When I was a child, I used to cry on my birthday. When the assembled guests launched into the familiar song with words that are more or less the same in every family I know, I would burst into tears as the cake with its candles was brought towards me.
I couldn’t bear being the centre of attention, the bright eyes all focusing on me, the collective emotion.
This had nothing to do with the genuine pleasure I experienced at a celebration in my honour. It didn’t in any way spoil my delight at receiving presents, but there occurred at that precise moment a sort of feedback loop, as though in response to the collective noise produced on my account I could only make another, even shriller noise, at an inaudible and disastrous frequency. I don’t know until what age this went on (the anticipation, tension, joy, and then me, in front of everyone, suddenly sniffly and distraught), but I have a precise memory of the feeling that used to overwhelm me at ‘our sincerest wishes, and may these candles bring you happiness’, and the desire to immediately disappear. Once – I must have been eight – I did run away.
At the time when birthdays were celebrated in class (at nursery school), I remember my mother having to write a note to the teacher to ask her to ignore mine. She read the note aloud for my information, then slipped it into the envelope. The word ‘emotional’, which I didn’t understand, appeared in it. I didn’t dare ask her, aware that writing to the teacher was already something exceptional, an effort, which had the aim of obtaining from her something equally unusual, a privilege, a special dispensation. In fact, for a long time I believed that the word ‘emotional’ had something to do with the size of an individual’s vocabulary. I was emotional, and lacked the words to express myself, which appeared to explain my incompetence at celebrating my birthday in company. So it seemed to me that in order to live in society you had to arm yourself with words, not be reticent about accumulating them, diversifying, grasping their tiniest nuances. The vocabulary thus acquired would through time form a breastplate, thick and fibrous, which would enable you to operate in the world, alert and confident. But there were still so many words I didn’t know.
Later, at primary school, when I had to fill in the registration card at the start of the year, I continued to cheat when it came to my date of birth, shifting it by a few months to the middle of the summer holidays, just to be on the safe side.
Similarly, in the school canteen or at friends’ houses (until quite an advanced age), I several times swallowed or hid the lucky charm that I was alarmed to find in my slice of Epiphany cake. I found it impossible to declare my victory and be the general focus of attention even for a few seconds, let alone several minutes. I’d pass up lottery wins, crumpling my ticket or ripping it up when it was time to claim the prize, even going so far as to pass up a voucher for Galeries Lafayette worth a hundred francs at the end of my last year in primary school. I remember gauging how far I was from the podium – I would have had to get there without stumbling, looking natural and relaxed, then climb a few steps and probably thank the headmistress – and concluded it wasn’t worth it.
Being the centre of attention, even for a moment, tolerating being looked at by several people at once, was quite simply unthinkable.
I was very shy as a child and young girl but, for as long as I can remember, this handicap revealed itself especially when faced with a group (that is, when I had to deal with more than three or four people at once). The classroom in particular was the first manifestation of a collective phenomenon that has never ceased to terrify me. Until the end of my schooldays, I was incapable of sleeping the night before I had to do a recitation or make a presentation, and I shall pass over in silence the avoidance strategies I’ve developed over the years in an effort to avoid all public speaking.
By contrast, from a very young age, I seem to have been at ease in face-to-face situations, one-to-ones, and to possess a genuine ability to meet the Other, as soon as that Other takes the form of an individual rather than a group, to link myself to him or her. Wherever I have visited or settled, I’ve always found individuals with whom I can play, talk, laugh, dream; wherever I’ve been, I’ve made friends and formed lasting bonds, as though I grasped early on that that was where my emotional protection was to be found. Until I met L.