On Being Different

The movie The Great Santini came out in 1979. I saw it shortly thereafter.  Santini was Pat Conroy’s father, Bull Meechum, who was in so many ways like my own father. I’d just turned thirty, was preoccupied with life so much so that even though the movie was unsettling, it took years to unpack why.  Reading several of Conroy’s books shed light on why.  I’d like to have sat down with Pat Conroy.  He and I were different in a number of ways but alike in so many others. 

(Warning: raw language)

Regarding Pat Conroy the writer: 

“She (his psychiatrist, Marion O’Neill) said I had the kind of anxiety that would never lead to ulcers because I do not hold my feelings in.  Somewhere I must have a hidden vagina or a female organ, because I can talk about my feelings, and I can cry.  Marion assured me my anxiety had a way of getting out into the world, and I think she thought that was writing.  What therapy is like is also what writing is like.  Every book I’ve written has been called forth from a dark side of me.  Marion told me”—

 “A lot of your cure comes from your writing, and the deeper you go, the better it’s going to be for you and your mental health.  There are things you have not dug out yet.  You’ve got to make sure you keep digging.” 

From My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy as told to Katherine Clark, 117.

He (George Gargade, Pat’s good friend) said, “You know what’s wrong with you, boy?  You’re always depressed.  You know why you’re depressed? You think too fu—in’ much.  You’re always thinkin’ too fu—in’ much.  Now, be like the Daddy Rabbit bit, I don’t think about nothin’ at all.  And you’re too fu—in’ sensitive.  I just go along and one thing leads to another, that’s fine, nothin’ I can do about it.  I ain’t sensitive about it.  And don’t be readin’ them fu—in’ books.  They’re so depressing anybody would want to kill themselves.” 

From My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy as told to Katherine Clark, 112.

If the language has not run you off, keep reading.  

These quotes rattled my cage maybe not in the same way it might have yours.  They reminded me of an occasion in therapy twenty+ ago when my therapist said, “your family/life story is one of the toughest I’ve every heard”.  My immediate thought was, “did you just start as a therapist yesterday?”

I know we all have our own version of burying the ugly stuff back there in our lives.  It is really a challenge if not impossible to unpack it alone.  As Conroy’s psychiatrist said, you’ve got to keep digging—talking it out.  I too was badgered by a father who repetitively said I was too sensitive.  Because as a kid, your father is an authority and knows better (at least you think so) I tried to not be so sensitive. Early on it was the beginnings of denying my very self and almost creating a split personality—of sorts.  Not the DSM version, but trying to not be who I was innately.  As my father saw it, sensitivity was nothing to be proud of but to be embarrassed about, to be ashamed of as a boy.  It was sure not manly.  

Masculinity in the eyes of many.

Like Conroy, maybe I have a female organ buried somewhere within my insides—at least my father thought so in calling me a sissy so often. Then as I over the years—and it was years—came to understand myself more, I wondered if that less than (supposed) masculine part of me expressed itself in my differentness, my different orientation in so many ways.  I don’t see it as cause and effect but those aspects of my being—the differences I felt—were huge pieces of myself to integrate.  Early on it all was to be keep under the radar and to be ashamed of—loathing myself along the way fearing the loss of everything dear should the essence of me be broadly known—all the differentness about me.  I was in my early 30s, already over ten years of marriage and two beautiful girls when my understanding of myself was just beginning to surface in my own consciousness.  I, as do many, did a great job of burying the traumas of childhood. The way burying often works, it scoops up a wide swath to bury along with specific events and memories.  I’d give myself an exceptional grade of A+++ for pulling that off.  Yet I had no conscious realization of what I was doing.  I told many clients at similar junctures in their lives to not manhandle the process (interesting I use that term—it even being sexist in a way) of uncovering with a steam shovel (that dates me as I think of Captain Kangaroo reading of the book, Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, i.e. what’s a steam shovel?).  My experience has been that the realization of traumas eventually bleeds to the surface on its own in times when your psyche can emotionally deal with it (most of the time at least).  But when it does bleed through it sure doesn’t feel like you can deal with it. Bleed is exactly what I did emotionally. And too, these inner revelations seem to come at the most inopportune moments.

Decades ago I was in Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Green Hills and saw a book titled There are Men to Gentle to Live among the Wolves, by James Kavanaugh.  In a preface added later Kavanaugh writes: 

“I wrote about myself and thousands of others who do not settle easily into a niche but want from life “everything good and beautiful”.  No longer did we accept the indictments of “unstable”, “selfish”, or “incapable of commitment”.  We were searchers looking to regain a lost or stolen identity, wanting real relationships, and an honest, fulfilling life.” 

“I will probably be a searcher until I die and hopefully death itself will only be another adventure.  To live any other way seems impossible.  If anything has changed over the years, and it has, I only feel more confident now about what I wrote then.  I am also far more aware of the power that guides each of us along the way, and provides us with the insights and people we need for our journey.  There are, indeed, men and women too gentle to live among the wolves and only when joined with them will life offer the searcher, step by step, all that is good and beautiful.  Life becomes not a confused struggle or pointless pain, but an evolving mosaic masterpiece of the person we were destined to become.”

“Too gentle to live among wolves” was how I so often had felt. 

This ‘self actualization’ (an old term used by we therapists) has been a long and at times a grueling process.  It is exhausting.  I found a plethora of ways to momentarily avoid or escape the process which I would say now were totally necessary to keep from going batshit crazy.  I’m not saying all of my diversions, my actions were healthy, they were not, but they were necessary.  I’m at a point in life where I don’t need you to agree with me (or accept my language at times).  Yet I learned years ago that I am an INFJ on the Meyers Briggs.  When I read the description of me I see that the ‘J’ doesn’t mind telling you what he thinks—not to impose upon or sway you but just to state where he stands.  BUT, one fly in the ointment is that INFJs want everyone to like them.  Me too.  So I suffer from an innate glitch in the software in that those two aspects of me don’t work together—i.e. internal conflict #36.  When I put it out there I give folks something to shoot at.  I’ve learned to dodge critical bombs and bullets—yet am riddled with bullet wounds and scars.  That still doesn’t mean criticism quit stinging.  Like Conroy, I am writing and you are reading.  I use writing along with therapy to work out my stuff too. I am not as thin skinned as in decades gone by. 

Unlike my father or Pat Conroy’s father, The Great Santini, I vehemently disagree over my sensitivity.  I am grateful for it.  I believe it made me a better therapist, a better listener.   I’ve alway couched my depression protectively in saying I am just ‘a melancholy’—well,  I am.  One great diversion from that side of me has been humor—warped as it can be at times.  I thank God for humor and the laughter it generates. If God herself doesn’t have a sense of humor, we are all in trouble.  Humor has shed light into the darkest recesses of my own soul on many occasions.  

Yes, I have also minimized my own history by saying to myself, “other guys have experienced far worse than you, suck it up!”.  I downloaded a version of my critical parent who long after I left home, his voice echos in my head even now.  It has taken voices of others making statements like a friend did recently while we were on a bike ride: “I never knew you had such a history. It doesn’t show in how you appear and carry yourself—how you’ve lived your life”.  That was a grand compliment and yet an indictment of how good I’ve been at burying and hiding things.  Then again, without having a total breakdown, which I was very close to at fifty when I went for three weeks of intensive therapy in Scottsdale, the process is just that, a process.  I’ve told multiple clients to “trust the process” but then saw the frustration in their faces as they wanted to lunge across the room for my throat.

I am grateful for who I am.  I’m not boasting.  I am such a mixed bag—as we all are.  I’ve learned along the way that masculinity is far from being macho with all the brawny bravado.  Ego is my enemy most days.  We males have way too much of it. 

My early Pentecostal teaching had something to do with denying and burying.  I don’t blame that, I’m just owning it’s influence. There was good that came from that version of religion and faith even with its disallowing of any doubt or questioning.  We as congregants bore the burden of false dogma and theology, not the system.  We just drank the koolaid we were given—as weak as it was.  But it was not poison to the point of death of all faith for me.  I found the antidote in continuing to question and seek a clearer truth. 

Life has taught me that we ALL feel different in a lot of ways.  We feel excluded, not chosen like the last guy to be selected for a team. We actually are all ‘different’—unique.  There is no one else out there exactly like you.  I look for groups or communities to identify with who have some of the same qualities and differences as me.  But different is good and I’ve found I’ve been enriched and grown way more interacting with others that are different from me rather than being around the same.  Same can stagnate—even suffocate.  What a shift that has been from the man I was in my twenties.

I believe it is that Truth that has actually drawn me along, a ‘calling’ which every person has.  There has been a crap load of noise and voices in my head to unpack to be able to hear the quiet ‘voice’—a steady voice, a faithful one. 

As you enter the hall at the Academia Gallery in Florence to view the statue of Michelangelo’s David there are several blocks of marble with human figure emerging from the stone. We like them are emerging from the stone—the strongholds of our pasts discovering the beauty of our differences within our commonness.

I’m still unpacking—digging with a small trowel, not a shovel.  I don’t believe the unpacking and searching for the better—seeking my truth as well as the Truth, will ever stop. 

Hope not.