Authenticity Is Our Super Power
And that’s not nearly as simple as it sounds.
Me at age four or five.
When I was 18, I ran up and down hills wearing heavy, stiff boots, singing songs, and carrying a 7-pound rubber rifle. I was in basic training, and they ran us until our legs stopped working — so we took turns carrying each other. We put our heads down and pushed the limp body in front of us by their web belt.
On my first day, I heard someone getting yelled at in the hallway. I ran and squeezed myself between the yelling faces, and my classmate.
The yelling faces were delighted at my loyalty and tried to hide their smiles under their screams. Rows of our classmates joined — and this was how we stayed safe. We swarmed. We stood at each other’s backs, sides, and bellies.
. . .
One day, towards the end of our training, we were rehearsing for a parade. We were meant to look like one body, but someone in the row made a mistake. One by one the bodies in front of me started leaning to try and stay together. All five-feet-six-inches of Cadet Lemmon grunted to a sweaty forty-five-degree angle from the ground, chin in and forehead high. He was shivering. It was outrageous he could lean that far and stay standing with two feet stuck to the ground — and I burst out laughing.
Cadet Lemmon’s body was determined to maintain this alternate reality. And by nature of my five-foot-seven-inches, I was just a little further back and had a bigger view. And without meaning to — I had a moment of spontaneous sanity.
Before I could think to squash it, I defied the unspoken golden rule. I forgot to be scared. I laughed. I escaped the deluded reality we were enacting together.
The lead instructor, who had been circling and observing our rehearsal, did not miss this break in our agreements. He stopped. And time stopped. And because Lemmon had leaned so far, I was fully exposed. For the first time that summer, I was alone and scared.
No one was allowed to protect my belly, or my back, or my side. I had threatened the tyranny they had secured over our thinking — and I needed to be terrorized back into this reality before I could risk infecting anyone else.
At dinner, he pulled me away from my classmates. I could feel the heat of him on my cheek, “You think this is funny, McNiff? You think you are better than everyone else? McNiff — You are the weak link.”
I could barely breathe while tears pooled in my subdivided plate of uneaten mashed potatoes and butter rolls.
I felt hot with my classmates’ silence.
The saber-tooth tiger of my worst fear that I don’t belong — that if I do it wrong I will be thrown out of the tribe and eaten — had me in its jaws. My classmates couldn’t even watch him eat me. They just had to listen. And know that they could be next.
. . .
There is a logic behind this kind of brutal demand for conformity in the military. But why do our societies do this? Why do our families do this?
When he was yelling at me, I didn’t once think, What an asshole. How does he not see how funny that was? I didn’t once think of walking away and not putting up with that shit. I felt like I deserved it.
I was used to being gaslit into being responsible for someone else’s expectations — and shamed for not doing them right. When a family member told me I was “Quitting on my marriage the same way I quit on the Air Force.” I felt confused, and mad — and bad. I really didn’t like being a quitter.
It took me years to stand in the fact that I served the entirety of my commitment honorably. That’s not called quitting. That has an official name. It’s called an honorable discharge. It took me even longer to fully inhabit the sanity of my choice to end an unhealthy relationship. Now I know to call that brave and loving.
Stopping an abusive cycle is brave and loving.
No one needed to tell me to squeeze next to that stranger on my first day of basic training. My adaptive superpower is that I can feel a group and know what it needs from me. I knew immediately what the yelling faces wanted from me. But more than 20 years later, I’m still learning how to stand in myself, as myself. I’m still learning how to use this gift of being able to feel a group, without losing myself.
. . .
I’ve heard Pádraig Ó Tuama describe how his love of Wonder Woman helped him understand that he “was born to live a different kind of life that was a long and slow project of learning to move away from the ideas about what a boy should do and what’s just for girls.” And this gives me language for what I’m doing. I’m living a long and slow project of learning to move away from the ideas about what I’m supposed to be and discovering who I am.
After I was publicly shamed that night in basic training, I returned to the herd. And that was relieving. But that isn’t the same as belonging, and really these sensations are too easy to confuse.
Turning off what we feel, and turning away from what we know is true — in order to return to our rung on the ladder, is not belonging. That’s restoring comfort. That’s relieving the terror of change.
The pins and needles we feel when our foot wakes up from being asleep, doesn’t mean something is wrong with our foot. It’s the same thing when we wake up to the reality that we’ve been asleep and shut off from ourselves. It hurts, but that pain doesn’t mean something is wrong. This is just how it feels when we get in our bodies and start to remember what we learned to disown.
The saber-tooth tigers are real, and they aren’t real. The consequences for not conforming are real and they’re not. We will lose things we love, and we will gain things that feel so mind-blowingly good they scare the shit out of us. And when we are in that disorienting place, we need people around us who know this territory.
Not so we can become like them, but because we need what Meg Wheatley so perfectly named, “Islands of sanity.” Because it’s so confusing and disorienting and new. We need to be around folks who know this territory well enough to be able to remind us to reorient back inside of ourselves. Until we start to know it too.
. . .
The wicked irony is that the American ideal of rugged individualism isn’t individualism at all; it’s conformity. This ideal is rooted in capitalism, and capitalism creates a brutal hunger games style of conformity. We aren’t supposed to know how to be ourselves, by ourselves. We need mirrors, and inspiration, and reminders, and encouragement, and a hell of a lot of camaraderie for this kind of individuation.
And this is where we stop arguing about what we already know is true — and where we can start doing really good things for each other, just by standing near.
. . .
I wrote this essay a full year after listening to Pádraig Ó Tuama unpack the poem Wonder Woman, by Ada Limón. It’s tremendous.