The Myth of Normal 96

Abandoned as an infant by her mother and deserted again a few years later after a brief reunion, Sontag learned early to repress her rage: “I’ve always made excuses for her. I’ve never allowed my anger, my outrage.” As an adult she reported herself “seething with resentment. But I dare not show it.” “Profoundly neglected, ignored, unperceived as a child,” she compensated by developing character features that promoted her success in the world. “One of the healthiest things about me—my capacity to ‘take it,’ to survive, to bounce back, to do, to prosper—is intimately connected with my biggest neurotic liability: my facility in disconnecting from my feelings . . . When a small child, I felt abandoned and unloved. My response to this was to want to be very good.” “Guilt is awful,” Sontag said, poignantly—and yes, it is. But there is no culpability where there is no choice. No conceivable condition exists under which a human being has less agency or fewer options than in infancy and early childhood. The imperative to survive overrides everything, and that survival depends on the maintenance of attachment, at whatever cost to authenticity. This is why so many childhoods, particularly in a culture that both breeds stress and feeds on it, are marked by a tense standoff between the two, where the outcome is predictable and the consequences are lifelong. Here’s something else I’ve come to know, which I hope will be heartening for you as it is for me: it is not only necessary to leave blame and guilt behind on the road to healing, to move from self-accusation to curiosity, from shame to “response ability”—it is also and always possible. “What changed for me is that I realized that I had a choice,” Anita Moorjani says. “When you are conditioned to do something, you’re not even aware you’re doing it. Not even aware that you’re suppressing yourself, because you’re in survival mode.” The onset of inauthenticity may not be a choice, but with awareness and self-compassion, authenticity can be.