Shame, Shame, Shame!

The lost Lenore continues her search for childhood failure stories, as well as moments of prepubescent humiliation, so naturally I'm happy to chime in...
"When I was a wee lad, since I had very low self-esteem and was afraid of everything, the result of both nature and nurture, I rarely would speak for myself. My poor social skills were noted on my kindergarten report card as I had this habit of speaking through my friend, Markie. Now Markie wasn't an imaginary friend, he was flesh and blood, but if I had to give an opinion, it was usually prefaced by "Markie says," a defense mechanism to turn attention from myself and on to another target, i.e. Markie. To give you a sense of my inner fragility, when asked as part of some class exercise to "be a tree," I refused, as I was terrified that, should I surrender myself to the concept of becoming an oak, I might never be "Dan" again. Speaking through or "behind" others became a habit, but the tide may have turned one day in grade school during a "Parents Day" event when I was asked a solution to some odd numbers problem. Afraid to give the wrong answer, I said, "I agree with (insert name of kid who had been asked previously and didn't have the right answer either)," which struck the parents in the room as being incredibly funny. Nothing like being laughed at by adults in front of your peers and your own parents to make you feel so small you wouldn't be picked up by an electron microscope. As I recall, my father took some action at this point and got me focused on my arithmetic, but the real result I think was my realization that this strategy of hiding behind others was doomed to failure, particularly if you choose people who are bad at math. Today, I am a self-actualized, confident, bon vivant and writer who never met a camera he didn't like, so yes, one can face shame and humiliation as a youngster and yet still rise to celebrity heights...at least in his own mind!"

Fail Safe

The Lost Lenore seems to have been lost from the pages of the New York Sun as she's been so dang busy with her new book, FREE RANGE KIDS, soon to be hitting shelves o'er the land from the good people at Wiley publishing. Anyway, her most recent query asked for anecdotes about failure...the point being that yes, little Jimmy can fail a quiz or strike out in his Little League game and it doesn't mean he needs to have a private tutor and a sports psychologist. You can fail and still learn something and turn out fine. So, here's what I had to say on the subject (she loved it, as per usual...!)
"When I was in the fourth grade, one quarter, I got a "D" in a particular class. You have to understand, I didn't (don't) get "Ds." I was the fat kid/last kid-picked-for-dodge ball, so I had no self-worth whatsoever, since it became clear to me, from watching the daily vignettes from LORD OF THE FLIES in public grade school, that a person was deemed worthy based on either their physical prowess (I had none) or their mental prowess (good grades). To be fat AND stupid, well, I should just jump off the roof of the school and be done with it. So I was thoroughly upset, panicked, etc. I talked to my Dad about it, and seeing that it was of a concern to me, we both met with Mrs. Hunt, the teacher, and the culprit seemed to be my lack of understanding of how a battery works. To this day, I remain mechanically uninclined (I've been a competitive fencer for 22 years and still have NO idea how to rewire my electrical weapons, nor do I want to learn), but anyway, I was assured that this poor grade was not the end of the world and if I gave this battery thing another shot, I'd be fine. I did, somehow managed to get my mind around the idea of volts and currents or whatever, and got a better grade. Evidently, it must have had an impact on me as I still remember this 37 years later. I learned that I could "fail," or at least get a bad grade and (1) still have worth (2) still be loved by my parents (3) and that there is, in fact, something I could do about my situation. I think as children, we think that if we make a mistake it is irrevocable, that there's no hope, all is lost, woe is me (at least kids who grew up in the 60s and 70s; today's kids are likely to contact their lawyer and start a class action suit against the teacher who gave them the poor grade, but anyway...). You might say my failure taught me EMPOWERMENT. Like Alfred told Bruce Wayne, "We fall, so we that we learn to pick ourselves up." And there it is...