Double Bind

by Robin Romm

  In second grade, without being fully cognizant of what was happening or why, I found myself pulled out of my regularly scheduled class to attend special sessions in another room, in which I would take an amalgam of tests that involved categorizing a bunch of odd shapes. And in third grade, I was transported to an entirely different elementary school within my district to take classes with the other kids who were classified as G&T, or gifted and talented. I had been tracked—set, unbeknownst to me, on a path toward advanced placement classes and coveted spots in higher education. That was supposed to be a good thing.

  “You don’t belong here!” This impish kid (whom I incidentally had a crush on) yelled at me in the hallway one day. “Your parents paid for you to get in!”

  I was disturbed, yes, but not particularly rattled. He was merely vocalizing something that was already thick in the atmosphere—­that was heavy and felt, if hardly vocalized. I did not know anything about any bribes, but I knew for certain that I did not belong. I was the only black kid in a sea of mostly Italian, Irish, Jewish, and sometimes Polish hyphenates who, at the time, were all just white to me, as I, to them, was hardly a first-­generation American child of West African parents. (They did, however, seem to know that my parents had accents, an observation that one or more of them hurled at me with an accusatory tone.)

  During this period, a gulf started to form between me and all kinds of signifiers of “knowledge”—textbooks, homework, in-class exercises. If I got something “right,” then perhaps I really was gifted and talented; if I got something “wrong,” then the white kids were right, and I truly didn’t belong there. In short, I was in a constant state of anxiety. The classroom, in particular, was a minefield. I grew so terrified of speaking in class that, one day, instead of raising my hand to ask my third-grade teacher if I could use the bathroom, I sat there as the urine soaked through my pants, filled the plastic seat bolted to my desk, and dripped onto the floor. (My teacher, God bless her, covered for me, saying the pee was apple juice, otherwise I never would have heard the end of it.)

  All emotions, I have since learned, require an outlet. Like dreams deferred, they fester and run or, perhaps, explode. In my case, my anxiety expressed itself as a near-constant stream of commentary, often humorous, that I just had to share with my neighbor in whispers and notes. I became, as my teachers often called me in report cards, “a social butterfly.” I became, in other words, “a problem.”

  As Frankfurt school psychoanalyst Erich Fromm discussed in To Have or to Be?, nouns have increasingly displaced verbs to describe certain phenomena. Patients seeking help from a therapist, for example, are more likely to say that they “have” a problem than to report that they “were” troubled. “[S]ubjective experience is eliminated,” Fromm explained, “the I of the experience is replaced by the it of the problem.” While Fromm thought this shift in language usage indicated alienation from one’s self, my being a “problem” rather than being “troubled” represented my alienation from the rest of my class. I was not perceived as a human being experiencing a feeling, but rather as a problematic object that should be removed—akin to how Western medicine beholds a tumor as a foreign, malignant entity that must be lanced from the patient, rather than, as holistic health practitioners would interpret, a symptom of a systemic issue affecting the entire body.

  Moreover, knowledge was no longer transferred to me as if through osmosis, suffusing and transforming my very being; it was, rather, something that I came to possess and stockpile, like ammunition. Knowledge became less a thing to be shared and more a weapon with which to defend myself, and let fly with spite.

  A funny thing happened after I took the bar exam and before I started working at a large corporate law firm in Manhattan. I kicked up into a forearm stand—granted, I did so against a wall and with the aid of a blue foam block that my trial yoga teacher of the week advised us to frame between our hands for balance. Nonetheless, I was proud; I suppose it was fitting for pride to arise from entering into an asana whose Sanskrit name, pincha mayurasana, means “feathered peacock pose”—as I interpret it, the kind of asana you show off in. Heading home that day, my yoga mat rolled and pinned under my arm, I felt the sort of smug elation someone might feel after she’d just purchased a very expensive pair of shoes.

  This feeling, however, faded quickly and was a distant recollection by the middle of my second year at the law firm. Though a bona fide Juris Doctor, working at a law firm was still reminiscent of being in law school: We had “classes” filled with all of the other associates who joined the firm the same year; each member of the class advanced every calendar year, as one would advance to the next grade. Instead of teachers, we had “partners,” whose approval every ambitious associate sought to obtain by producing good work product and promptly responding to emails at all hours of the day. Hungry associates were voracious for partner validation, disseminated in the form of positive feedback in periodic reviews and “sexy” work assignments that might eventually appear in the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times. Accordingly, some associates were known to make you look bad in front of your superiors, aka, “throw you under the bus,” to appear more competent or to “cover” their collective “ass.” One day, walking with a stack of documents in my hands, I imagined collapsing from exhaustion in the hallway and one of my cohorts stepping over my unconscious body without losing his stride.

  The aforementioned summation of law firm life is not one I am only making in hindsight. It was not lost on me at the time that this environment was also rife with illegitimate authority and bullying. But I wanted to do very well. So I worked very hard. If this part of the essay were in a film, you would not see a montage, but rather a time-lapse shot of me sitting behind a desk in my erstwhile office as the sun rose and set and rose and set and rose and set outside the window.

  I was miserable. However, as in well-plotted genre fiction, the extreme situation that I’d found myself in forced me to reconsider all that I’d thought I’d known about myself. Who knew that I had a latent affinity for the Fourth of July, a holiday that had failed to stir any feeling in me until I found myself, two years in a row, due to work, unable to attend a lame barbecue with the rest of America? I also learned that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my working days immediately answering emails sent from all time zones. Most importantly, I discovered my erroneous conflation of “doing well”—a position that is inextricable from accumulating accolades on one’s transcript or periodic performance evaluation form—with “being well.”

  I’m not proud to admit that the global financial crisis, for me, personally, was a profound relief. I didn’t lose my job or housing, and the deluge of work (that had been aggravated by an apparent-in-hindsight bubble) suddenly subsided. My email stopped pinging, my BlackBerry stopped vibrating, and I could once again hear my thoughts above the droning hum of the built-in temperature-regulating apparatus in my office. I soon realized that I hadn’t done any yoga in several months. It’s true that I had been incredibly busy. But when I searched my memory files for the last time I’d regularly attended a yoga class—that is, not just popped in sporadically—I realized that it had not been too long after I’d kicked up into a forearm stand for the first time.

  Soon thereafter, in the eerie post-apocalyptic silence of the financial crisis, I started to do yoga again.

  Is it needless to say that most of the associates and partners at my law firm were white? Is it needless to say that most of the students and professors at my elite law school were white? For the purpose of this essay, it is not, because—as with the whiteness of my gifted and talented class—this backdrop helped set the tenor of my ambition. You don’t have to be a yogi to be enchanted by a mantra. We all have mantras. The difference is that yogis choose the words that are repeated in their heads, while the average person typically doesn’t and becomes entranced by unconscious spells. I can see now that one of my mantras was I’ll show you.

  “I became an overachiever to get approval
from the world,” Madonna apparently said, according to one of those websites that aggregates decontextualized quotes from persons of note. Nonetheless, I can picture these words spoken by both Madonna and Condi, with a challenge in their eyes and capped with a gap-toothed Cheshire smile.

  I could be projecting, of course. My own gap-toothed smile notwithstanding, I could very well be seeing something in the two of them that I recognize in myself. Whether Madonna’s “Blond Ambition” or Rice’s particular brand of black ambition, I am intimately familiar with that drive to prove that I can do whatever a man and/or white person can do—and more. The law firm, where white men abounded, was a psychodramatic playground in which to exercise this ambition. It was also a playing field in which—as in the coveted worlds of Henry Ford and George W. Bush—there appeared to be a marked divide between those who had to know, and those who did not have to know. The “rainmakers” were those partners who must have known something at some point, but—due to the amount of business they were capable of bringing in—no longer needed to know as much. Rainmaker business was then handled on a day-to-day and, frankly, mundane level by the “service” partners, a kind of Master Mind group for law firms. The service partners obviously had to know quite a lot about their respective niches of specialized knowledge, knowledge that was essential for completing the documentation that would “paper the deal” for the firm’s client.

  The path to becoming a service partner was, at least theoretically, clear: accumulate sufficient specialized knowledge and demonstrate your proficiency in it to whatever partners were paying attention. The road to being a rainmaker, by contrast, was far less straightforward, depending as it did on such dubious factors as “proximity” and “access” to said rainmakers, factors that effectively amounted to being “chosen” or “tracked.” While it was unclear how to become a rainmaker, it was certainly clear to me that, in the context of the law firm, this is who I would rather be. It was also clear that I didn’t see any women or people of color making it rain.

  When I finally had time to contemplate all of this, during those precious slow months after the financial crisis first hit, I started to feel like a pawn in a much larger game, being slid here and there by some invisible hand. Incidentally, two white male partners—both libertarians—seemed to authentically value my efforts, giving me the illusion of agency. Nonetheless, I finally appreciated the ways in which my life was not like a clichéd, mainstream movie, in which, after a number of tightly plotted moves, I would arrive at some static scene of “success.” Life was more complex than that. I also decided that I’d done enough showing off.

  In her memoir No Higher Honor, Rice reflected on her trying relationship with Donald Rumsfeld, who appeared to be less congenial toward Rice in her role as a peer rather than as a subordinate:

  . . . [T]he two of us were walking side by side through the Rose Garden portico. I turned to Don and asked, “What’s wrong between us?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “We always got along. You’re obviously bright and committed, but it just doesn’t work.”

  Bright? That, I thought to myself, was part of the problem.

  Epistemology is the philosophical inquiry into how one knows what she knows. What has preoccupied me of late is, rather, why anyone knows what he or she knows. Becoming meta, I now understand, is a long, unending process. Perhaps I thought it was a state that I had “achieved” after having been metaphysically body-slammed into a state of alienation by my “gifted and talented” white peers. But I was not some transcendent observer, wisely watching over myself with compassion. I was merely dissociated, a hungry ghost repeating history in a futile attempt to satisfy my desire for validation.

  When I kick up into a forearm stand now, at least there is no longer another version of myself by my side, playing on loop the canned applause of a studio audience. Instead, she stands there silently, watching the inflow and outflow of my breath.

  REFERENCES

  Bush, George W. Decision Points. New York: Broadway Books, 2010.

  Fromm, Erich. To Have or to Be? New York: Continuum, 2005.

  Hill, Napoleon. Think and Grow Rich. New York: TarcherPerigee, 2005.

  Lechter, Sharon. Think and Grow Rich for Women. New York: Penguin, 2014.

  Rice, Condoleezza. No Higher Honor. New York: Crown, 2011.

  Letters to My Mother and Daughters on Ambition

  SARAH RUHL

  Dear Mom,

  Today you called me on the phone and I said, “How are you?” and you said, “Okay,” and I heard a hesitation and I said, “Why only okay?” You said, “Well, I am still having trouble with a sense of what my mission is in life.”

  You are seventy-two. I am forty-one. What could I possibly have to say to you about mission and ambition and mothers and daughters. This is a conversation we’ve been having since I was ten years old.

  I have always been terrified of the word ambition. I find it distasteful, menacing, as though it was always pursued by its invisible compound partner “blind”—blind ambition. If someone asks me, “Do you like him or her?” and I answer, “He or she is—‘ambitious,’ ” I am making a polite backhanded insult. I am saying that I have met a young person who seems more interested in a career or money or power and plunder or in scaling mountains than in the thing itself, the work. I treasure people who do the work itself for the sake of the work, and I am afraid of ambition. It stinks of oiled-up leather boots and money and calculators and corpses of friends cast aside—of the specific attempt to do better than others. But perhaps there is something to scrape away at, to investigate. Why do I fear the word ambition? Is it because I am secretly ambitious? Is it because I am a woman? Is it because I grew up in an Irish Catholic family and you were taught to keep your head down, to be wary of strivers?

  My friend Emily Morse, the artistic director of New Dramatists, talks of focusing on the idea of mission rather than ambition. What happens if we take the “amb” out of “mission”? What is an “amb”? The second foot of an iamb. “Amb,” pertaining to walking. Does the “amb” in ambition make the mission move? Is the missing “amb” a way in which a mission feels stuck, stagnant, not moving?

  But I digress. You, my mother, called me today. You spoke to me of feeling a lack of mission, not ambition. I was in a taxi on the way to an appointment to get my blood drawn and my urine collected so that I could get life insurance in case I drop dead and still need to take care of my children somehow after I am dead.

  All my life you were doing something. You were grading English papers, you were in a play, you were gardening, you were driving me somewhere, you were reading, you were planning, you were directing a play. You were in motion and seemed interested in playing as it lays. You did not have a plan—an ambition—to get to x or y place before you were thirty, before you were forty. You took pleasure in the tasks before you. I thought this was good. I thought this made you who you were—warm, and in motion.

  Now that you are seventy-two there are fewer tasks before you demanding your attention. When you are in a play, I find that you often have a sense of mission. Every night there is something before you. But you are in a play now and still you feel your sense of mission waning. Is it because theater is transitory and you want to leave something behind? Is it because the contemporary theater itself lacks a mission? Or is theater not enough, you want a legacy? I once asked you if it was not enough that you had two daughters, one who wrote plays and one who was a doctor, if that counted as a legacy, and you said, “Not really, that is not mine. It is yours.”

  What is a mission and what is an ambition, and what if we have one but not both? And does having one make us a nice little missionary and does having the other one make us a bitch?

  When my sister was in medical school one of her professors told her she’d make a good surgeon. “What does that mean?” my sister asked my uncle (a doctor), and he said: “It means he thinks you’re a bitch.”

  Mom, you grew up in the fifties. The feminist
movement came along just as you were having babies. You were not part of any consciousness-raising groups. You did not look at your vagina while you were standing over mirrors. You did not talk about how you would infiltrate the patriarchy. You served on the PTA. You made us lunches. On my brown-bagged lunch, you would make little drawings, and a small crossword puzzle of my name. This comforted me when I felt lonely in the cafeteria. You read us Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and did funny voices. You took our temperatures. You made us chicken soup and baked potatoes. You knitted us sweaters and recited the words of absurdist playwrights. You made us laugh.

  I want, before you die, for you to feel at rest, to feel you’ve accomplished enough. To look around at this earth and say: It was good.

  And I wonder if that counts as a mission or ambition—to want fullness or satisfaction for your parents or your children. Can ambition be directed toward others, and involve satisfaction and rest? Or does ambition only count as checking things off your own list and moving ever forward? An ambulatory kind of mission. Scaling heights. Making progress.

  Some people have never seen a mountain they don’t want to climb. I don’t wish to climb mountains. I see a mountain and I think: That’s pretty. I have no wish to climb that. What after all do you do after you climb a mountain? You climb back down. And you find a bigger one to climb. That repetitive striving does not appeal to me. Maybe it’s because I get altitude sickness. Or maybe it’s because I’m lazy. Or maybe it’s because I prefer water. I see a body of water, and I want to swim in it. Maybe swimming is more like a mission—being immersed in a task in which you are held, surrounded by the task, inside consciousness, wading, forgetting everything but for the task—and scaling a mountain feels more Austrian and ambitious. However, I spoke to a rock climber recently and asked him why he climbs rocks, and he said it was for the same reason I like to be in water—because it puts him at the very edge of a moment.