I was recently re-reading Vivian Gornick’s Harper’s Magazine essay, subtitled "Notes on Humiliation," and I was struck by this:
The tales of harassment in the workplace that surfaced when the #MeToo movement erupted in 2017 . . . revealed behaviors that were simultaneously condoned as acceptable and experienced as denigrating. . . I imagine a woman walking into her office every workday for years, her throat tight, her stomach in knots, ready to swallow the dose of medicine she has to down if she is to hold this job.
This example of repeated, ongoing, humiliation helps me to better imagine and understand the experiences of some women in the workplace. It also seems to me to be similar to, and thus helps me better understand and give words to, the humiliation experiences of some of my neurodivergent teenage patients.
Some neurodivergent teens walk into their middle or high school every school day for years, their "throat tight," their "stomach in knots." They swallow "the dose of medicine" (teasing, exclusion, being blamed and misunderstood) in order to stay in school, stay out of trouble, earn good grades, graduate, and (hopefully) move on to a place and stage of life that might better fit their neuro-developmental profile.
They also, sometimes, after working hard all day to "keep it together," melt down, lash out, and/or withdraw after returning home and may, understandably, resist getting up, getting ready, and going to school to repeat the whole thing over again the next day,
Gornick’s essay reminds me to be in awe of my neurodivergent patients: their courage, their strengths, their fortitude. It reminds me to openly express my awe and to ask “How do you do it? How do you get up every day, go to school, and mostly do well?” hopefully helping them to better see how awesome they are, their strengths and resilience.
I was also struck by the personal and poignant example with which Gornick begins her essay, this one from her own early adolescence. She describes how a once "inseparable" friend of several years abruptly and without explanation abandons her for someone new, and then writes:
One day, I approached the two of them in the yard. “Sheila,” I said, my voice quivering, “aren’t we best friends anymore?” “No,” Sheila said, her voice strong and flat. “I’m best friends now with Edna.”
I stood there, mute and immobilized. A terrible coldness came over me, as though the blood were draining from my body; then, just as swiftly, a rush of heat, and I was feeling bleak, shabby, forlorn, born to be told I wouldn’t do, not now, not ever.
Gornick continues:
Fifty years later, I was walking up Broadway on a hot summer afternoon when a woman I did not recognize blocked my path. She spoke my name, and when I stared at her, puzzled, she laughed. “It’s Sheila,” she said. The scene in the schoolyard flashed before me, and I felt cold all over: cold, shabby, bleak. I wouldn’t do then, I wouldn’t do now. I would never do.
This example reminded me of the staying power of having our mistakes and differences weaponized against us; how these can misshape our most basic or core beliefs about ourselves, others, the world, and our future; sometimes for years, sometimes for a lifetime.
This example also reminded me to continue to use cognitive therapy approaches when working with my neurodivergent patients, including recommitting to helping them:
And, as discussed above, I want to help them experience how in awe of them I am and to see themselves as awesome.
Gornick concludes her essay with an invitation to reframe humiliation as an opportunity for growth. I think this deeper level, cognitive "thriving" strategy is too hard for most of us, including me, to implement consistently—if at all—but here it is:
The great Borges thought it best to look upon our broken inner state as one of life’s great opportunities—to prove ourselves deserving of the blood pulsing through our veins. “Everything that happens,” he wrote, “including humiliations, misfortunes, embarrassments, all is given like clay,” so that we may “make from the miserable circumstances of our lives” something worthy of the gift of consciousness.
I, like Vivian Gornick, will “leave it at that.”
References
Gornick, V. (2021). "Put on the diamonds": Notes on humiliation. Harpers Magazine,
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