Upside to Adversity
I grew up in the Southern California suburbs. While it wasn’t without its problems, it was a great place to grow up. So throughout my adult life I have not considered the notion of adversity teaching me lessons. I had plenty of good memories from my youth.
For a dime I could go swimming in an Olympic size pool. Another dime could get a box of popcorn while resting from my swim. Upstairs at Verdugo Park I could play Ping-Pong or basketball. The public library; the YMCA; the Parks and Recreation baseball, basketball and flag football teams; Cub Scouts; the fireworks at McCambridge Park; high school sports; Bob’s Big Boy; fifty cent movies at the Cornell. The whole deal. Yes, and I was walking around town at the age of six without fear. There were blue-collar parts of town — I grew up on the west half of Burbank — but no one ever advised me to stay out of certain areas. If there was a loud noise in the middle of the night it was a car backfiring.
I did have adversity in my life — no one lives a life free of it — but I considered it manageable and comparatively not so bad on an adversity continuum. I left Burbank and came to Fresno, where I worked as a teacher at Edison High, Kings Canyon Middle School, and Roosevelt High. I met students who were had been stabbed, or shot and paralyzed, shot and killed, committed patricide, were beaten by Dad for asking for a light bulb to do homework, joined gangs to have a family, had no food in the house for a month, and many, many other unsavory things. Not all of them lived that life. There was also another group who, while they hadn’t suffered that kind of calamity and horror, they were immersed in it, either in their family or neighborhood. And to be clear, I also had some students who were fortunate enough not have those experiences nor did live where it was happening. But for a third of them or more, life had the most difficult and harmful kind of adversity.
So here is the sampler of adversity I have faced in my life:
1. 1959 — Dad’s angry voice makes my soul quiver. I feel scared, powerless, ashamed, and spend the next 50 years believing I was no good and making sure everyone I came in contact with was in a good mood.
2. 1963 — Molested by a stranger. I had no one to turn to because I believed that Dad would blame either Mom or me.
3. 1964 — Taunted on the schoolyard. Called “Black Jack.” Suddenly aware of my darker skin.
4. 1965 — Played baseball with no skill for it and a mitt for a righty. Tough year.
5. 1979–2013 — For me, the most stressful thing about teaching was — every five or six years — having a really bad kid who wanted to make everything personal, who came after the teacher every single day, and no matter what I did I couldn’t turn him or her around. One kid was so bad that I fought back panic attacks every single day. When it was like that it was as if my body was absorbing a poison, but I had to go work even though I could feel my spirit inside me turning and running away.
6. 2012–2014 — Four surgeries in two years.
Those are the major ones, I guess. I don’t know what good might come from posting them. Paul Simon said in a song called “Quiet,” that external negative voices and experiences that bring self-doubt are “handcuffs on the soul,” and likewise, I take it that adversity and maybe the reliving of it, the carrying around of it, can create self-doubt, shackling the soul, when the purpose of the soul is to be free. In fact, I would say that the soul is the essence of freedom itself.
What are the life lessons I learned from experiencing adversity? There was a record album my brother had. He bought it early in 1968. The predominant theme of the album is redemption. On that album there was a song called, “Dear Landlord,” and in that song there is a lyric that says,
Dear landlord
Please heed these words that I speak
I know you’ve suffered much
But in this you are not so unique
What I got out of this lyric was we don’t suffer alone, and that it’s liberating to see and understand that there are others in the same situation. That we shouldn’t place our suffering at the center of our consciousness, because, “in this you are not so unique.” When we realize that and are able to overcome the adversity, then we can help others. Just imagine if all of us were committed to helping others get from where they are to the next best place.
I would say what I learned, ultimately, was empathy. Everybody stands somewhere on the adversity continuum. There’s someone who have suffered more than you, and someone who’s suffered less. But we are in position to help others because of our experiences, rather than just eating the pain and memory and hobbling along on our own. Like the expression, “Take a negative and turn it into a positive.” That’s what Dad used to say. He was on to something.
