do with difficult feelings, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only girl on the block who attempted these:
• to not feel things so deeply – aka, grow a thicker skin, not take things personally, and generally “just get over it” – problem with this: it requires denying one’s own experiences, not a great place from which to build.
• to hide painful emotion and create an outer mask of being “fine” – problem with this: it leads to isolation and further misunderstanding. If you succeed, no one knows you except for your mask; if you fail, no one can understand it because you keep denying that you’re in pain.
• to distract oneself – the problem here is that pain is now prolonged, as it’s just right there, waiting, until you come back to it.
• to blame everyone and everything for our misery in a futile attempt to make the villains “do something” to make it better, to draw them in closer to soothe us – oh, the complex problems with this, as false attempts to bring people closer only push them away. And it misses the fact that the other person probably wanted distance to begin with, or they wouldn’t have engaged in hurtful actions. So not likely to work. Ever.
• to make something out of distress, an alter of sorts – bad poems, sad movies and books, endless playbacks of songs where the music and lyrics glorified youthful alienation and loss, long tearful phone calls to friends, fights and fights and fights with parents. And probably the entire Goth decade, girls in shapeless, impenetrable black, even their eyes and lips untouchably, unkissably black. Problematic only if you think building an identity as a misunderstood, lonely, melancholy or angry person is a bad idea.
• to numb one’s pain – in my generation, girls used mostly food (overindulgence and then the emergence of starvation) and drink, but later generations have added in a more complex variety of numbing options, such as cutting, internet/Netflix, designer drugs and meaningless sex. I won’t patronize my readers to state the clear and unremitting problems in these strategies.
Yet it turns out pain isn’t something to be avoided or covered up or ignored or numbed. Pain is to be used as the basis of becoming competent, agentic adults. What we girls needed was a heroine’s journey. The time and space to learn about what dangers lay ahead, then the practice in meeting and overcoming these dangers.
Heroic overcoming, especially for boys-becoming-men, is what fills children’s fiction. Mythology, fairy tales and even some modern movies geared toward children provide a villain – the awful, usually ugly, seemingly über-powerful, larger-than-life witch or giant, monster or alien. I always thought that these stories were crucial to help children understand how they will somehow overcome the villains they’ll encounter in their day-to-day life. We allow our children to identify with the hero, and to push away the villain, then celebrate in the victory over the villain, who has been slain, decapitated, banished, evaporated, or at least made a fool, and thus stripped of their seeming power. When anger and fear have no release, someone becomes a villain, someone else a victim. Yet no matter which side of this teeter-totter you sit on, the game is rigged for a lifetime of dissatisfaction and self-sabotage. Wile E. Coyote never actually destroys the Road Runner, and the Road Runner never fully banishes or destroys the stalking, relentless Coyote, yet these two are yoked forever in the most unsatisfying ways. Evil is out there, these stories warn, so be prepared for an endless battle.
But now I see things differently. Great fiction has something else to tell us – the giant or witch is not some OTHER creature. The destructive, rageful, hurtful, selfish, reckless, vain, mean, detested and destestable ogre represents our shadow self. We each have a shadow, an ugly, angry, self-entitled vortex that sits atop our deepest fears and strongest rages. I imagine that it’s the purpose of the anger to keep everyone, including ourselves, far off track from our terror and fear of humiliation. Yet the fear is the root of the anger – the humiliation of feeling so small and inadequate in the face of fear turns in to endless attempts to make others afraid. The more angry and self-absorbed we become, the less others can hurt us. We’ll just hurt all by ourselves, and inflict whatever we can on the people we no longer care a whit about. In this vein, evil is inside us, so we must be prepared to encounter the Shadow within.
And thus the hero’s journey – the ability to learn the unique skill set one brings to bear in the world, and to use it to fight against, tame, and overcome the id-like inner Shadow. This is the training I needed, but it was outside the scope of what my family could provide to their children, both male and female. No one in my clan was prepared or guided on a hero’s journey of their own, so it makes sense they didn’t even know to provide this to their children. And I doubt that in the suburban ‘70’s, any of the neighbor kids were getting this either. Baby boomer parents weren’t exactly raised to be heroes; they were the children of the Great Hero generation, and instead they thought they could coast.
Power is not just in the mind, nor does it rest solely in the body. Power is the ability to use our total physiological energy – from mind, body, and positive and negative emotions – in an unending pursuit of our greater goals. No one is powerful when they are impotently or wildly enraged; no one is effective through avoiding conflict; and certainly, no one who bases action or inaction in fear can harness anything like power. As a teenager and young person, I let my Shadow self call too many of the shots, and didn’t even know I’d done so.
Here’s the training I’d like to see for teenagers: Let’s train boys and girls just like we train boxers and martial artists, to encounter not just outward dangers, but inner Shadows. Let’s develop classes where we introduce kids to their Shadows, then come face to face with their inner ogre/witch, and learn how to encounter, withstand and transform their fear and anger. And sure, there’s a masculine and feminine strength to bring to bear in this training, so boys can learn to Man Up and girls can learn to Woman Up and each learn to take useful, effective action. Let’s build a modern-day Vision Quest field trip into high school curricula (with parental consent and release of liability forms – can you imagine? – well, we should do it anyway).
I have a very different relationship with my Shadow than I ever had before. I’ve come to respect my deeper feelings of discomfort, assume they have something important to tell me either about myself or my situation. I let myself feel them, then turn a curious mind to the action they might call from me. I have been training myself over the years, stripping away the ineffective strategies, to take action – positive action – at the very time that my emotions flood and I’d previously been left to choose between helpless, isolating inaction or stupid, angry, isolating action. Without knowing it, I’ve become a Shadow Boxer – learning protective punches, jabs, straights, hooks, crosses, uppers and the oh-so-important blocks, practicing them in the air, at no one in particular, or in a mirror, at inner Demons and outer Adversaries. I’ve been learning how to move out of the path of incoming danger, through bobbing, weaving, ducking, parrying, to be light and nimble on my (emotional) feet.
I hope no one laughs when they see me at the gym these days, with 5 pound weights in each hand, throwing punches at my mirror image. I still lack the “oomph”, the snap of the throw, but I’m getting better at staying on my toes, better at being able to hold my arms upright with the addition of this small amount of extra weight. I’m my own ringside coach, cajoling more effort, more strength out of myself. I’m a suburban girl who’s come late to the ring, but I’m gonna stay in as many rounds as I can.