How to be Human: Andrew Solomon on the Meaning of Difference

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How to be Human: Andrew Solomon on the Meaning of Difference

Have you ever seen a movie, heard a song, or read a book and thought, This is the work I meant to make?

That’s how I feel about every book, article, or essay written by the National Book Award-winning author of Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, Andrew Solomon.

His work has served as my mentor.

Somehow, Solomon manages to encapsulate the themes and theories, the feelings and ideas that have lived inside me without proper articulation my entire life. Don’t get me wrong, I have TRIED to articulate these notions, but no one does it better, or with more concision, than Sir Solomon.

Noonday Demon and Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity are back-to-back classics. The introduction in my copy of Far From the Tree is so heavily highlighted it’s added an extra half-pound to the book.

What particularly resonated for me was Solomon’s argument in the introduction to Far From the Tree, in which he explains that although we can reproduce an inanimate object, when it comes to babies, “there is no such thing as reproduction.”

“When we make a baby,” he writes, “we do not make ourselves as a baby as much as we have deluded ourselves into believing otherwise.”

How often do we forget that our children are not us?

We are raised to follow the mold of our parents, of adhering to their values and beliefs, because we were raised with the mistaken notion that their governing beliefs would naturally become ours.

But what happens when we are born in such a way that our physical appearance alone belies the assumed facts our parents had for us?

Why is it so difficult to accept differences in our children?

Perhaps, as Solomon so eloquently writes in Far From the Tree, it’s because :

When our children are born with identities that do not resemble ours, when their preferences or abilities are foreign and unshared by their parents, and whose traits can only be found in groups outside their families, they live in horizontal identities.

Identities that are familiar to parents and professionals are considered vertical. These identities are reinforced, highlighted, respected, and accepted. Vertical identities are passed down through genes and the environment.

They embody attributes like ethnicity, skin color, and language. Being born straight to straight parents is a vertical identity. Being born gay to straight parents is a horizontal identity.

And those born into horizontal identities are often subject to impulses that begin and end as perceived deficits their parents endeavor to fix.

Physical disability is a horizontal identity, and so are genius, homosexuality, autism, psychopathy, and learning differences.

I would add that there are also identities that may not be technically horizontal but for whom the parents rush to remedy perceived deficits, leading the child to feel horizontal.

I am one such person.

My perceived difference was a failure to match my peers academically, physically, and emotionally—all consequences of a panic disorder.

From when I was an infant until I was 25 years old, I had panic attacks that went unnamed and untreated, but whose symptoms led the adults in my life to believe I needed to be fixed.

I did not do well in school; I performed exceptionally poorly on standardized tests. And because of these failures to be as studious as my parents had been, to do well on tests, and glow in the face of academia, I was sent on an odyssey of more standardized testing to identify and “correct” the learning struggles that besieged me.

My root issue was panic disorder, which affects behavior and learning, and often it’s the symptoms that become the focus, leaving the underlying issues unaddressed and exacerbated. We often try to fix what we can see and ignore what we can’t.

When you suffer from panic attacks from such a young age, you do not grow like other children—I was also physically tinier than everyone in my class and the two grades below. I was slow to grow in inches, I was slow to grow in pounds. My differences were measured and weighed, plotted, charted, and classified.

The doctors considered growth hormones and leg extension therapy. When I learned they gave these hormones to horses, I was a firm NO. I was happy to be tiny so long as I didn’t have to take horse pills or get my legs surgically elongated.

Only, I did not feel that others were comfortable with me saying who and how I was.

My learning issues stemmed from panic attacks, not intellectual disabilities, and yet, I was repeatedly told that I was a “slow learner.” I didn’t learn like the other kids and needed tutors and extra help to do what others could do more easily. I was raised in an atmosphere that told me who I was wasn’t “normal.” And that required an intervention.

As Solomon says in Far From the Tree:

For nearly my entire existence, I have believed, with everything I have, that I am not intelligent. I am still utterly amazed whenever someone tells me I am smart. In the past few years, I’ve slowly begun to accept that I might be as capable as my incredibly bright and intellectually prosperous friends.

Those with horizontal identities (and I would consider myself to be horizontal-adjacent, are often the object of parents’ impulse to correct and fix).

For those born with identities that challenge conventional “vertical” notions of normalcy, professionals and parents alike confer the word “illness.” But is identity an illness? And who has the right to deem something “wrong” simply because it differs from what is common? Or because it feels “alien”?

This is not to say that we should not help our infants or get medical attention and care for our children who have differences that make their lives less livable.

The question is, though: Who decides what is acceptable and what isn’t? Who decides what is an identity and an illness, and who decides that someone is not suitable because we don’t understand them?

When a child is born with a horizontal identity, most parents rush to address the perceived “abnormality.” Parents worry for the horizontally identified child in a vertically identified world. Instead of fixing the world to fit the child, we often work to fix the child to fit the world.

We do this to make life easier for the child, but at the same time, we also do this to make life easier for us as parents. So many of us are affronted by the identities that belie our assumptions of who we are and how we identify.

Parents often misapprehend a child’s horizontal identity as a truth about themselves they’d rather not know. But, instead of accepting that truth or learning and gaining knowledge about that horizontal identity and accepting that it isn’t a reflection of our identities, we work to change the child so that we are comfortable in society’s flawed agreement about who counts and who doesn’t, so that we glow in our child’s reflected glory, instead of crack in the refracted lens.

We raise our children to imitate us, hoping—even assuming—that they will live according to our standards and beliefs and choose us as their template to build their lives so that we feel valid and worthy and, well, right.

Yet, if we are to continue along this line, fixing what perhaps doesn’t need fixing, then what are we doing but eliminating identities simply because we confer they have less value? When we consider identities that don’t match ours as different, we invalidate them as legitimate identities.

Why is being deaf an illness instead of an identity? Why can’t being deaf be an identity that requires no fixing but demands society opens itself to a larger embrace?

When we look upon our children as different—as other—we are not seeing them for who they are, only for whom they are not. We are expected, by other parents, teachers, or doctors, to correct our children, to “normalize” them, and eradicate their differences.

But if we live in a world of sameness, where is originality, art, culture, genius, invention, and celebration?

Instead of fixing what we deem incorrect, perhaps we should be curious and go toward our children’s specific experiences and learn what it means for them and society. We must learn how to speak the language our children speak so that we can work to make a more inclusive society, to accommodate differences instead of erasing them.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about these ideas in the comments! And if you’ve read the book, please weigh in!

Until next week, I remain…

Amanda

About me: I am an author and a mental health advocate. I’ve published 13 books, most recently Little Panic: Dispatches From An Anxious Life. I sit on the advisory board of Bring Change to Mind and live in Brooklyn with my dog, Busy.