Shame

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Self-blame and self-hatred are common among molestation and rape survivors, who judge themselves harshly for not “putting up a fight,” even where fight was not a viable survival option. However, both the experience of paralysis and the critical self-judgment about “weakness” and helplessness are common components of trauma. In addition, the younger, the more developmentally immature or insecurely attached the victim is, the more likely it is that he or she will respond to stress, threat and danger with paralysis rather than active struggle. People who lack solid early attachment bonding to a primary caregiver, and therefore lack a foundation of safety, are much more vulnerable to being victimized and traumatized and are more likely to develop the entrenched symptoms of shame, dissociation and depression.37 In addition, since the psychophysiological patterns of trauma and shame are similar, there is an intrinsic association of shame and trauma. This includes the collapse of shoulders, slowing of heart rate, aversion of eyes, nausea, etc.38 Shame also feeds into the common misperception of traumatized individuals that they are, somehow, the cause of (or, at least, deserving of) their own misfortune. Another (powerfully corrosive) factor comes into play in the formation of shame: while it appears to be an almost structural component of trauma, all too frequently trauma is inflicted by the people who are supposed to protect and love the child. Children who are molested by family and friends, of course, bear this additional confused and chaotic burden. Shame becomes deeply embedded as a pervasive sense of “badness” permeating every part of their lives. Similar erosion of a core sense of dignity is also found in adults who have been tortured, on whom pain, disorientation, terror and other violations have been deliberately inflicted.39 While the principles of uncoupling fear from immobility discussed in this chapter apply to these cases, the therapeutic process is generally much more complex. It requires a broader skill for negotiating the therapeutic relationship so that the therapist does not get tangled up in taking on the (projected) role of the perpetrator(s) or rescuer. As They Go In, So They Come Out: The Rage ConnectionWhen a pigeon that is blithely pecking at some grain is quietly approached from behind, gently picked up, and then turned upside down, it becomes immobilized. The pigeon will, like the guinea pigs I saw in Brazil, or Picasso’s dove in the play, remain in that position, with its feet stuck straight up in the air. In a minute or two, it will come out of this trancelike state, right itself, and hop or fly away. The episode is resolved.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  When a person knows they’re going to be evaluated, it’s reasonable for them to expect that their decisions will be judged against the standard of what a rational person would decide in their situation. You might think that would move your decisions to a more accurate place, but the opposite is true. Thinking about how you will be judged if you quit makes you move further from that benchmark of rationality. You end up quitting less and committing more. Out on a LimbIt turns out that the popularity of your belief is inversely correlated with your determination to fight for it no matter what. As Katy Milkman, a professor at the Wharton School and author of the 2021 bestseller How to Change , along with John Beshears, now of the Harvard Business School, have demonstrated, when you stake out a position that is out of the mainstream, you are more likely to escalate your commitment in the face of disconfirming information. These researchers weren’t studying anything as wacky as a doomsday cult. Instead, they looked at eighteen years of corporate earnings estimates and updates of more than six thousand stock analysts. An important part of a stock analyst’s job is making and updating estimates of corporate earnings. When we think about financial analysts, we think about a profession that is very rational and very analytical. The word “analyst” is right there in the name of the job. Milkman and Beshears wanted to find out what happened to analysts who made earnings estimates that were way out of the consensus when those estimates later turned out to be far off actual earnings. Would the analysts stubbornly stick to their original forecast, or would they revise the projections based on the new information? Not surprisingly to a reader of this book, there was a lot of stubbornly sticking. The analysts escalated their commitment to their extreme position, despite the information that actual results were not bearing out the forecast. This seems like cognitive dissonance and identity at play. They made a projection that was non-consensus. They did it in a public way. When the actual earnings conflicted with their prediction, they doubled down, just like the cult members did when the aliens didn’t show up. Stock analysts don’t have a financial incentive for sticking to inaccurate estimates. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The authors found that analysts don’t benefit from the attention of being a contrarian or a lone wolf. Rather, the analysts were punished for their stubbornness when they made incorrect earnings forecasts. If they were punished for maintaining those forecasts, why would they do it? The need to maintain consistency is strong, and appears to be even stronger once you’ve veered from the status quo. When you take these extreme positions, you’re increasing the distance between yourself and the pack. That distance makes your position more integral to your identity, a part of the way that you define yourself as compared with other people.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  slow-motion car wreck (1972) Portsmouth, New Hampshire ( More bars per square inch than any city in America, my father will inform me later, and all the women like to drink and fuck ). My father’s crashing with friends, working occasionally as a longshoreman. “Longshoreman” sounds more romantic, more solid, than what he actually is. “Wharf-rat” is a better term. A photograph that appears in a local newspaper shows my father standing beside his friends Tommy (“Tommy the Terror”) and Scotty, dressed the part—black knit watchcap, black wool sweater with buttons along one shoulder, jeans. A pair of leather gloves in his back pocket, a steel hook with a perpendicular wooden handle. The costume to go with the job. The caption under the photo cites the three of them as local artists who work the docks. In Portsmouth he often uses the alias “Sheridan Snow,” perhaps to avoid my mother’s warrant. He has business cards printed up, which highlight his penchant for alliteration— This career involves salvaging a chunk of driftwood from the beach, putting legs on it and selling it as a side table. Many people in America invent careers like this in the early 1970s (What color is your parachute?). A few years earlier he’d stalk Beacon Hill in a flowing black cape, and then for a few years he wore one of those two-way Sherlock Holmes hats, to highlight his eccentric, poetic side. Later, when he robs banks, he will try to pass as a country gentleman, in town buying antiques. He will carry a Nikon camera around his neck, wear a tweed jacket ( I was always classically dressed, even in Levi’s ). As a longshoreman he shows up looking the part of an “old salt,” tells long-winded, mildly entertaining stories, but by all accounts a laggard, next to worthless once the boat docked. Years later I track Scotty down— Jonathan created blustery characters to protect himself from being hurt. He was a great absorber of others’ personalities. He would lift phrases and gestures from those around him, make them his own. He was like a jigsaw puzzle of different people . Portsmouth’s a small city. The dockworkers go to the galleries for free wine and to feel like artists. The gallery owners like to have them around, to add energy, wildness. They go out to the bars together afterward, end up in someone’s apartment, make a night of it. Scotty shows up late and Jonathan’s already made a scene, thrown up on someone’s shoes, passed out on the coat pile. After two drinks a cloud will come over him and he’ll be another person, not nearly as fun as the Jonathan of one drink. Even so, Scotty likes him, in spite of his bravado, his bluster. Especially the moments before the second drink, before the cloud. Just twenty, Scotty has “trouble” with his own father, another drinker. Jonathan’s twice Scotty’s age, a father figure, of sorts.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Parallel UniverseYou occasionally find yourself idly thinking about how it could have gone right. Or, maybe gone isn’t the best word, because it suggests that nothing was under anyone’s control; the outcome is merely fate, or chaos theory. But assuming she’d been normal, assuming she hadn’t homed in on your soft spots, assuming she’d not been shot through with that dark, smoky core of poison, what would have happened? Any number of things. Maybe you and she and Val would have stayed a threesome, a polyamory success story. Maybe you wouldn’t have stayed together but you would have remained dear friends, a trio growing old parallel to each other. Or maybe it would have been messy and sad. Sometimes you wish you’d had the chance to find out. Dream House as Self-Help Best SellerWhen it started, I believed I was special. It was a terrible thing to discover that I was common, that everything that happened to me—a crystalline, devastating landscape I navigated in my bare feet—was detailed in books and reports, in statistics. It was terrible because I wanted to believe that my love was unique and my pain was unique, as all of us do. (“Having now described the fiasco with the Professor at length,” Terry Castle writes, “I confess, I feel on the one hand a bit embarrassed by its sheer triteness: my own sitting-duckness, my seducer’s casebook callousness.”) But then I opened book after book about lesbian abuse and saw pseudonymed women regurgitating everything that happened to me. There is a pie chart that encompasses those years of my life. A pie chart! The first book about lesbian abuse was published the year I was born. Not the most ancient scholarship in the world, but old enough. Why did no one tell me? But who would have told me? I knew so few queer people, and most of them were my age, still figuring things out themselves. I imagine that, one day, I will invite young queers over for tea and cheese platters and advice, and I will be able to tell them: you can be hurt by people who look just like you. Not only can it happen, it probably will, because the world is full of hurt people who hurt people. Even if the dominant culture considers you an anomaly, that doesn’t mean you can’t be common, common as fucking dirt.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  They’re the ones who catch our attention, the ones who persevered, despite not having adhered to the turnaround time. The story of the climbers who turned around on summit day was out there for the telling, but apparently not for the remembering. There is no doubt that quitting is an important decision-making skill. Getting the decision right is sometimes a matter of life or death. That was the case on Everest. But even in this life-or-death situation, we don’t seem to remember the quitters at all. The problem with this is, of course, that we learn to get better at things from experience, either our own experience or by watching others. And our ability to learn from experience can only be as good as our memory of those experiences. This is no less true for decisions about quitting. How can we learn if we don’t even see the quitters? Worse yet, how are we supposed to learn if, when we do see them, we view them negatively, as people not worthy of our admiration, as cowards or poltroons? Admittedly, “poltroon” is an obscure word now, but it’s a synonym for quitter that used to be quite popular, sufficiently nasty that if you called someone a poltroon, they were within their rights to challenge you to a duel. When Charles Dickinson called Andrew Jackson a coward and a poltroon in a local newspaper in 1806, Jackson challenged Dickinson to a duel, killed him, and it didn’t stop Jackson from becoming president in 1829. If calling someone a quitter is grounds to shoot them, how can we expect people to appreciate how important it is to become skilled at walking away? Quitting Is a Decision-Making ToolDespite the way grit and quit have been pitted against each other, they are actually two sides of the exact same decision. Anytime that you are deciding whether to quit, you are obviously simultaneously deciding whether to stick, and vice versa. In other words, you can’t decide one thing without deciding the other. Our intrepid climbers offer a good way to think about the grit-quit decision: Grit is what gets you up the mountain, but quit is what tells you when to come down. In fact, it is the option to turn around that allows you to make the decision to climb the mountain in the first place. Just imagine if any decision you made was last and final. Whatever you decide, you would have to stick with it for the rest of your life. Think of how certain you would have to be before you could ever make a choice to start anything. Imagine if you had to marry the first person you ever went on a date with. Having no option to change course or change your mind would be disastrous in a landscape that itself is changing, where mountains can become molehills, and molehills can become mountains.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  One reading strategy that attempts to neutralize the effects of this negative othering of the Pharisees sees in the Pharisee the hypocrite that is in us al . Käsemann, writing of Paul, articulates this when he states, “in and with Israel he strikes at the hidden Jew in all of us, at the man who validates rights and demands over against God on the basis of God’s past dealings with him and to this extent is serving not God but an il usion. ”61 This approach, however, does not neutralize the negative othering in Matthew (or elsewhere in the NT), but rather exacerbates the problem by symbolizing Jewishness (or Pharisaism) as that which is evil in everyone. In the words of Daniel Boyarin, it is to “allegorize EveryJew as a condemnable part of Everyman.” 62 This is no solution but is the problem itself. Matthew makes the Pharisees part of Christian identity. Indeed, he makes them essential for Christian identity, at least inasmuch as the Sermon on the Mount is concerned. This evokes the challenge of Rosemary Ruether: “the anti-Judaic myth is neither a superficial nor a secondary element in Christian thought … so it may seem impossible to pull up the weed [of anti-Jewishness] without uprooting the seed of Christian faith as wel .” 63 Stereotypes cast large groups of people into value laden categories. This process creates borders placing some “out” and others “in.” Is social differentiation inherently a harmful thing? The move toward a unified “one” where there are no social borders can be seen as an imperial move that does not allow for difference. Difference is necessary as an alternative to imperialistic totalities. Furthermore, eliminating social categories is unrealistic and also destructive, if it were even imaginable. Groups exist as a means to assemble disparate people into social configurations so that they may not be alone in their difference. Matthew insisted upon difference, and established a community of difference. Within his own group it is difficult to determine exactly how much diversity was tolerated. If 5:19 refers to some form of Pauline groups it is interesting to note that these believers are included in the kingdom of heaven, albeit with reduced status. This may be some indication of acceptance of difference (if even a rather minimal one), but lacking anything like Paul’s celebration of diversity in unity (1 Cor 12:12–31). In any 61 Ernst Käsemann, “Paul and Israel” in New Testament Questions of Today (London: S.C.M. Press, 1969), 186, quoted from Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 213. 62 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, 210. See also 209–14. 63 Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York, NY: Seabury Press, 1974), 226. 129 Matthew’s Trojan Horse 129 event, Matthew’s maintaining of difference could have been an anti-imperialist move, but it is not against Rome that he maintains this difference, but against the Pharisees.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  In addition, bulimia is an ineffective attempt to rid the body of something that is not-body; something that was forced onto or into the person’s body. For men, it is pornography that fills the void of disembodiment, alienating men from their own sexuality. There are plentiful other disembodying methods, other compulsions. These include the addictions to overwork, sex, drugs, drinking or compulsive eating. All are ways to suppress, numb or control the body—or are, ironically, misdirected attempts to feel it. However, without embracing bodily experience, we are left with an empty shell, a narcissistic image of who we think we are. We are unable to really feel the fullness of ourselves, a fullness formed from a continuous flux of experience. Pornography and eating disorders are two sides of the same coin—disembodiment and objectification. The less the body is experienced as a living entity, the more it becomes an object. The less it is owned, the further it is divorced from anything having to do with one’s core sense of self. A visit to the gym reveals a similar story. Lines of people are robotically pumping iron in an attempt to buff their bodies, but with little internal feeling or awareness of their actions. There is a great deal to be said about the clear benefits of cardiovascular fitness and challenging the power function of muscles. However, there is something beyond endurance and body mechanics. It is the kinesthetic sense, which can be awakened and developed in any movements we make and in the very sensations that prefigure any movement. This is the difference between willing a movement and being the movement. On returning to my local YMCA from a trip abroad, I was startled to see that in front of virtually every work-out station there was a brand-new flat-screen TV! It’s as though these individuals had temporarily parked their bodies, only to pick them up like the dry cleaning, after they had been exercised by the machines. In this regard, there is a distinction made in the German language between the word Körper, meaning a physical body, and Leib, which translates to English as the “lived (or living) body.” The term Leib reveals a much deeper generative meaning compared with the purely physical/anatomical Körper (not unlike “corpse”). As a society, we have largely abandoned our living, sensing, knowing bodies in the search for rationality and stories about ourselves. Much of what we do in our lives is based on this preoccupation. We certainly wouldn’t have computers or airplanes, cell phones or video games—not to mention even bicycles or clocks—without the vast power of our rational minds. However, like Narcissus, who fell in love with his reflection in a pond, we have become enamored by our own thoughts, self-importance and idealized self-images.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  What comes with this quitting strategy is that the founder is going to continue to put a few more months of time, money, and effort into something that Conway can clearly see is failing. But he considers those extra months spent as a huge win, because it gets the founder to shut the endeavor down much sooner than they otherwise would have. Without this type of intervention, founders, who are gritty by nature, all too often continue to grind it out until the bitter end. Giving up a few months to save years is a trade worth making, because it frees up the founders much sooner to move on to something that has a better chance of succeeding. Even so, after the company has missed the benchmarks, Conway often gets pushback. That’s not surprising because none of these things work perfectly. These tools are just trying to get us to no faster and more often than we otherwise would. One of the most common ways that the founders push back is by claiming that they have a duty to the investors to give it everything they have. Beyond that duty, they believe that if they don’t keep going, instead returning the remaining capital, their backers will think less of them, view them as a failure, and never want to invest in anything they do in the future. Just like the rest of us, founders are often irrational in their imaginings of what others will think or how they’ll react, and Conway is right there to help them see that they’ve got it wrong. Because he’s an investor himself, he’s uniquely positioned to offer these founders a more accurate perspective of the people they’re imputing these things to. In this instance, in practically every way, investors think the opposite of what the founders assume. There is no honor in spending every last bit of investor money pursuing an endeavor that’s failing. Returning capital to investors is the responsible choice under those circumstances and demonstrates the ability to make the hard decision when it’s the right thing to do. It shows an understanding of expected value and the ability to respond to new information and changing circumstances with flexibility rather than rigidity. Those are all traits of someone they would want to invest in again. Conway points out that, contrary to the founders’ beliefs, returning capital increases the chances that those investors will want to work with them again. He even offers examples of when he has done this in his own investing career. It’s not just a feeling of obligation to investors that makes it hard for founders to cut their losses. They also think they owe it to their employees to keep going. If they shut the company down, those people will be out of work. They’ve worked closely with the founder, putting their heart and soul into it, giving up so much in their lives to help make it work.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  If you’re in a cult and you quit, why did you join in the first place? Why did you give away all your money? Why did you cut off your family? If you quit figure skating, what does that mean for all of that time you put into that effort? Does that mean all those decisions were wrong? Does that mean you’ve failed in your goal? This desire to maintain internal consistency, as we’ve already seen, stops us from quitting. As does the worry that other people are going to judge us as harshly as we judge ourselves. Barry Staw demonstrated how much harder it is to quit when we’re worried about being judged by others. Recall that in “Big Muddy,” participants who committed funds to one of two divisions of a company and then learned that it subsequently performed poorly escalated their financial commitment to that same division in comparison to people who came to that decision fresh. While those coming fresh to the $20-million allocation gave $9 million to the money-losing division that previously received additional funding, those who made that previous decision gave it $13 million under otherwise identical facts. This escalation seems to be clearly influenced by a desire to maintain internal consistency. If I allocated the money to that division in the first place and then I change course, wouldn’t that mean that the original choice was a mistake? Does this escalation of commitment get worse when you add in the motivation to be viewed by others in a positive light? In 1979, with Frederick Fox of the University of Illinois, Staw explored just that question, asking if the desire for external validation further increases funding to the division they favored in the earlier decision. To answer that question, some participants were told that their position as a financial officer with the company was only on an interim basis. Their $20-million allocation might make or break whether or not they held on to that job. They were also told, after they had made the first funding decision, that the board of directors had been skeptical of the decision and reluctant to approve it. That group of participants further increased their commitment, now allocating $16 million to the division they chose earlier. That’s a huge adverse effect, nearly a 25% increase over those who made the previous allocation to that division and about a 75% increase over people fresh to the choice. Why is there such an amplification of this irrational behavior when participants are told that other people will be evaluating their decision? We are all trying to defend ourselves against how we imagine other people are going to judge us. We get it in our heads that if we don’t stick to our original choice, that will reflect negatively on us. The irony is that this desire to be viewed as rational causes us to become less rational in the decisions we make.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles24 24 take the Egyptian out of Apion!” (Ap. 2.138–144). Identity was complicated then, as it possibly is now. Such comings and goings are particularly well known in relation to Judaean culture because of the relative wealth of evidence. Tacitus, Celsus, and Cassius Dio all complain about “those who have abandoned their own ways, professing those of the Judaeans” (Celsus in Origen, C. Cels. 5.41; cf. Tacitus, Hist. 5.5), with Dio adding that the term “Judaean” is used for both native Judaeans and “all those who emulate their legal precepts, though being of another ethnos” (Dio 37.17.1). From the Judaean side, Philo and Josephus talk of the welcome afforded to those who seriously wish to join their ethnos and live under their laws. They fully respect the hardships and ruptured family bonds that this can involve (Philo, Vir t. 102–103; Josephus, Wa r 2.463, 560; 7.45; Apion 2.280–286). Since Moses’ laws reflect the very laws of nature, in Josephus’ view (Ant. 1.18–23), Abraham the Chaldean could embrace them proleptically long before Moses lived (1.154–168); the Adiabenians complete that work’s literary inclusio by embracing these laws in the last volume (20.17–96). In the Roman world particularly, the adoption of layered identities was not strange. Rome had extended its citizenship and identity to privileged foreigners, who added it to their existing identities with varying degrees of devotion. 43 Josephus also recognized the opposite direction of traffic, though he was not pleased about it—about Judaeans who abandoned the laws of Moses or simply failed to follow them. Since the moral lesson of his Antiquities is that those who follow Moses’ laws find success, whereas those who violate them meet disaster (Ant. 1.14, 20), the work furnishes examples of both kinds. Among the defectors and defaulters are various tyrants, rebels, kings including Saul and Herod, and high priests. 44 In Josephus’ time, Tiberius Julius Alexander was from the most eminent Judaean family in Alexandria, nephew of Philo and son of a pillar of the Judaean community. Josephus praises this man’s actions as governor of Judaea and later of Egypt, but notes matter-of-factly that he “did not persevere in the ancestral customs” (Ant. 20.100). No terrible consequence follows in Tiberius’ case. Josephus is much more severe toward Antiochus of Antioch, son of the most eminent Judaean in that polis, because his defection seriously harmed his compatriots. Unnerved by anti-Judaean sentiment as the war was beginning in 67 CE, Antiochus wanted to prove his Greekness by demonstrating his revulsion toward Judaean customs (τοῦ μεμισηκέναι τὰ τῶν Ἰουδαίων ἔθη). He not only offered Greek- style sacrifices, but advised the authorities to force other Judaeans to do the same, as a test of loyalty to their polis of residence, after falsely accusing them of plotting to burn it down (Wa r 7.47–53). A different kind of loyalty question is pondered by Josephus in Wa r 2.466–476. There, Judaeans from the south launch indiscriminate reprisals against Syrian poleis in retaliation for the massacre of their compatriots in Caesarea. The Judaean minority in Scythopolis join their townsfolk in defending the polis against these raids. But as soon

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  “Baby, if this ever happens in the future, you can always wake me up and I’ll go to the couch, I promise. I really don’t mean to do it. I don’t have any memory of it. I can’t control how I move in my sleep.” “You’re such a fucking cunt,” she says. “You never take responsibility for anything.” “All you have to do is wake me up,” you say, a kind of incoherent desperation zipping through your skull. “That’s it. Wake me up and tell me to move or sleep on the couch and I will do it, I swear to you.” “Fuck you,” she says, and gets out of bed. You follow her to the kitchen. Go to this page. Here you are; a page where you shouldn’t be. It is impossible to find your way here naturally; you can only do so by cheating. Does that make you feel good, that you cheated to get here? What kind of a person are you? Are you a monster? You might be a monster. END. Go to this page. Are you kidding? You’d never do this. Don’t try to convince any of these people that you’d stand up for yourself for one second. Get out of here. END. Go to this page. You shouldn’t be on this page. There’s no way to get here from the choices given to you. You flipped here because you got sick of the cycle. You wanted to get out. You’re smarter than me. Go to this page. Breakfast. You scramble some eggs, make some toast. She eats mechanically and leaves the plate on the table. “Clean that up,” she says as she goes to the bedroom to get dressed. If you do as you are told, go to this page. If you tell her to do it herself, go to this page. If you stare mutely at the dirty plate, and all you can think about is Clara Barton, the feminist icon of your youth who had to teach herself how to be a nurse and endured abuse from men telling her what to do at every turn, and you remember being so angry and running to your parents and asking them if women still got told what was right or proper, and your mom said “Yes” and your dad said “No,” and you, for the first time, had an inkling of how complicated and terrible the world was, go to this page. As you’re washing the dishes, you think to yourself: Maybe I could tie my arm down somehow? Maybe put a tack on my forehead? Maybe I should be a better person? Go to this page. You shouldn’t be on this page. There’s no way to get here from the choices given to you. Did you think that by flipping through this chapter linearly you’d find some kind of relief? Don’t you get it? All of this shit already happened, and you can’t make it not happen, no matter what you do.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  family friend No one would notice Jonathan wandering upstairs as Ray and Clare’s annual New Year’s party rages below. Maybe he’s looking for a free bathroom, maybe a little air, a place to clear his head. All night he’d tried to down a glass of water between drinks, pace himself. He stands before the sink and checks his eyes in the mirror. How long can he hold his own gaze? Does he look as loaded as he feels? Tonight the mirror is unkind, makes his face so haggard. But his cheeks have the flush that always comes, makes him look rugged, his hair slightly mussed. A party, for chrissakes, let’s get to it . He can hear the girls singing below, angels calling him. He wakes up with his cheek pressed to the tile floor. Must’ve dozed off . The party below is winding down. He moves through the house, he knows the girls’ rooms. He will just stop by to tuck them in, to say how much he enjoyed their song, but his heart’s beating so loudly. Jonathan had lived with Ray and Clare, off and on, for years. Even if not invited he would appear, drive his cab from Boston to Ipswich, forty-five minutes away. Ray would always welcome him, got a kick out of his hijinks. If Jonathan had money he was generous, especially as far as liquor was concerned. He’d arrive with a couple bottles, put them on the table with a flourish, drinks all around. I learn all this from Emily. More often than not, as the years passed, he’d arrive penniless. More and more of his things were kept in their basement, or in boxes left with other friends. In this way he could travel light, have a change of clothes waiting, a razor, a toothbrush, a book to replace the one he’d finished. In Ipswich he kept a suit at the dry cleaner’s, used it as his storage. He’d drop off the one he was wearing, change into the clean one right there. They knew him at the dry cleaner’s, he left Ray and Clare’s phone number, they would call Clare sometimes— I’m not sure where he is or when he’s coming back , she’d say. But he always came back, eventually, to pick up his suit, to clean himself up, to stay a few days—always optimistic, the work on his novel always going well. At one point Ray even set up a room for him, with a desk and a typewriter, so he’d have a place to write. Emily remembers him coming by for Christmas one year, he called that morning, had nowhere else to go. Emily, the youngest, barely ten, but she could see that Jonathan was trying very, very hard to be appropriate. As the girls got older it seemed less and less of a good idea to leave them alone with him. If they got close he growled. If you left him alone in the house too long he’d get into the liquor and drain it. The girls would come home from school to find him passed out on the floor. Or worse. One Fourth of July Clare baked an elaborate cake, something for after the fireworks. In the middle of the afternoon Emily came in from the barbecue to find Jonathan passed out on the couch, a hole gouged in the center of the cake, chocolate smeared on his face, his hands, the couch itself. Is this man ever going to leave? Emily wondered. The night I found out that Emily knew my father, knew him better than I ever would, we went back to her room. I don’t know what she said to her boyfriend, or if we told our friends, but she wanted to show me her record collection, the albums she’d pilfered from her basement, some that had my father’s name on the cover. I recognized his handwriting from his letters, his unmistakable scrawl. We’d danced to his Zorba the Greek album at parties, I’d even put it on, but had never noticed my father’s name on Zorba’s face, his arms raised, a kick-step.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  You can see that selfish and harmful impulses dwell within you as well, that you are not as angelic or strong as you imagine. With this awareness will come balance and greater tolerance for others. It might seem that only those who project continual strength and saintliness can become successful, but that is not at all the case. By playing a role to such an extent, by straining to live up to ideals that are not real, you will emit a phoniness that others pick up. Look at great public figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. They possessed the ability to examine their flaws and mistakes and laugh at themselves. They came across as authentically human, and this was the source of their charm. The tragedy of Nixon was that he had immense political talent and intelligence; if only he had also possessed the ability to look within and measure the darker sides to his character. It is the tragedy that confronts us all to the extent that we remain in deep denial. This longing to commit a madness stays with us throughout our lives. Who has not, when standing with someone by an abyss or high up on a tower, had a sudden impulse to push the other over? And how is it that we hurt those we love although we know that remorse will follow? Our whole being is nothing but a fight against the dark forces within ourselves. To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul. To write is to sit in judgment on oneself. —Henrik Ibsen Keys to Human Nature If we think about the people we know and see on a regular basis, we would have to agree that they are usually quite pleasant and agreeable. For the most part, they seem pleased to be in our company, are relatively up-front and confident, socially responsible, able to work with a team, take good care of themselves, and treat others well. But every now and then with these friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, we glimpse behavior that seems to contradict what we normally see. This can come in several forms: Out of nowhere they make a critical, even cruel comment about us, or express a rather harsh assessment of our work or personality. Is this what they really feel and were struggling to conceal? For a moment they are not so nice. Or we hear of their unpleasant treatment of family or employees behind closed doors. Or out of the blue they have an affair with the most unlikely man or woman, and it leads to bad things. Or they put their money in some absurd and risky financial scheme. Or they do something rash that puts their career in jeopardy.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  transparent Three months now since my father first walked through the shelter door. Tonight he’s relatively sober, able to raise his arms for the frisk without attracting undo attention, to move efficiently past the slumbering bodies to the Cage, to check his valuables, sign his name. I watch him from across the lobby, but don’t approach. Even without seeing him I can picture each step he takes. Once upstairs he will hand in his bed ticket and receive his hanger, shoebox, wrist tag. Sitting on the bench with the box beside him he’ll see himself in the funhouse mirror—his head grossly enlarged, his body birdlike, his hands mickey mouse hands. He’ll take his clothes off carefully, hang everything on the numbered hanger, place his shoes and socks in the box. Naked, he’ll rise, hand everything over the counter, get his bar of soap and ration of shampoo. Getting on nine, the rush over, the showers empty now except for him. A trough around the perimeter, like a moat, carries the water and dirt and sweat and suds away. The day my father walked through the doors I became transparent. I couldn’t find a way to talk about him with my friends, with my co-workers. Some approached, sideways, crablike, offered support, sympathy, but this was merely fuel for my shame. After a while, with the daily frenzy inside the walls, it just became a fact—That guy’s father is a guest here. A newcomer would try to take that in, process it, make it line up with his experience. Maybe his father was missing or a drunk, or had embarrassed him once or twice. Another month would pass, and it became normal. His father sleeps upstairs, like in some parallel home. Toweled off and in his johnny, my father climbs the next flight of stairs. The days long now, muted daylight filters into the dorms. A live-in staff worker wordlessly aims a flashlight at my father’s wrist. They pass between rows of men, some snoring, some staring wide-eyed into the gloom. One mutters an endless monologue, one paces back and forth to the toilets. One stands at a window watching the taillights on the Southeast Expressway, fading sparks. One night a co-worker says that I have the worst luck of anyone she’s ever met ( We arouse pity by cultivating the most repulsive wounds ). A version of empathy, I suppose, but I don’t really want to talk about it. If we go out drinking after work, if I end up spending the night with her, maybe I’ll say more, as we talk afterward, as a way to explain something about myself, why I’m the way I am, why I’m in her bed and not Emily’s. An affair is a room to disappear into for a few hours, another place to hide. But if asked directly I’ll say he’s just another drunk, that’s what I’ve always heard, a drunk and a con man, he has nothing to do with me. I don’t know you at all , she will say, a few months into our affair, but if you ever want to talk …and I’ll smile a skull’s smile and one by one the lights will go off inside me.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  29Lecture 3—Zwingli, Calvin, and the Reformed Tradition õEdward VI died when he was only 15, and there was a struggle for the throne. Edward’s oldest half-sister, Mary, came out on top. When she finally came to power she lost no time in restoring the old faith and executing as many Protestants as she could round up—including Cranmer, who was found guilty of treason and condemned to death. õAfter two years in prison, the queen allowed Cranmer out, and he received a brief reprieve. He got to stay in a comfortable house and debate theology with Catholic churchmen. He ended up saying he was sorry for his break with Rome. õOrdinarily under canon law, a heretic who recants gets off the hook. But Mary was determined to burn Cranmer. On the day of his execution, when Cranmer was supposed to stand in the pulpit of a prominent church and publicly declare his allegiance to Rome, he ditched his script and said instead: “As for the pope, I refuse him as Christ’s enemy and the Antichrist.” õMary’s goons yanked him from the pulpit and brought him to the stake where a number of his colleagues had already burned to death. The story goes that he was so ashamed of recanting his beliefs that he stuck his right hand, which he’d used to sign the recantation, into the fire first. õMary’s bloody triumph turned out to be brief. She had no child herself. She married Prince Philip of Spain, much to the outrage of English people who had no love for the Spanish. Throughout her marriage she was prone to phantom pregnancies, but each one was a false alarm.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  That action of lying conflicts with your belief about yourself as a truthful person. That creates dissonance. So do you suddenly start thinking of yourself as someone who lies? No. You rationalize away the untruth that you told your boss. “It didn’t hurt anybody. I don’t do this on the regular. This was an exception to the rule.” Whether it is your own actions or new and disconfirming information, when it comes to a battle between the facts and changing your beliefs, the facts too often lose out. Like the other forces we’ve explored, cognitive dissonance adds debris to the katamari, making it harder to quit. Every time you rationalize away new information in order to cling to a belief, that belief becomes more tightly woven into the fabric of your identity. The act of rejecting the facts becomes circular. Now the next time you discover conflicting information or your actions don’t align with your beliefs, you’re going to be even more motivated to stick to those beliefs. This explains why some of the Seekers could have rejected such clear signals that Marian Keech did not have a direct line to superintelligent beings from another planet. Forced to square the failure of the aliens to show or the flood to arrive with their decision to cut off their families and friends and get rid of their worldly goods, they rationalized away the absence of the doom. Their devotion may have staved off the end of the world. This was all a test and the Seekers passed it. There was no spaceship because the aliens were already on Earth, about to reveal themselves. That’s how they resolved the conflict, just as we all do. The Mirror and the WindowWhen it comes to identity, we all want to maintain a positive self-narrative. We want to think well of ourselves. We want to believe that we’re consistent and rational, that we don’t make mistakes, that the things we believe about the world are true. When we look in the mirror, we want to see someone we can think well of. We also want others looking in on us to view us the same way. We worry that if others see inconsistency between our present and past decisions or actions, they will judge us as being wrong, irrational, capricious, and prone to mistakes. The desire to maintain a positive self-image contributes to the problem with quitting. When you quit, you’re closing a mental account, and we know that we don’t like to close those accounts in the losses. If you abandon a belief, that is the moment you admit you were mistaken. If you set out on a course of action and change your mind, that’s when you go from “failing” to “having failed.” And if you have failed, doesn’t that mean you made a mistake to start in the first place? Of course, the answer is no. But that’s not how it feels to us.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  To underscore this point, Milkman and Beshears looked at how analysts reacted to updated earnings information, depending on whether their estimates were out of consensus or in the mainstream. If extreme positions become more integral to who we are, we ought to see less escalation of commitment from those with consensus positions. That’s exactly what they found. Analysts who made consensus forecasts that later turned out to be far off actual earnings seemed perfectly willing to update those forecasts. It was only the analysts who had made extreme predictions who were so stubborn. This was one of the problems Andrew Wilkinson had in cutting his losses on Flow. He took an out-of-consensus, very public position about the superiority of bootstrapping to venture backing. That led to him turning down the flood of venture capital offers coming in. He later admitted the importance he attached to that position and those statements. “I glorified that, and that was my identity. I really valued that.” As his venture-backed competitors started to outpace him, it likely influenced his continued commitment, long after the world showed him that his investments did not have a positive expected value. The lesson in all this is that we need to be careful about tying our identity to any single thing that we believe. And we need to be particularly cautious when a belief is outside the mainstream and public because it is so much harder to let go of those beliefs, facts be damned. Mistaken IdentityThe tragedy of all this is that the way we imagine other people view us is often wrong. That means that some of the irrational decisions we make about quitting are based on a mistaken fear of how we’re going to look to other people. Those imaginings, frankly, are often unkind and ungenerous to those around us because we assume that if we quit, even if it’s obviously the right thing to do, other people are going to think that we failed. That we’re capricious or weak. In these scenarios, we don’t believe there’s going to be any empathy or understanding of why we might have made the choice that we did. But that harsh view of others is usually unjustified. It turns out that when we do quit, other people often don’t think that way at all. Those worries we’ve projected onto others are just head trash we’re carrying around. That’s what happened with Sarah Olstyn Martinez. “I was worried my fellow ER doctors would think I was a wimp, a sellout who couldn’t hack it. I was worried about how my supervisors were going to view me.” She dreaded giving her boss notice, because she assumed he would be angry or upset. When Olstyn Martinez finally did give her notice, her boss was actually very understanding. By the end of the talk, he apologized for failing her, for not making the job less stressful so that she could have persevered.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  It is common to find exilic Cubans occupying top administrative posts in City Hall, The Miami Herald , and the city's corporate boardrooms. Cubans wield tremendous power in the political, social, economic, and cultural spheres of Miami. Because exilic Cubans surmounted the social structures of oppression, I am the racist or the oppressor when in Miami and the victim of racism or oppression when I leave. Remember that racism is more than just personal prejudices or biases; it is the product of social structures designed to privilege one group over another. Even though my prejudices and biases remain the same, when in Miami I am the one who benefits from the social structures, hence the racist. Yet when I leave Miami and drive on the New Jersey Turnpike, I am the victim of racism. What changed? Not my biases or prejudices; rather, my social location. Although personal biases or prejudices are not virtues to be emulated, they do not fully constitute racism: social structures do. This is why, when people of color point out Euroamerica's racism, they are referring to something that goes beyond mere bias or prejudice. White privilege makes all whites racist not because of their possible beliefs of superiority but because they benefit from the present social structures; in the same way, I must confess my racism when in Miami because those structures are designed to benefit me. This does not make all whites evil, wicked people; it simply reveals who benefits in society because of race. It must be remembered that this was not always the case. After all, blond-haired and blue-eyed white Gauls were sold as slaves in the marketplaces of Rome during imperial times, and white Europeans served as slaves to Moorish and Ottoman overlords. Racism depends on which group controls power and uses that power, at the expense of others, to provide privilege for one group. In this country, at this time in world history, the face of racism happens to be white. In the same way, I must confess that I am a sexist, even though I consider myself a feminist. Because of my gender, I must realize and confess my complicity with sexist social structures, a complicity motivated by personal advantage.4 When competing with a woman for a job, I hold the advantage of being hired, and at a higher salary, solely because I am male. It does not matter that my personal beliefs are that men and women are and should be treated as equals; the social structures exist to provide me with privilege due to my gender. All things being equal, I prevail over women in the marketplace, in the church community, and in society at large because I am male. I need not hold racist or sexist beliefs; my complicity with social structures protects the privilege that comes with whiteness and maleness. Racism, as well as sexism, becomes normalized within a society through its customs, language, traditions, myths, regulations, and laws.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  JEROME. As much as to say; It is of My will, and of the Father’s will, that I should die for the salvation of men; you considering only your own will would not that the grain of wheat should fall into the ground, that it may bring forth much fruit; therefore as you speak what is opposed to My will, you ought to be called My adversary. For Satan is interpreted ‘adverse’ or ‘contrary.’ ORIGEN. Yet the words in which Peter and those in which Satan are rebuked, are not, as is commonly thought, the same; to Peter it is said, Get thee behind me, Satan; that is, follow me, thou that art contrary to my will; to the Devil it is said, Go thy way, Satan, understanding not ‘behind me,’ but ‘into everlasting fire.’ He said therefore to Peter, Get thee behind me, as to one who through ignorance was ceasing to walk after Christ. And He called him Satan, as one, who through ignorance had somewhat contrary to God. But he is blessed to whom Christ turns, even though He turn in order to rebuke him. But why said He to Peter, Thou art an offence unto me, (Ps. 119:165.) when in the Psalm it is said, Great peace have they that love thy law, and there is no offence to them? It must be answered, that not only is Jesus not offended, but neither is any man who is perfect in the love of God; and yet he who does or speaks any thing of the nature of an offence, may be an offence even to one who is incapable of being offended. Or he may hold every disciple that sinneth as an offence, as Paul speaks, Who is offended, and I burn not?. (2 Cor. 11:29.) 16:24–2524. Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. 25. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  I got my father’s razor and made up my mind to kill Freda, and now I know she is happy.” The jury chose madwoman, and Alice spent the rest of her life in the Western State Insane Asylum in Bolivar, Tennessee. Even when sex between women was, in its own way, acknowledged, it functioned as a kind of unmooring from gender. A lesbian acted like a man but was, still, a woman; and yet she had forfeited some essential femininity. The conversation about domestic abuse in lesbian relationships had been active within the queer community since the early 1980s, but it wasn’t until 1989, when Annette Green shot and killed her abusive female partner in West Palm Beach after a Halloween party, that the question of whether such a thing was possible was brought before a jury and became one for the courts . Green was one of the first queer people to use “battered woman syndrome” to justify her crime. The idea of the battered woman 35 was brand-new—it had been coined in the ’70s—but both abuse and the abused meant only one thing: physical violence and a white, straight woman (Green is Latina), respectively. The baffled judge eventually allowed Green’s defense, but only after insisting on renaming it “battered person syndrome,” despite the fact that both the abuser and the abused were women. Regardless, it was not successful; Green was convicted of second-degree murder. (A paralegal who worked with Green’s attorney told a reporter that “if this had been a heterosexual relationship,” she would have been acquitted.) All of this contrasts sharply with the way narratives of abused straight (and, usually, white) women play out. When the Framingham Eight—a group of women in prison for killing their abusive partners—came into the public eye in 1992, people were similarly uncertain about what to do with Debra Reid, a black woman and the only lesbian among them. When a panel was convened to hear the women’s stories to consider commuting their sentences, Debra’s lawyers did their best to leverage the committee’s inherent assumptions and prejudices by painting her as “the woman” in the relationship: she cooked, she cleaned, she cared for the children. The attorneys believed, rightly, that Debra needed to fit the traditional domestic abuse narrative that people understood: the abused needed to be a “feminine” figure—meek, straight, white—and the abuser a masculine one. 36 That Debra was black didn’t help her case; it worked against the stereotype. (In another early lesbian abuse case, in which a woman gave her girlfriend a pair of shiny black eyes, the prosecutor acknowledged that while she was grateful for and surprised by the abuser’s conviction, she believed that the fact that the defendant was butch and black almost certainly played into the jury’s willingness to convict her.) The queer woman’s gender identity is tenuous and can be stripped away from her at any moment, should it suit some straight party or another. And when that happens, the results are frustratingly predictable.