Ben's Search for Meaning

Last week I lay in bed in our vacation rental in Hawaii, my head resting on my husband's chest, and my brain broke. "Does not compute," it said. "This much happiness is not possible." Being in the middle of a week-and-a-half-long vacation with our children in a beautiful place where I have many happy childhood memories certainly contributed to my bliss overload, but the truth is I have felt the same thing on several occasions in the past couple of years, often when I wake up next to him in our bed at home or while snuggling on the couch, watching TV. My brain simply doesn't know what to do with the fact that I am married to a man I'm intellectually, emotionally, physically, and sexually attracted to, and that we have a really good life together.

My mom did not have a happy life. She had a difficult childhood in which she felt she was expected to raise her younger siblings, she left her first husband because he beat her, her second husband left her, she raised seven children largely on her own, she worked hard as a waitress to support us, after finally getting a college degree and a good job she suffered through health problems that forced her into early retirement, and then she passed away after a painful battle with pancreatic cancer. Despite her seemingly constant challenges, though, she often smiled and laughed. Growing up, I learned from her that life sucks but you can choose to be happy anyway. One of her favorite books was Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, which is about (among other things) how Frankl found ways to remain positive even while imprisoned in an Auschwitz concentration camp.

The coping skills my mom taught me proved incredibly valuable as I struggled through a pretty difficult childhood myself. We were poor, my dad lived an ocean away and I had no meaningful relationship with him, my mom constantly fought with my older sisters and I was often called on to mediate, I was bullied for being white, and I was gay in a religious environment that taught me being gay wasn't even a valid option. Looking back on it now with a bit of objectivity, I feel like I had a pretty crappy childhood. Yet, as I said above, I have many happy memories of that childhood. Of course part of this is that there were genuinely good times mixed in with the bad times, but it's also thanks to the positive thinking philosophy my mom taught me. If Viktor Frankl could be happy in a concentration camp, after all, surely I could be happy through my relatively minor struggles.

The thing my mom didn't teach me, because I'm not sure she really believed it, is that sometimes life can be really good. Sometimes you can just be happy without trying. The problem with believing that life will always be horrible, that it's all about the trials and tribulations, is that you're less likely to work toward making your life happier than it is. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can't change, by all means, but don't forget the part about the courage to change the things I can. As a child, there wasn't a whole lot about my circumstances I could change, so learning to have a positive attitude regardless of my circumstances was a necessary survival skill. As an adult, I have a lot more control, but it's taken me years to learn to exercise that control rather than just accept whatever circumstances life hands me.

Given my mom's experience with marriage, it's no surprise that I was cynical when it comes to finding happiness in a romantic relationship. You're never going to find someone that you're perfectly compatible with in every way--intellectually, emotionally, physically, sexually--so you might as well just pick someone you get along with well enough and choose to be happy. There's some truth to this, because there really is no such thing as a perfect relationship, but I went to an extreme when I allowed religious influence to make me devalue the physical and sexual aspects completely, marrying someone I connected with emotionally and intellectually, but who wasn't even the gender I'm attracted to. I later came to realize that yes, I am capable of choosing to be happy in fundamentally unhappy circumstances, but that's no reason not to change my circumstances when I can. I still had a lot of my mom's cynicism about relationships, though, so honestly I'm lucky to have married someone who makes me as happy as my husband does. My requirements were basically someone I could get along with and who I was attracted to (I added a second requirement to the one I'd had the first time), so as the years progress and we get to know each other better, I'm delighted by each new way I discover that he is customized to specifications I didn't dare hope for. Life will never be perfect, but it turns out it can be pretty darn wonderful.

Invasion of the Imposters

Yesterday as my husband and I rode around in a tour bus, playing the role of tourists in a place I spent half my life, I realized there is a term for the relationship I’ve always had with Hawaii: imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is typically used in other contexts to describe successful people who secretly fear their success was not rightfully earned, and if they are not careful they will be exposed as a fraud. I didn’t do anything special to earn my status as a resident of Hawaii—I was just born here, and lived here for the first eighteen years of my life, when I had no say about where I live—but then neither did anyone else from Hawaii. Yet whenever I’m here, or whenever I talk about being from here with anyone who knows Hawaii, I’m constantly worried about being exposed as a fraud, that I’m not truly local like everyone else.

When I was twelve, I moved across town and transferred to a new middle school. On one of my first days, a teacher was talking about an upcoming field trip and explaining that we could either bring lunch from home or order a bento box. Because I was haole—white—she assumed I had moved not from another part of the island but from the mainland, so she paused, singled me out, and started to explain, “Ben, a bento box is a plate lunch in a to-go box, with—” Embarrassed to have all the other kids thinking I was from the mainland, I stopped her and reminded her that I had just moved from Hawaii Kai, so of course I knew what a bento box is. She laughed, apologized, and moved on.

The truth is, before that conversation I didn’t know what a bento box was. My ignorance probably came from a combination of two things: although I was born in Hawaii, my family had come from the mainland just a year before I was born, so our home wasn’t as saturated with local idioms, food, and culture as homes of families who’d been in Hawaii going back several generations; and we were poor, so it would have been pretty rare for us to go to a restaurant and buy a bento box rather than just packing peanut butter sandwiches in a paper bag. Whatever the case, I didn’t know it, and I felt like I should, and if people found out I didn’t then they’d know I was a fake local, just like they assumed from the moment they saw my pasty white skin.

Growing up white in Hawaii, it’s hard not to feel like an outsider. Everyone is hyper-conscious of race, whether it’s simply used as a descriptor (“You know that one Tongan guy, the really big one?”) or in jokes based on racial stereotypes (“You’re so stingy, why you gotta be so Chinese?”). Adults may mean it harmlessly, and they typically do, but children have a tendency to be cruel. In 10^th grade P.E. class, one day a boy who was just a couple shades darker than me asked, “Why are you so white?” I joked, “Same reason you are,” and he immediately body-slammed me, knocking me to the ground. Later, he attacked me again in the locker room. In history class we’d learn about the atrocities committed by Europeans and Americans against the Hawaiian people—not to mention atrocities committed against Native Americans and Africans—and I felt all eyes in the room on me, blaming me for things done hundreds of years before I was born. Toward the end of high school, my friends nicknamed me Slappy White and White-White Boy, and I embraced it because I was tired of feeling like there was something wrong with me because of the color of my skin, and joking about it was the best way for me to own it.

A flip side of my imposter syndrome here is that I feel like a fraud talking about my childhood as if I were a victim of racism, when in fact I’m part of one of the most privileged classes in America, as a cisgender white man. There’s truth to this, because apart from a couple of bullies my life was never in danger, I had no barriers blocking me from education or career (being poor actually helped because it qualified me for Pell grants and scholarships), and changing my minority status was a simple matter of moving to any one of the other forty-nine states, which I did immediately after high school. But my experiences, mild as they may be in comparison to harsher ones, did have a psychological effect on me that extends beyond my feeling like a fake local in Hawaii. At work, I constantly fear my colleagues will figure out I don’t really know what I’m doing, or that I don’t work as hard as everyone else, or that I don’t really deserve my position. When friends make a joke I don’t get or a reference to current events that I’m unaware of, my immediate reaction is to laugh or smile and nod instead of asking them to explain.

At the end of the day, everyone has things they know and things they don’t know, regardless of where they grew up or how smart they are. I don’t need to pretend I know the way to that one beach all the locals know, or that I like poi, or that I talk Pidgin (I don’t). I am who I am, and that includes both my knowledge and my ignorance. If you’ll allow that of me, then I’ll return the favor. 

Everyone's a Little Bit Sadist Sometimes: An Argument for Moderation (Most of the Time)

Last night I was chatting with a neighbor about politics, as one does, and we were lamenting the radical polarization of politics, also as one does. "What does it say about us,"  I asked, "that we keep electing these politicians who are so incapable of compromising with the other side?" And it's not just compromise; our politicians are incapable of having rational conversations with their opposites. If you look at political discourse on social media, it's not terribly surprising that these are the people we elect. We as a human race seem to take pleasure in ridiculing those we disagree with. Like, if I can just get one more jab in, you'll finally see how superior my point of view is--and therefore how superior I am. We all know how fruitless this effort is, but we engage anyway.

And yes, I mean we. I know I do it. If you can sincerely say that you don't take pleasure in mocking or arguing with people who are wrong, then my sincere kudos to you. You are more mature than I am. I like to think of myself as a moderate liberal, capable of engaging in productive conversations with people I disagree with, and sometimes I pull that off--the conversation with my right-of-center neighbor last night was quite friendly and I learned about his point of view--but a lot of times I don't. I tend to swing far left and become combative in certain trigger situations. These triggers include my hot-button topics, which for the most part are cases where I perceive people being hurt; especially when those people are part of the LGBTQ community, women, or people of color, all of whom I broadly think of as "my people," even though I can only claim membership in one of those groups (why I don't think of straight white men as my people despite being a white man and having several straight white male friends is a topic for me to explore another day). Other triggers that make me dig into my ideologies and become obstinate are when I'm engaging with an obstinate person from the other end of the spectrum, when I'm engaging with a stranger on social media so I have nothing to lose, when I feel attacked or threatened, when I'm grumpy for unrelated reasons, or when I just have a really good joke that happens to be at the expense of people I disagree with.

My perceived correlation between the political spectrum and niceness. An admittedly oversimplified view.

Generally speaking, I see a correlation between political moderation and niceness, and between political extremism and meanness. This is absolutely true of me: When I'm more moderate, I'm more willing to listen to other people, to speak respectfully and be nice. When my more extreme political views take over, that's when I get belligerent, sadistic, just plain mean. I'm making it sound like I believe the solution to all the world's problems is for everyone to be more moderate, and to a certain extent I believe that, but unfortunately it's not so simple. There are situations where it's not appropriate to be nice. When people are actually being hurt, sometimes the only way to make it stop is to dig your heels in and forcefully say NO. If someone's pointing a gun at my children, I'm not going to worry about hurting his feelings--or his body--as I do whatever it takes to stop him and protect my children. The difficult thing is identifying the threshold for those gray situations between "you're pointing a gun at my children" and "I disagree with your personal beliefs" at which point it becomes appropriate to set aside niceness.

The key, I suppose, is being honest with ourselves about our motivations. If I'm being a jerk just because my ego is threatened, because I'm hangry, or because I'm reverting back to that basic human tendency to take sadistic pleasure in being mean to others, then I'm part of the problem. If I'm being a jerk because it's legitimately the most effective way to stop someone from being hurt, then I will be that jerk. And maybe some problems take both the moderate approach and the more extreme approach. Both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X were fighting the same injustices, but the two fought in very different ways. I believe both were necessary. I'm going to work on being Martin whenever I can, and being Malcolm when I need to.