CHAPTER 13

Kryptonite

I was determined to get away, to be a person and not a charity or a problem. I knew I wasn’t bad-looking and that I could pass.

—Nella Larsen, Passing

In 1989, playwright David Mamet published a book of essays titled Some Freaks. At the very end is a spare five-page composition, “Kryptonite,” that makes an outsize claim: Superman is a sham. “Far from being invulnerable,” Mamet argues about the Man of Steel, “Superman is the most vulnerable of beings because his childhood was destroyed.”

Comic-book readers and nonreaders alike know Superman’s origins. He was rocketed to Earth just moments before his home planet, Krypton, explodes. An orphan and an alien, he is a superman with superpowers but also one with an inalterable weakness: An ore called kryptonite, likely from a meteor from Krypton, can sap him of his superstrength. “And what is Kryptonite?” Mamet asks. “Kryptonite is all that remains of his childhood home. It is the remnants of that destroyed childhood home, and the fear of those remnants, which rule Superman’s life.” Because of this, Mamet concludes, “There is no hope for him but constant hiding, and prayer that his enemies will not learn his true identity. No amount of good works can protect him.” Superman is doomed to, in Mamet’s words, “adulation without intimacy.”

Superman is faster than a speeding bullet yet he can never quite outrun his past.

With “Kryptonite,” Mamet describes the lonely terror that resides not just in the heart of Superman but in the hearts of many supernormals as well. As much of their success has depended upon their rocketing themselves away from their untenable childhoods—separating themselves emotionally or physically from their early adversities—supernormals often live in fear of colliding with the past. Their kryptonite comes in the form of phone calls, traumatic reminders, chance encounters, family holidays, or other toxic intrusions that have the power to do them in. Of course, it is common for most adults to have trouble going home again, in one form or another, as they are irked by being treated like the children they once were or by being reminded of a more helpless time. For many supernormals, though, the past can be triggering at best and annihilating at worst.

So, like Superman, some supernormals live in a vulnerable present. Feeling like aliens or orphans themselves, they may go through their days like outsiders in a world where they suspect they can never truly belong. They walk among friends and co-workers and even lovers who perhaps do not truly know them, or who may never be able to understand them. They build the best lives they can only to worry that good things will not last. Every day they wonder if today will be the day that a piece of the past will come back and ruin everything.

Calvin was, as far as he knew, the only person in law school who could sail through torts yet not point to every continent on the globe. This was because, before college, he had never been to school. Somewhere along the way, he settled on telling people he had been homeschooled as a child, but that was not really true, Calvin said, “because that would imply some schooling actually happened.”

Calvin’s father was a controlling and suspicious man who believed that popular culture would ruin his children. He saw it every day, he said, at the community college where he taught, and for this purported reason neither Calvin nor his sisters were allowed to attend school. Instead, they lived an isolated and rural existence in central California in a house with locks and bells on the doors so the children could be monitored with ease. They were left at home with a mother for whom English was a third language. None of the children knew what she thought about the rules her husband laid down because she said very little and spoke her mind not at all.

Calvin was one of the countless—or, more accurately, uncountable—adults who grew up with an adversity that could not be named. Although keeping a child isolated in his home is a form of emotional abuse, and not sending a child to school is a form of neglect, why a parent would impose such restrictions, or what exactly was the matter with Calvin’s father, no one would ever quite know. As a result, there were no categories or statistics to help Calvin make sense of the life that he lived. Over time, though, Calvin read enough in books or saw enough on trips to stores to know that his family was not like other families. He knew that his life was, as he put it simply, “not normal.”

More than anything else, Calvin wanted to be like other kids and go to school, and every August he begged. “You can’t start school in the middle,” went his father’s annual retort. “You have no records so you don’t exist.” Calvin could read, though, and by the time he was a teen he was grading his father’s students’ papers. He knew a great deal about some subjects, such as government and US history, and nothing about others, like geography and algebra.

As Calvin got older, to keep a better eye on him, Calvin’s father began to take him to work. Walking down the noisy halls with his father, Calvin stared at the students who moved loudly and unself-consciously in powerful, carefree streams. Watching them, Calvin felt like a foreigner longing to defect. He imagined that, at any time, he might just fall in line with the students he saw, the very thing his father feared the most. When a banner appeared outside the college that said FIRST COURSE FREE!, Calvin convinced his father to let him sign up. Perhaps precisely because the class was free, or because his father worked at the school, there was little paperwork and not a single question about his previous schooling. Calvin had squeezed into school through a crack in the system, and soon under the watchful eye of his father he was taking more classes. The man did not know it, but Calvin was researching four-year universities and the emancipation process, too.

The public university system in California is a prestigious one, and Calvin set his mind on going there, because after a lifetime of not existing, to use his father’s phrase, Calvin wanted a degree from a school that people would recognize. He wanted a pedigree. He wanted a name. By then, he was over eighteen but under twenty-four so—unless he got married or joined the armed forces—to receive tuition assistance he would need a letter from someone who could attest to his financial independence. Calvin knocked on the door of one of his community college professors. After years of secrecy, he was prepared to tell all.

“Can I close your door?” he asked on the threshold of this professor’s office, his voice and hands shaking, rattled by what he had come to do. Once inside, Calvin began by spilling his father’s strange objections to popular culture, and then he moved on to his desperate need for someone to vouch for him. Of course he would help, the professor agreed readily, so Calvin stopped short of confessing that he had never so much as seen the inside of a kindergarten. Being one or two smart moves away from a four-year university was no time to come clean about all that.

Calvin ran away to attend one of those big prestigious California universities he had dreamed of, and once there, he lived under an assumed identity, by which I mean he took cover beneath the assumptions that other people made about him. He rented a room in a house with other students, and he put his belongings away quickly, for he did not have many. Then he placed some posters on the walls of his room, like false advertisements for a heretofore typical life. Hoping to be caught in the act of doing something normal, Calvin sat intentionally but nonchalantly on the floor of the den and leafed through a magazine again and again, as his housemates came and went. He seemed so relaxed and cool no one would have guessed that, other than the siblings he had left back home, he had never had a friend before.

In college, Calvin did just as he had always dreamed. He fell in with the streams of students who wound their way around campus and with the clusters of coeds who formed study groups and service clubs. Calvin did not lie about his past so much as he left out the parts about his father and about school. No one would have guessed that Calvin had never taken the SAT or been on a school bus or learned his multiplication tables, and no would one have guessed that, because Calvin had betrayed him, his father had told him to never, ever come home again.

“I learned to dodge and deflect when people talked about television shows or birthday parties, things I never saw as a kid. A lot of other things just never came up. People take for granted that if you are where they are in life, then you’ve had the same life,” Calvin said with an honest shrug. “Everybody assumed I was normal.”

Calvin was doing what is called passing. He was allowing himself to be mistaken, if not for someone other than he was, then for someone who had lived a life different from the one he had lived. This particular meaning of the word passing emerged between the late 1800s and the early 1900s in reference to racial passing, most commonly when light-skinned blacks were able to pass for whites. Although passing happened every day, it was supposed to be hidden and it depended upon secrecy, so as a phenomenon it was taken up most candidly in film or fiction. James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man or Nella Larsen’s Passing, for example, both tell the tales of racially ambiguous black folk who move to the big city where they are able to pass for white. Once there, they make white friends, marry white spouses, and pray to have white children, lest their racial heritage be exposed. Immersed in white culture far away from the black communities and customs on which they were raised, for Johnson’s and Larsen’s protagonists there is no turning back. Indeed, historian Allyson Hobbs calls racial passing “a chosen exile” in that one separates oneself, usually willingly, from the only family and friends and land one knows, ultimately unable to go home again.

In the 1960s, sociologist Erving Goffman broadened the application of the term passing, defining it as the management of a dangerous identity of any kind, usually in order to avoid being discovered as different. The chronically ill may pass for being physically healthy to avoid special, and limiting, treatment at work. Criminal offenders may pass for those without police records to engineer a new start in a new place. The mentally ill may pass for being well to avoid discrimination. Gay men and women may pass for being straight so as to protect themselves from prejudice and violence.

For those with different or dangerous identities, Goffman recognized, there are no good choices. They may disclose their status and face the pubic consequences and social problems that follow, or they may keep their secrets and closely guard themselves and their personal information instead. “Because of the great rewards in being considered normal,” Goffman wrote, “almost all persons who are in a position to pass will do so on some occasion.”

At about the same time that Goffman was writing about managing different and dangerous identities, Holocaust survivors were struggling with how to handle their different and dangerous experiences as well. It may be difficult to imagine now, but in the decades just after World War II the full horrors of Nazi genocide were not widely understood and had not yet even been labeled “the Holocaust.” As a result, refugees and survivors who arrived in the United States after Hitler’s defeat—about 150,000 of them, mostly between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five—were unsure of how to talk about what they had endured and who around them might understand. Jews and survivors reported passing as the unaffected in order to sidestep painful memories and the uncomfortable reactions of others. “As far as they knew I came from France,” said one woman who scarcely spoke of the war even with the man she would go on to marry.

Another young woman, who had a serial number tattooed on her arm at Auschwitz, told other young people she met it was her phone number. “Nobody talked about it” was the consensus, because all that had happened was too horrible, too sad, and too complicated, and because even those who did want to give voice to their own lives were often encouraged to keep quiet. In her memoir of girlhood during the Holocaust, Still Alive, survivor Ruth Klüger remembers being told by an aunt to erase what had happened “like chalk from a blackboard.” It certainly was not as simple as that but as writer Eva Hoffman says, for many reasons and in many ways, “The survivors kept silent. They passed for normal.”

Passing for normal is what some supernormals, like Calvin, do as well. The sons and daughters of alcoholics play in the neighborhood and act as if their mothers or fathers are just fine. The brothers and sisters of mentally ill siblings go to school and pretend all is well at home. Abused children change their clothes away from others so no one will see their bruises, and neglected ones do the same so no one will see their dirty undergarments. Teenagers who live in poverty and who have no money for lunch sit in the cafeteria and say they are just not hungry. One way or another, supernormals fall in with the unsuspecting, and it is easier than one might think. That was the thing about fortunate people, Calvin noticed: They assume that everyone they know is just like them.

Like the infamous “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law, which prohibited openly gay men and women from serving in the military—and explicitly directed them to pass—passing of any kind requires, says psychoanalyst Kimberlyn Leary, “on the one side, a subject who doesn’t tell and, on the other, an audience who fails to ask.” And audiences generally fail to ask. Most likely this is because, to many, the very notion that differences or dangers are common and all around is inconceivable. Indeed, in the years after the Emancipation, so many light-skinned blacks were able to live among whites because, wrote historian Allyson Hobbs, “no one ever asked if [they] were black; the question was unthinkable.”

Likewise, on the college campus where Calvin strolled from class to class and leapt from the dean’s list to law school, it seemed unthinkable to those who knew him that he had grown up as strangely as he had. Of course he would never be quizzed about whether he had been to the third grade or had ever learned his continents; such inquiries would be as outlandish as Calvin’s upbringing itself. No, Calvin was safe from being asked such things directly, and he could have prepared for questions like those anyway. What Calvin feared the most was what he could not see coming. He lived every day with the terror that, like a meteor spiked with kryptonite, one small piece of his past was going to come crashing into his present. Somehow, someway, someone was going to find him out.

In his memoir of drug addiction, recovery, and redemption, Night of the Gun, New York Times columnist David Carr ends his story this way: “I now inhabit a life I don’t deserve, but we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn’t end soon.” This was just how Calvin felt. There may have been no other student who was more thankful to be sitting in a lecture hall and sporting a law school T-shirt, like a highly visible identification card that proved he belonged. His casual dress in no way indicated that his day-to-day existence felt anything but relaxed.

Because Calvin was passing, there were, as Nella Larsen described in her novel of the same name, “perils, not known, or imagined, by others who had no such secrets to alarm or endanger them.” For supernormals who pass, the past may be out of sight but it often is not out of mind. In fact, keeping secrets requires a great deal of mental work. Moment-to-moment, spontaneous thoughts and feelings must be suppressed, or at least edited to match what others expect to hear. Palatable life stories must be imagined, presented, and kept straight. Accidental encounters with the past must be avoided or diffused. Uncomfortable subjects must be dodged or subtly shifted. Sparse generalities must pass for adequate information. Every word and every action must be monitored and scrubbed of contradictions. Trading one kind of vigilance for another, Calvin had shifted from looking out for ways to escape his past to looking out for ways that his past might catch up to him. This meant that not only was his past different from that of those around him, but his present was, too.

Anyone who passes, wrote Goffman in Stigma, “must be alive to the social situation as a scanner of possibilities, and is therefore likely to be alienated from the simpler world in which those around him apparently dwell.” Relationships must be deftly handled, as the supernormal weigh the consequences of minute but consequential decisions: “to display or not display; to tell or not to tell; to let on or not to let on; to lie or not to lie; and in each case, to whom, how, when and where,” as Goffman said. If that sounds exhausting, it is. Keeping secrets is cognitively and even physically taxing, chronically straining our bodies and minds. Calvin’s past might not truly destroy him, as he sometimes feared—life is rarely that black-and-white—but like kryptonite, it zapped him of his strength when it felt too near.

No one knew how much Calvin did in secret. To speak to his mother and his sisters on the phone, he waited until his housemates were out so no one would hear if his father hung up on the call, or no one would see if Calvin became angry or began to cry. He checked and rechecked his bank account and his grade point average, terrified that one or both might fall below a workable number. He visited and revisited the financial aid office to renew and increase his loans and grants, which, as only students with loans and grants would understand, were never enough. He avoided students who hailed from his hometown, and he felt guilty about how much he hated them and their innocent but dangerous questions, like “Where did you go to high school?” When classmates went home for holidays, Calvin pretended to do the same but instead drove to the desert, where he camped out alone save for the coyotes that howled into the big open spaces at night. “Everyday life was so much work,” Calvin recalls. “I just needed a break from being me.”

Because they have secrets, the supernormal who pass build their lives on top of lies of omission. They inhabit what feel like double, even triple, lives, with disconnects between who they used to be and who they are now, between where they came from and where they live today, between who they are at work and who they are at home, between who they are with family and who they are with friends, between what they say on the outside and what they feel on the inside. Many supernormals manage so much dissonance that nothing about their lives may ring true to themselves. “Have I made this all up?” they may wonder both about their successes and about the problems they fled. They may feel like fakes and impostors and cheats and pretenders, frauds who must be passing not only for people who have had normal and good lives but also for people who are normal and good themselves.

Passing may spare us the experience of being told we are bad, but it leaves us with the sneaking suspicion that we are doing something terribly wrong. To psychoanalyst Carl Jung, “every personal secret has the effect of sin or guilt” and, indeed, we tend to interpret secrets as inherently blameworthy. In one empirical study about how we think about our own secrets, participants were given ambiguous information about their performance on a task. Those who were required to conceal the information felt worse about how they did, and even about themselves, than did those who were instructed to tell another about how things had gone. That is, when we are not sure what to make of something that has happened in our lives, the very act of keeping it secret is seen as indicative of its badness, and of our own.

After graduation, when he applied for admission to the bar, Calvin was unsure of what exactly he was required to disclose. He had no criminal record, and no untreated mental disorders or substance abuse problems, but academic misconduct, false statements, and misrepresentation were frowned upon, too, and by his own estimation Calvin misrepresented himself almost every minute of every day.

A law degree might look like a flimsy piece of parchment, but to Calvin it was like a big piece of armor. It was a shiny shield that deflected questions about his past and protected him as he raced into the years ahead, changed cities, and was awarded a sought-after job as a public prosecutor. “Conversations only go so far back,” he observed.

Calvin had won the battle for a bona fide existence, at least on paper. His résumé was impressive, and his assumed identity was too. More than ever, people assumed a great deal about who Calvin was. They took for granted that he was smart and hardworking, which was true, but Calvin was so successful that people also took for granted that he had had a charmed life, which was not true. This was a new bind for Calvin: As much as he had always wanted to be taken for normal, he resented being mistaken for privileged. Calvin had fought hard to be where he was, but strangely, where he was felt like nowhere. “It is like there is a box for people who are fortunate and successful, and there is a box for people who are unfortunate and unsuccessful, but there is no box for me. I don’t fit anywhere.”

This had been all but proven on one occasion in law school when Calvin divulged some of his background to a friend, a man who reacted with clumsy surprise. “Wow, I would not have been able to tell,” he marveled, like there should have been some sort of sign. Then he looked for some tidy reason that Calvin’s father had acted as he did: “Is he religious?” (No.) And he looked for a clear-cut, more identifiable adversity: “Did he sexually abuse you?” (No.) And he looked for a neat explanation for how Calvin had turned out as well as he had: “Did you have some great mentor or something?” (No.) Not wanting to be a puzzle or a rarity—and exhausted by the prospect of needing to help people understand how someone like Calvin could even come to be—he told few people about his life at all.

Calvin had come such a very long way, but he could not get away from how his life had begun. No matter how much he did with his present, he could not change his past. Because of this, he felt like an unwelcome outsider most of the time, and although that might sound like an insecurity that resided entirely within Calvin, supernormals who pass know better. As someone who was passing for normal, Calvin was privy to the unkind things people said about those whose lives unfolded in ways that seemed other than average and expectable. He heard what his colleagues said about the criminals—and their “fucked-up families,” as they were often called—whom they worked with every day. This is one of the most painful and alienating truths of someone who passes. “It is not that he must face prejudice against himself,” wrote Goffman in Stigma, “but rather that he must face unwitting acceptance of himself by individuals who are prejudiced against persons of the kind he can be revealed to be.” Or in Calvin’s more accessible words: “People don’t know it, but they insult you to your face.”

“I am solitary,” wrote psychoanalyst Carl Jung, “because I know things and I must hint at things which other people do not know, and usually do not even want to know.” And with that, Jung puts forth what is perhaps passing’s greatest burden of all: isolation. Without a doubt, distancing oneself from a difficult or dangerous past conveys many benefits, most notably a new life. As he once dreamed of doing, Calvin had stepped into the flow of people his age who were leading so-called normal lives. He was passing, and quite well. But to truly understand passing is to understand not just the exhaustion and the fear of being found out that results, but the loneliness, too. “Not close to a single soul,” wrote Nella Larsen. “Never anyone to really talk to.”

Calvin sometimes felt like the loneliest person in the world. He knew that sounded self-pitying or self-indulgent, and that it could not factually be correct, but he felt it all the same. He had the strange sense that, even after all this time, he had never once had a friend. Calvin did have friends, of course, and boyfriends and colleagues, too. “But they did not know my secrets,” Calvin said, “so they never really knew that they never really knew me.” Secrets separated him from everyone around so, no matter who he was with, he felt surrounded by strangers. When others looked at Calvin, they saw a capable, affable, well-regarded professional, but like David Mamet wrote about Superman, Calvin felt doomed to “adulation without intimacy.”

At the end of each day, Calvin went home to his apartment where he could close the door on the rest of the world. In doing so, ironically, he was not as alone as he thought. In his memoir, Charles Blow remembers an abandoned house where he played after his sexual abuse, calling it his “Fortress of Solitude, like Superman’s retreat… There in that house I stopped running from loneliness and embraced it. Loneliness became my truest and dearest friend, a friend who would shadow me for a lifetime.” And in his memoir, President Barack Obama remembers solitude as “the safest place I knew.”

Calvin kept his secrets and his distance to keep himself safe, too—to protect himself from losing friends and jobs—yet loneliness and isolation have their own ways of putting us at risk. One longitudinal study that followed a cohort of more than a thousand children from birth to young adulthood found that social isolation in early life was associated with poor health in one’s twenties. And loneliness can be a chronic and cumulative stressor at any age, one that can raise blood pressure, elevate levels of stress hormones, increase symptoms of depression and thoughts of suicide, and compromise the immune system. Data from dozens of studies including hundreds of thousands of participants point to loneliness as a major risk factor for ill health and even death. Chronic isolation is deemed more harmful to our well-being than many well-known risk factors such as physical inactivity and obesity, and has been hailed as just as bad for our health as smoking. “One of the greatest diseases,” said Mother Teresa, “is to be nobody to anybody.”

Yet as Calvin described, combating loneliness is more complicated than just living with, or gathering with, other people. Loneliness is perceived social isolation from others, or the seeming unavailability of others, rather than objective social isolation. So many supernormals who pass feel disconnected from others even when—and sometimes especially when—they are surrounded by family and friends. They may feel most isolated sitting across the table from family members who have not been able to love or protect them. They may feel most lonely in a crowd of friends because it is there they are reminded that no one really knows who they are, that they are truly on their own.

“What I felt at almost every stage of my development was lonely,” said Oprah Winfrey about her early life. “Not alone—because there were always people around—but I knew that my soul’s survival depended on me. I felt I would have to fend for myself.” Winfrey did indeed fend for herself, throughout a childhood and adolescence marked by sexual abuse and consequent promiscuity, by way of secrets and passing. After a teen pregnancy, Winfrey delivered a baby who died in the hospital, and recounting this, she said, “I went back to school and told no one. My fear was that if I were found out I would be expelled. So I carried the secret into my future, always afraid that if anyone discovered what happened, they, too, would expel me from their lives.”

Calvin had a very different secret but one that he, too, once feared would result in his being expelled from school and from other people’s lives. Now armed with two degrees—real achievements and true pieces of his identity that no one could take away—Calvin felt he could take more risks. He could try again to tell some people about his past. “It started with my friends. A fair number of them were gay,” he said. “I was open about being gay long before I was open about the way I grew up. It seemed easier, like being gay was something people could understand. Not that being gay is easy, but that was the point. We could connect about feeling like outsiders, about feeling scared. I watched how people responded to that, to my being gay, and depending on how that went, I came out—to some people—about my other secrets. How my dad was, how I never went to school. A lot of them had big family problems or whatever too. Of course. I don’t know why I thought I was the only one. I guess because I figured no one had a story quite like mine, which is probably true. But now I look around when I’m out in public—a restaurant, wherever—and I imagine how many people might be sitting there with secrets. I think it must be a lot.”

Indeed, there were other people who could understand Calvin, but for so long he had not recognized them, for they were passing, too.