This was all but proven that summer day. Emily swam laps, same as always, but her team must have been moving slowly because the coach gave them all a loud talking-to. Emily hung on to the concrete lip at the end of the swim lane and pressed the balls of her feet into the smooth tile wall as she listened to her coach yell to the group, “Stop thinking about everything and your brother and get your head in the pool!” Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott suggests that, as children try to make sense of the world, one way this process goes wrong is through coincidences, as coincidences “lead to muddle.” The coach’s words that morning were one of those unlucky coincidences that fed a false worldview. To Emily, his words were meant just for her, and they felt like code. We all know what goes on at your house. No one is going to talk about it. No one is going to do anything about it. Shut up and swim, he was saying. This is your lot.
***
Emily did shut up and swim. In the years that followed, she swam her way to out-of-town swim meets on the weekend and then to a college far away from New Jersey. When faced with the college application prompt, “Describe a challenge you have overcome,” seventeen-year-old Emily had trouble thinking of one. She felt blank. Finally, she wrote about a state swim meet when she won a blue ribbon despite being quite ill. Not for a moment did Emily consider writing about her father’s alcoholism, probably because she still did not have a word for what had been wrong with her father; nor did she know that what she had lived through was a bona fide adversity. In retrospect, though, Emily doubts she would have written about her father’s drinking had she been able to. Alcoholism seemed a seedier challenge than what colleges were really looking for, she thought, and it was one for which, in her family, there had been no uplifting blue-ribbon triumph, the kind that everyone seemed to want.
Psychoanalyst Carl Jung said in his autobiography about his own secrets around growing up depressed and with a depressed mother, “It would never have occurred to me to speak of my experience openly,” and so it was for Emily. Never once did Emily talk about her father’s drinking with her friends at school, and not a single time did she mention it to her boyfriends, or even to a man she lived with for more than two years in her twenties. This was more automatic than it was intentional, as she almost never thought about her father’s drinking, either. Her early experiences were there in her mind somewhere, though, and they influenced her. Such as when she noticed that one of the men she had dated smelled like her father—or more accurately, like whiskey; Emily did not date him for long. And when she opted to spend holidays at other people’s houses, rather than return to her own. Once, when Emily brought her partner to meet her family, she reflexively found reasons for the two to stay with a friend across town, only once joining up with Emily’s father, and for breakfast at that. Emily does not remember consciously deciding to stay away from her father, or plotting to meet him early in the morning before he would have started drinking. She had tiptoed around the elephant both in her living room and in her own mind for so long that, by adulthood, so much about Emily’s life and about her decision making still simply, and literally, went without saying. Talking about her father’s drinking just “never crossed my mind,” Emily said.
This is how secrets—and those who keep them—can be quite misunderstood. Skeletons in the closet. The dirt swept under the rug. Where the bodies are buried. We think of skeletons and dirt and bodies as information we willfully, tactically hide from others, when sometimes, and maybe even usually, secrets are automatic and multidetermined. Fear leaves us speechless. The lack of labels and categories leaves us without words. Those around us hint, or insist, that some things are better left unsaid. Supernormals rarely set out to fool others, and in retrospect they often realize there was a great deal that they kept not only from other people but even from themselves. Dostoevsky makes this distinction when he says, “Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.” The problem is that having many such things stored away in your mind may not feel all that decent, and it can produce a vague, unshakable sense not just that one has secrets but that one is living a lie.
Journalist Charles Blow recalls this feeling of lying in his memoir, when he reveals how he managed to go on behaving as usual in his home after he was sexually abused by a relative: “I had to resort to the most useful and dangerous lesson a damaged child ever learns—how to lie to himself . . . There is nowhere to hide in a small house. I had to make room within the rooms, a safe place midway in the mind, behind seeing and before knowing . . . That’s what people in this town and in our family did with secrets. No matter what it was—not a word. No good could come from giving voice to vice.” Blow could not be safe in his house, so he survived by finding a place in his mind where he was safe from the knowledge of what had happened to him. He says he learned to “lie to himself” but really what he articulates so beautifully is the muddle that exists, for children and for adults, as secrets and lies and not knowing become all jumbled up.
***
Back in California in 1976, the children from the bus kidnapping returned to school that autumn, and the majority showed not a dent in their academic performance. Unbeknownst to others, however, many began to fantasize about being heroes or, to be more exact, about being better heroes next time. They imagined scenarios of revenge or escape should they ever be confronted by kidnappers again. Some secretly prepared themselves, with exercise or even weaponry, to be more decisively triumphant in the future—that is, to summon the fight or flight they had not been able to muster right away on that summer day. Although inwardly, many of the children would view the kidnapping as the origin story of their lives, outwardly they preferred not to be reminded of or known for the incident. Later that year, one of the boys was recognized at Disneyland, and some curious parkgoers asked if he was a student from the bus. His reply?
“No, I don’t live in Chowchilla.”
CHAPTER 4
Fight
I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It’s so fuckin’ heroic.
—George Carlin
In 1955, on Kauai, Hawaii’s “Garden Island,” psychologists Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith inadvertently began what would become a groundbreaking and decades-long study of resilience. Their subjects were 698 infants—all of the babies who were born on the island that year. These infants were from Asian, Caucasian, and Polynesian families, many of whom were struggling with multiple adversities. Some lived in chronic poverty and were undereducated and underemployed. Alcoholism or mental illness ran through many of the homes. Werner and Smith hypothesized that the more difficulties these children were exposed to when they were young, the more problems of their own they would have as they grew. This was a commonsense proposition, to be sure, but it was also one that had not, by the 1950s, been empirically demonstrated in a large sample, much less from the cradle and then across time. To do so, these nearly seven hundred brand-new citizens of Kauai were followed, from birth into middle adulthood, by psychologists, pediatricians, public health professionals, and social workers.
Unfortunately, Werner and Smith were somewhat right. Two-thirds of the infants they labeled as “high-risk”—those who grew up alongside four or more adversities—had serious behavioral or learning problems by age ten. By age eighteen, they struggled with their own delinquency or mental illness, and many had become pregnant. What Werner and Smith did not expect, however, was that, despite their troubled beginnings, one-third of the high-risk children went on to become “competent, confident, and caring adults.” They earned educations and held better