Clown Class: The Struggler's Code

This is my kindergarten class photo. I’m trying to draw our attention to what’s happening with the thumb.

Please try and focus away from the bangs.

Take a second, if you will, and form your own hand into that shape. Feels so casual, doesn’t it? Natural. Uninhibited.

I don’t know what was running through my mind with that precise thumb pose but I’d lay money down that I was trying to convey to the photographer, in gesture, that I was going to be Absolutely No Trouble that day. Could’ve accomplished that with a regular smile and, you know, not being trouble that day but I clearly felt I had to go to some lengths to get this message over.

Why’d I feel that way?

One thing you know about yourself if you’re a struggler is that you are trouble.

You have too many feelings for the size of the containers you’re in. Your first containers are your parents or whoever’s on deck to care for you when you emerge. Your early containers have a certain capacity to meet your larger feelings, a capacity that they partially inherited from their own early containers.

My mom used to tell a hilarious (to her) story about when I was a toddler. I was two years old, max, maybe in my late ones. She’d have a friend over and I’d be sitting on her lap while they were talking. Every now and then I’d grab my mom’s face and redirect it away from her friend, as if to say, “ENOUGH WITH THAT INTERLOPER, I AM THE MOVIE STAR HERE, YOU WILL LOOK AT ME NOW! ME, ME, ME.”

The subtext and moral of the story was that I was a jerk. That’s why it was a funny story for her. The rudeness! The narcissism of this baby!

For this to be a funny story about a jerk, and not a cute story about a cutie, that’s got implications for A Good Baby’s Code of Conduct.

Babies. Have someone read this to you if you can’t read yet. Do you have your physical needs met? Did you eat something recently? Have you had a nap? You’re set, then. Nope! You’re set. Don’t start going on about something else. You can’t just ask for love. That’s not done. Attention is when we check to see if you’ve had food. If you have eaten recently, we ask you to relax. Please pass this on to the other babies.

Some babies eventually figure out that it’s creepy to have emotional needs. They’ll be strugglers someday but that’s tomorrow’s problem.

My mom had another story about me and brother that she loved to tell, too, but this one we understood to be heartwarming. We used to go out to eat as a family on a regular basis when my brother and I were teeny-tiny, sometimes to very nice restaurants. We were apparently so well-behaved that perfect strangers would cross the room to compliment my parents on our stellar comportment. Happened all the time. We were a strange and marvelous sight, I guess.

I don’t…love this story, either. I never think, “Wow. My brother and I, we really had it together. Kudos to everybody.” I feel like there’s an age beneath which you should probably not be able to be amazing in fancy restaurants. I get an eerie feeling when I think of the two of us, neatly dressed and subdued, quietly working our forks, with no sudden outbursts. Sudden outbursts are a small person’s bread-and-butter. I’d like it better for us to at least have had a shot at bothering the other diners.

Furthermore, as my mom told it, we were never any trouble as children ever. Just ever. We were born good and stayed good and were good, never caused one problem. This is either the most inaccurate or the eeriest assertion of all. I pressed her on this now and then while she was alive but she stood her ground and meant what she said as a compliment to everybody involved.

You might be thinking that I’m teeing up this post to shame my folks for breaking our spirits or something. I really don’t want to do that. I don’t want to do it because a) I love them and I’m clear that they were human beings doing their best and b) I would like you, the photographer, to know that I am Still Absolutely No Trouble.

Where do feelings go when we squash them? I know they don’t just disappear and I also know they go “into the body” but the shelf life of squashed feelings is still mysterious and amazing to me.

We know they’re in there somewhere, the feelings we cram out of view to be polite and stay loved. We also know that we’re secretly disgusting monsters. The feelings band together in the night, see, night after night. They join up in rebellion and mash themselves into each other. The feelings coagulate and ferment and bubble into whole beings. Their eyes are gigantic and sloshy with rejected tear water and when they want something they turn a freaky shade of dark pink-red and vibrate all over and can’t control their movements. Lots of sudden, untoward wetness.

Have you ever seen the video of an adult male kangaroo in Australia who comes up on a house and bangs himself menacingly against the heavy glass patio door? The video is shot from inside, and over and over here comes this glaring, pro-wrestler muscle man of a kangaroo, veins bulging, going

WHAM. WHAM. WHAM.

against the glass, staring down the camera-holder. Horrific, hilarious, vomitous. I don’t know how the person holding the camera wasn’t screaming. The video cuts out and you never see the kangaroo leave. He could still be there, for all we know.

The monster I know I secretly am feels like it has the force, size and dementedness of that fucked-up kangaroo.

It takes a lot of effort to keep this freak out of view. The program I have running to do that takes up a lot of my operating power. Doesn’t leave a lot left for going about life smoothly. If I think I’m going to run into a situation that brings up feelings that don’t fit the container, I…try to not run into that situation. This is how I move as a struggler. I’m always doing a lot of awkward dodging and backing off and rerouting through what might seem like straightforward A-B paths to non-strugglers so I won’t burst into my freak form.

A non-struggler’s directions to an easy outcome for a basic thing:

Open the door, go to the street, face right, go down one block, go into the gray building.

What a struggler might do with those directions:

Open and close the door sixty times. Go back to bed and turn the ringer off. Let a few months pass. Wake up one morning and vow that this is the day, the big day for going to the door again. You did it, you went to the door. Make a note to get yourself a treat for that. Open it, go to the street. Face right. There’s a dog in a yard some ways to the right that’s barking. But what kind of bark. What’s the deal with the yard. Is it fenced. You can’t go look because what if it’s not. Go left! That’s not where the gray building is but the point is you’re moving. Walk down the street, getting farther and farther away from the gray building. Run into a friend.

“Where are you going?” they ask.

You don’t want to say it. “The…gray building.”

“Oh, that’s that way!”

You can’t say, “But a dog,” so you say, “Amazing, great to know! Thank you!” and then you stand in place, waving, while your friend walks away, hopefully in a different direction altogether. You might fake walking toward the gray building for a few feet but then you know you’re going to turn around and keep going the other way. The people in the gray building definitely don’t want to see somebody come into their space vibrating and weeping and knocking things over because they saw a dog of unknown intent. We haven’t even gotten to the people in the gray building, what they might be about. Let’s not. We don’t have all day.

If you’re the kind of person who can just open the door and go to the gray building, you’re probably perplexed and frustrated with the strugglers you know. It’s right there. You just go in. Don’t make such a big deal out of it.

And if you’re a struggler, you know you baffle regular people all the time, and when I say baffle, I mean baffle at best.

If you’re a struggler, non-strugglers can seem unempathetic and terrifying. If you’re a non-struggler, strugglers can seem…well, I don’t know. I’m a struggler. You tell me.

I don’t have a moral for this story. This isn’t a story. What we have here are the given circumstances before all the stories start.