High school in Hailey, Idaho (1964-68) was not a fun time for me. I spent most of it alienated, awkward, lonely, worried that I would die a virgin, worried that I wouldn’t die a virgin and would be a father when I was 16, worried that I would flunk out of college, worried that once I flunked out, I would get drafted and die in a rice paddy in Vietnam, leaving my quadruplets without a father.
I worried about everyone I knew dying in nuclear war, leaving me as the improbable witness to infinite horror. I worried about my parents turning 60 and dying of old age. I worried that my brain, which I had been told was a dangerous sharp object, would turn against me and I would die in a locked ward in State Hospital South, in Blackfoot, where people from all over Idaho were sent when they got too depressed to function.
I worried that recurring fantasies of violence would get me sent to the reformatory for juveniles in St. Anthony, where teenagers from all over Idaho were sent when they became too feral for their parents and the local justices of the peace to handle. I plotted the murders of high school bullies, and worried I wouldn’t get away with them.
________
Sixty years later, after a career of teaching adolescents of various ages how to write, I can see that I wasn’t the only kid in my high school with worries. We all were worried about something, at least if we were paying attention to the world we were living in, which was peaceable on the surface, brutal in its undercurrents, dark in its future.
People could and did get sucked into evil, did die in Vietnam, did get sent to reform school and mental institutions, did become parents who spent irreplaceable portions of their lives raising kids they wouldn’t have had if they’d had a choice. My social awkwardness and resultant non-parenthood managed to get me to college rather than side-tracking me into working to support a family, and college kept me from getting drafted, at least until student deferments were abolished. Then it was a just-high-enough lottery number that kept me a civilian.
Nuclear war was a real worry, big enough, even now, to invoke the Multiverse’s Anthropic Principle: this self is here, me, alive, so it didn’t die in a nuclear holocaust, no matter how high the odds were that it would happen. Other realities and other selves—infinities of them, probably—were not so fortunate. If the barriers between alternate realities weren’t so strong, I’d have an alternate-self refugee problem.
________
There were a few moments of self-consciousness in my adolescence when I intuited that my problems were relatively minor in the big scheme of things, and that they would pass.
But other people had problems that were, in a word, lethal. Other people’s loneliness—I’m thinking of the high school bullies—ended worse than anything I would ever experience. Other people’s families were exponentially more violent than mine. Some of my classmates, I can now recognize, were being abused, sexually and otherwise, by families and teachers and peers.
In my reality, other worried teens fulfilled their dreams of violence and went to St. Anthony. Terminally worried teens committed suicide. Anxious teens, frightened into paralysis, couldn’t look around themselves and see that their families loved them even if they didn’t understand them. Fear shaped their lives and outlooks enough that they got old early and died alone.
People were forced into religions, social classes, academic categories, impossible conceptions of personal beauty and behavior. Nobody escaped being sorted, categorized, diagnosed, and psychically altered to fit predestined family roles.
None of us, given the forces arrayed against us, were able to look out for our own interests. Considering that those interests were mostly defined by the icky narcissism of adolescence, where impulse rules and self-pity is the addictive drug of choice, that was fortunate. But the people who were supposed to protect us from ourselves and our world, even when they had our welfare in mind, didn’t always provide the protection we needed.
________
My parents aimed me at college and convinced me that becoming a high-school-age parent would effectively end my lifetime happiness. They spoke with the authority of hard experience. They had wanted children, but once they had them, their lives, which had been carefree and happy for the first year of marriage, were filled with hard work, enormous responsibilities, and the tragedy of losing a child. They wanted and loved their children but their lives, deeply constrained by a lack of discretionary income, showed us how much of a sacrifice it had been to raise two sons, lose one, and come up with his replacement.
I had a justifiable horror of parenthood. I had no doubt that my brothers and I had trashed our parents’ lives. And if social awkwardness hadn’t condemned me to virginity, the examples I had in high school—ostracized unwed mothers, high-school dropouts working as assistant auto mechanics, girls who gained weight and then disappeared to live with relatives for a year, only to return to school sadder, wiser, and alone—would have.
When I finally got to college, birth control pills were in wide use, the sexual revolution had overthrown centuries of cruel patriarchal morality, and losing one’s virginity was a relatively worry-free experience. It occurred without fear of pregnancy, or much ceremony or commitment for that matter. It was all good.
________
I sometimes use my teaching experience to explain not having children, saying, “Perfectly good parents can end up with awful children.” Behind that statement is the larger gamble parents take with genetics, accidents, drugs, and adverse childhood experiences. Also Freud’s insight that among humanity’s primal bands, there was a vampiric antagonism between young and old, one that at its most violent involved murder and cannibalism.
Biology ensures that once you have children, cannibals or not, you don’t normally wish you hadn’t conceived them. Pheromones and hormones and enormous cultural pressures create people willing to forget their dreams, work for decades at jobs they hate, and pass personal ambitions onto a newer generation.
Once, after I had graduated from college and had a teaching job, my mother asked me when I would get married and have kids. “Never,” I said, and she told me that not getting married and having children would wreck my life. I reminded her that the last time she had worried about me wrecking my life, she had warned me against having kids.
“You’re being incredibly selfish,” she said. “I dreamed of having grandchildren.”
I should say that by this time her Alzheimer’s was in its early stages. Her ability to separate her own life from those of her children was gone, as was her ability to refrain from speaking what she was thinking. What she was thinking echoed the cultural expectations she had been raised with. For a decade or so, her condition masqueraded as sanity.
________
Let me end with a memory of the district guidance counselor during my time as a grade school and high school student. She was a pleasant looking but obese woman, middle-aged and single, with a broken engagement in her past. She had spent her 20s in college and grad school, and her 30s and 40s taking care of parents both stricken with Parkinson’s. She was highly intelligent, but her life had warped her outlook, and her outlook warped her guidance counseling.
She was notorious for advising female students to forgo college and get married, so they wouldn’t grow old without kids. She guided a few promising male students into the Naval and Air Force Academies while there was a war on. While they didn’t die in combat, more than one died relatively young of stress-related diseases. She told lots of people they weren’t college material, which caused a few of them to wave university diplomas in her face years later.
Her life had not gone according to plan. In that, she wasn’t any different from the rest of us, but the hijacking of her life by her parents’ illnesses had forced her into a weird definition of her own agency. I think her guidance of high school juniors and seniors into marriage and the military was a counterproductive effort to put the illusion of choice into her own and her charges’ lives. The ’60s were hard on marriages and the military both.
She did maintain good relationships with college admissions officers all across the West, and shuttled students she deemed college material in likely directions. For those students, she did her job well.
For the misfits, the delinquent, the alienated, the creatives, the inarticulate, she didn’t do well at all. I hit the bullseye in all these categories. She saw me as troubled but intelligent. That was a bad combination for her, an irresistible invitation to project her own hopes and frustrations onto my innocent head.
She was a friend of my parents, and with their permission she gave me my first IQ test when I was 8 years old. I aced it.
Looking back, I can see that she cheated in my favor. She gave me more time to solve problems than the test allowed, and she must have given other hints about right answers that I picked up on. I ended up with an embarrassingly high IQ, which she reported to my parents, who leaked it to my older brother, to me, and to their friends. The information did not endear me to family or community.
The next school year my guidance counselor arranged for me to skip fourth grade. Between the IQ test, skipping a grade in a small-town school, and spending the summers in Sawtooth Valley, far away from my classmates, I was well on my way to being an alienated, inadequately socialized freakishly smart kid, in an arena where being smart wasn’t at all cool.
When it was time for college, she helped me get into Harvard, editing and revising my application until it conformed to the sensibilities of a sophisticated committee of academics familiar with the narrative concept of the bildungsroman. In a bildungsroman, a talented rustic journeys to the big city, learns its ways and becomes fabulously successful, and then returns to his hometown to treat the people who scorned him with kindness and generosity.
________
My guidance counselor died in her 60s of hereditary Parkinson’s, which is not a good way to go. At the end she couldn’t move or talk or think. But she lives on in my life, for better or for worse.
Being smart, as Ted Kaczynski might tell you, allows you to break certain societal rules. You shouldn’t go as far as Ted did, but you can look critically at marriage and children, careers in law and medicine, team sports, tacky material evidence of success, beaten paths and stultifying conventional morality.
But being smart is a societal role too, and an unforgiving one. Perhaps because I’ve never felt very smart, I’ve been hyper-conscious of the moves you must make to fit into the role. That first IQ test, as bogus as it was, was the moment my story stopped being about free will and started being about Fate.
Over the years I’ve gotten smarter and smarter, trying to live up to the role that was chosen for me.
It helped that I learned to love books, and that once I had seen it was possible, I tried to put my experiences and feelings into words.
It helped that I learned early on that if you knew geometry, you could maneuver through the math sections of the SAT and ACT and look like you knew what you were doing.
It helped that I never mistook a diploma for an education, my own opinions for facts, my decisions for outcomes.
At this late date, high intelligence consists of identifying and avoiding life’s pitfalls, and to the extent that I was a good writing teacher, that’s what my best students learned from me. It was the smartest thing I could teach them.
If you don’t know that writing has pitfalls, you haven’t written much.
________
My life hasn’t resembled a bildungsroman. I will always come up short in the forgiveness department (my only saving grace is that I don’t forgive myself my own sins, of which there are plenty). But I can remember every cutting remark, every scornful glance I received during my high school years, and I see no reason to forget them. In the end, God, or karma, or the laws of physics catch up to all of us, the cruel and the kind, the smart and the stupid, the educated and the ignorant, alike.
If that fact allows for a few moments of tragicomic schadenfreude before you get yours, that’s one of life’s guilty pleasures, at least in my case.
________
The thing we call the self isn’t a personal creation. Selves are community projects, and they are handed to you well before you’re old enough to understand that it’s a loan you’ll have to repay. If you try to avoid making payments, that’s part of the plan, too.
You’ll spend your life being the person others, some of them long dead, have imagined into existence.
It’s your life’s work. It matters whether the community that created you allows you to look over your own shoulder. If it does, you can now and then think about your life, wonder how you got where you are, and take an occasional day off from worrying where you’re going.