Supernormal. Мэг Джей
more severe if the youth is targeted once a week or more, and they may continue well into adulthood as the experience of powerlessness and victimization becomes woven into who they are, with depression or anxiety lasting for years or even decades after bullying subsides.
This might have been how it went for Paul were it not for one of the rocks hurled his way. When Paul came home with a bloodied eye that required stitches, his mother considered that perhaps he ought to beat a retreat; that maybe the family should move so he could go to another school: “I feel bullied by those kids!” Paul heard his mother cry to his father that night behind their closed bedroom door. Hearing those words and his mother’s sobs, what struck Paul the most was the unfairness, the wrongness, of it all. Parents are not supposed to cry. Families are not supposed to move. People who do bad things are not supposed to get away with them. So in that moment, Paul decided to stay right where he was. He was going to find a way to fight back.
***
When faced with danger, our deepest instincts are to fight back or run away. This “fight-or-flight” response was so-named in 1915 by psychologist Walter Cannon, who observed in animals that, when threatened, the body mobilizes to defend itself or to flee. In Cannon’s model, every living being’s goal is to maintain homeostasis—another well-known word he coined—and, to do so, the brain coordinates bodily systems in order to ensure the stability of what, before him, French experimentalist Claude Bernard called the milieu interieur, or the internal environment.
Cannon’s ideas have been refined over the years, but a century later we know that he was largely correct. Following disturbances in our environment, the brain and the body respond in an effort to make things right. The amygdala triggers the release of stress hormones, and as a result heart rate increases, focus narrows, digestion slows, and blood flows to our muscles for extra energy. These changes prepare us to react to stress—to do something about it—by either advancing or retreating, through fight or through flight.
When we think of the fight in fight or flight, we may imagine physically harming someone or something, and in the most primitive evolutionary sense, to fight is to punch a person who shoves us or to throw rocks at a bear that charges our way. In the modern world and for the supernormal, however, fighting back can take many forms. The word aggression is derived from the Latin aggredere, which can mean “to attack or assail,” but it can also mean “to approach or attempt,” or “to seize an opportunity.” For the supernormal, to fight often means to attack a problem. Rather than raging against another person, for supernormals, fighting the good fight is more often about battling back against a situation—poverty, discrimination, abuse, bullying, unfairness, abandonment—whatever the case may be.
Fueled by some original injustice, the supernormal are not afraid to work long and hard without immediate rewards, even in the face of multiple setbacks. There is an unwillingness to be beaten, an impulse to fight for one’s own survival and to better one’s circumstances, an imperative to stand up for oneself and for what is right. In fact, they usually feel they have no choice. Failure is not an option, as they say, because neither is keeping on with life the way it is.
In my office, this is how the supernormal describe themselves:
I am a fighter.
I am a survivor.
I am determined.
I am a scrapper.
I am tough.
I am strong.
I never give up.
I just keep going.
I do what has to be done.
I’m driven.
I am a striver.
I always find a way.
I pick myself up and brush myself off.
I do whatever I set my mind to.
Backed into a corner, I come out swinging.
Most supernormals do not literally become fighters, of course, and even Paul joined the military as an engineer, a problem solver. But no matter who or what they may look like on the outside, on the inside they see themselves as fighters at heart. Many draw strength from the stories not just of superheroes but of all sorts of fighters. Real-life heroes who can show them a way forward. Characters in books and movies and music that seem as powerful and as relentless as the supernormal may feel. Fictional assassins who know something about locking in on a target and having that killer instinct. Metaphorically speaking, they are hunters. They are stalkers. They are slayers. They are soldiers. Whatever the situation—or the inspiration—each day feels like a fight for survival, and scrappers that they are, supernormals use whatever strengths, whatever weapons, they have to prevail: smarts, sports, family, talent, work ethic, personality, even language.
Also once a student who, like Paul, felt young and out of place, Senator Elizabeth Warren describes in her memoir, titled A Fighting Chance no less, a midwestern adolescence in which she learned to work with what she had: “I was only sixteen, but because I’d skipped a grade, I was now a senior in high school. The way I looked at it, I wasn’t pretty and I didn’t have the highest grades in my school. I didn’t play a sport, couldn’t sing, and didn’t play a musical instrument. But I did have one talent. I could fight—not with my fists, but with my words. I was the anchor on the debate team.”
And as millions of people know by now, Lin-Manuel Miranda, in his smash Broadway musical Hamilton, tells the story of Alexander Hamilton who “wrote his way out” of poverty in the Caribbean and into becoming one of the nation’s Founding Fathers. Maybe fewer people, though, are aware that Hamilton’s story is not entirely unlike that of Miranda, who wrote his way out of some tough times, too. As a child in Washington Heights, Miranda was picked on for his verbal skills: “I caught my first beatin’ from the other kids when I was caught readin’,” he raps on The Hamilton Mixtape. Miranda fought back against his troubles with his songwriting, winning a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, two Grammy Awards, and three Tony Awards by the age of thirty-six. “It’s up to me to draw blood with this pen, hit an artery,” he raps some more. The pen, as they say, is mightier than the sword.
***
Paul returned to school with a bandage over his eye, and he began waging what he called an internal battle for self-respect. Much the way some kids have lucky socks they wear to soccer games, Paul started his day by rummaging through his dresser drawer, looking for his superhero T-shirts. He wore them in layers under other shirts and jackets, like armor he said, and they protected him from feeling defenseless and alone. Days at school were long, and as he counted down the hours—“six more, five more, four more to go”—Paul practiced being strong, at least in his own mind. He memorized the periodic table. He solved word puzzles. He worked a Rubik’s Cube. He changed his handwriting so it slanted to the left rather than to the right. Mind over matter, whatever it was, Paul was determined to make it so. Ever since the stitches, the kids no longer threw rocks at him, and the words and comments that came his way Paul deflected: “I refused to accept that what they said about me was true.”
These might sound like imaginary victories, or mere wishful thinking, but researchers know that fighting back on the inside can be as important as what happens on the outside. One study examined the well-being of eighty-one adults who had been held as political prisoners in East Germany and who had been subjected to mental and physical mistreatment including beatings, threats, and being kept in the dark. Decades after their release, about two-thirds of the prisoners had struggled—or were even still struggling—with post-traumatic stress, while about one-third of the prisoners had not. To understand why some prisoners fared better than others, researchers looked at the type of treatment they received, as well as the coping strategies they used while held captive. More predictive of later suffering than how severe the abuse was or whether the prisoners feared for their lives was the extent to which they gave up on the inside. Those who felt mentally defeated—who felt like “nothing” or who quit caring about what became of them—were more likely to struggle for years and even decades after their release than those who secretly fought back in their own