It’s hard to quantify psychological abuse. For years, I felt sure it wasn’t real. I didn’t believe in things like emotional intelligence, the critical inner voice, generalized anxiety, ego depletion, and how these can lead to high-risk behaviors and addictions. I also didn’t believe you could inherit any of it down through the generations. But I believe now.
For most of my adult life, I’ve been more persuaded by my mother’s idea that with enough willpower, you can overcome anything and that if you seek help, if you identify yourself as being weak, troubled, or different, you will be put on a list. Then you’ll never know whether you failed in life because you weren’t good enough or because you voluntarily admitted it and people decided they wanted nothing to do with you. Admittedly, young people don’t worry about things like this anymore. Now it seems everyone has their own pet defect or preferred victim category.
My mom was a brilliant, gifted artist and a very good person, but part of her lived in perpetual fear that I wasn’t clever enough, tough enough, industrious enough, and that I’d let people push me around for the rest of my life. She wanted me to be like Michael Corleone but worried that I was more like Fredo. And I was ashamed when I tried hard to be the former but more often embodied the latter. Little did I realize that we’re all Fredo.
In Blue Nights, when I read Joan Didion’s famous advice to herself, “Do not whine. . . . Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone,” I felt validated. It became my mantra, my personal statement. Here was one of my favorite writers, someone I’d actually had the benefit of briefly meeting when she came to read at the University of Missouri, articulating exactly how I felt—a relief because I could never find the words. I wanted to be a creative artist and therefore ostensibly privileged subjectivity and emotional authenticity, but I couldn’t express what really mattered. I couldn’t admit that what I really wanted was to be numb inside.
Instead, I escaped into work. When I wasn’t working to exhaustion, I drank. No one was going to criticize me for that as long as I kept my mouth shut and didn’t cause trouble. And Didion’s writing proved that someone better than me felt the same. Granted, she was being a little ironic when she wrote those lines, but I never wanted to think in that direction. I wanted something I could point to and say, in the voice of my mother, “See? I’m fine. Now get off my porch.”
Millennials and Gen-Zs would find these attitudes strange. They probably don’t realize that many Boomers (my parents’ generation—I am Gen-X) came of age in the late 1950s, which was when their social attitudes and cultural values solidified. My parents, for example, despised the hippies as being too lazy, entitled, and self-indulgent to accomplish anything of substance. I have a feeling I would have despised the hippies, too.
Every generation thinks the next is too soft and entitled. They haven’t gone through what we’ve gone through and their immaturity puts us off. But they have their own struggles, things we will never intimately experience and therefore won’t really understand. And, just as with our generation, some of them won’t survive for long—at least not long enough to “make it,” which is to say, become the sort of peak consumers our parents unthinkingly brought us up to be.
Still, I wonder what my parents and their contemporaries accomplished with all that willpower, paranoia, workaholism, and despair. They and their Boomer friends died (and are dying) anyway. No one remembers their names. My mother died and maybe less than ten people remember her. She worked harder than anyone I’ve ever met. When I’m gone, it will be as though she never existed. As Eric Maria Remarque asked in All Quiet on the Western Front, “What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at school?”
What use is it that my parents didn’t talk about how they were mistreated and abused as children? What use is it that I was warned not to speak of my own psychological problems and what my parents passed on to me? Why all the quiet desperation, drinking, fear, and resentment? What will be the use of everything we thought and did and felt in a particular decade of our lives if all it meant was that we had to keep our mouths shut and spend more time alone? All the things that seemed to matter so much, all the things we had to keep hidden to avoid being put on a list, will be less than smoke. Soon we will be, too.
I think we should say how we feel now, while we can.