“If it don’t kill you, it’ll make you fatter.” I first heard this phrase from a colleague who attributed it to her Puerto Rican grandmother. I’ve since encountered many variations of it, as I’m sure you have as well, but the meaning doesn’t vary. We all face adversity at some point in our lives. Sometimes the experience causes permanent psychic damage, but if we struggle to overcome it, we emerge better equipped to tackle future challenges. See how much more economical the original formulation is?
There’s a reason the phrase is on my mind. I mentioned last week that I had rediscovered the journal I kept of a year teaching in a Houston high school. Among the many gems I uncovered was a note about a former middle school student who had gone on to attend a performing arts high school where she was consistently overlooked in casting the many ambitious shows the school produced. As a result, this talented, smart and beautiful young woman came away from her high school years feeling like an artistic failure. Not surprisingly, the experience led her to abandon any thoughts of a career in theater.
We are still close friends after all these years, so I thought she would find this passage from my journal an interesting reminder of her fraught adolescent years. Her reply contained this telling line:
“It was only as an adult that I bolted upright one day and thought, hey, it wasn’t me! I got cast almost every time I auditioned anywhere else. It was THEM!”
Cheryl – not her real name – has gone on to live a successful personal and professional life. In her work, she often has to deal with clients who are critical of the work she does for them, but I would argue that the lessons she took away from those damaging early rejections have strengthened her ability to withstand the critiques, defend her work, and come up with compromises that make everyone happy.
Let me be clear that I’m talking about dealing with the scars left by defeats and unanticipated rejections, not traumas. As much as we may dramatize early assaults on our egos, they do not compare to the shocks so strong that they leave an imprint on nervous systems and body chemistry. To choose an extreme example, someone witnessing the murder of a loved one may manage to get on with their lives, but that injury will never leave them. It will change their lives forever. One can never encounter a story like that dismissively by exhorting the victim to “get over it.”
In contrast, I once sat in on the introduction to a week-long writing workshop that Rosellen was leading. It was her practice to have everyone in the group introduce themselves by telling the group something that most people don’t know about them. One woman who looked to be in her early 50s, responded “My name is … and my mother didn’t love me.” Although no one in the group was insensitive enough to say it, I’m sure that many of them were suppressing a desire to say, “Get over it.” I’m not minimizing the harm that had been done to her in her early years, but the experience had clearly “killed” her, not “made her fatter.”
I may be betraying my reaction to my Freud-infused clinical psychology training by saying that our experiences don’t necessarily leave an ineradicable mark on our psyches. In fact, they can “make us fatter.” Just moments before I wrote these last words, I was reading an article in the New York Times by Nate Silver, the political prognosticator, in which he makes the case that past failure in the political arena is not a death sentence but can in fact be a steppingstone to future success. Barack Obama was trounced in his first run for a congressional seat. Kamala Harris dropped out of 2020 Democratic presidential primary after what was widely considered a failed campaign. Bill Clinton gave an unending Fidel Castro-like speech at a Democratic Convention that many thought was the end of his political career. At a later convention, he won the presidential nomination.
It’s increasingly clearer that the efforts to protect our children from failure may deprive them of the chance to grow from those setbacks. Silicon Valley valorizes failed start-ups as lessons learned that lead to future success. At an earlier stage in my career, I edited a magazine published by the organization I directed that placed writers in public school classrooms to introduce students to “real” writing as opposed to what has become “school writing,” a very different and less palatable animal. I insisted that each issue of the magazine include an account of a failed lesson or activity, on the grounds that it contained valuable information about future success.
So, it appears that my friend’s Puerto Rican grandmother was on to something. Those experiences that can feel crushing at the time may provide the nourishment that builds the muscle to wrestle with the challenges to come.
