Somebody Somewhere (21 page)

I was expected to do frightening things—publicity things—for people who weren't even friends with me. “Why aren't they my friends?” I asked. “It's business, Donna,” said Mrs. Miller. “But why would I do business with people I wasn't friends with?” I wanted to know.

Out came the diagrams and stick figures, scales, connecting lines, and talk bubbles. We moved from emotions to sketching out relationships between people. I saw where words like “friend,” “acquaintance,” and “stranger” fit on a scale. With the concepts neat and labeled, it began to emerge just how much I had taken on faith.

Twenty-seven years too late, I learned that friendship is not given blindly but earned. I began to test the theory in my growing friendship with the Millers and the Mareks. I learned that the answer to the question “Are you my friend?” was not an assurance that people were not going to hurt you.

I learned that real friends didn't just become friends because you asked them if they were and they said yes, or because they wanted to have sex with you, which meant they liked you.

I asked what other signs there were so that I wouldn't have to check all the time if someone was my friend, and somewhere in there I learned about context. But as I learned what I had been blind to, I had to face the degree to which I had been a victim of this context blindness.

“You're invited to a party,” said one of the girls Carol knew. “Tony wants you there.” Carol liked Tony, he had bought her a drink once from the drink machine. He was a friend; she made him laugh.

Carol went to the party—a fourteen-year-old bursting at the seams for acknowledgment of equality and popularity. Once in the door, Carol found she
was
the party. By the time she began to understand, she was gathering her clothes and nursing a black eye and a swollen face. Still, she had
thought it must all have been a mistake. She must have misunderstood. Two hours later, after wandering the streets, Carol returned to the same place again to apologize for whatever mistake she had made that she hadn't understood.

I was angry. I wanted to ban the word “friendship” from the language. I was in a Catch-22. If I accepted what I was learning, I would be able to have a more comprehensible and complete life. But I would have to look back at what had happened to Carol in the name of friendship.

Carol was not the shining picture of survival she had once been. She had been the epitome of the word “victim.” It was time not just to agree to take care of what had once been Carol, but to be angry for that part of my life in order to move forward.

I sat at the end of the row in the corner of English class. With my back against the wall, I felt relatively secure.

Week after week, Joe singled me out. I had no idea why. When it came to picking a scapegoat, I stuck out like the testicles of a bull terrier. It seemed I had some invisible sign on me saying Masochist in Search of Persecutor, Please Apply.

“How's the university,” asked Mr. Miller. I told him the latest chapter in the scapegoat saga. “Where do you sit in the room?” he asked. I had no idea what this had to do with anything but explained the way I stood when approached, where I chose to sit, and how I spent my time on breaks. Mr. Miller stood up and said, “Right. I am Donna Williams.”

In his kitchen, I watched Mr. Miller play “This Is Your Life.” Slowly I came to understand why I had had more than my fair share of being singled out. Without understanding body language in the same way as others do, I had been a walking advertisement for trouble.

I came to see how my version of “wanting my own space and owning myself” was their version of “lonely, in need of company” or “lacks confidence, ego-trippers welcome.” In being friendly I had
sometimes been curious about people's height, age, and the color of their eyes or hair. I had occasionally asked to touch a piece of their clothing (if it was velvet or angora). Their translation was probably “must be on drugs,” “hippie with brain damage,” or “open to being slept with.” I came to realize that when it came to sending out messages I may as well as have been doing this in Swahili with the amount of shared definitions between myself and others.

“Let me explain ‘herd mentality,' ” said Mr. Miller, arranging some objects on the table to show me the concept in action. I saw that these people who found security in the company and support of others were not actually crazy and illogical after all. I looked back on my life and cried. If only. Yet somewhere in all of this I finally learned why people turn to each other for support.

At the university, Joe was as creepy as ever. He had come to symbolize every walking ego problem that had ever had Carol play bedroom games. He stood for the wall that had stopped my accepting the word “friendship,” the new awareness of how people earn real friendships. Outside of the university, I felt a growing urgency to physically attack him. I told my classmate Kerry.

Kerry listened to me talk about how to attack Joe as a symbol of social slime. It was all just theoretical. Nevertheless, the emotions were hugely real. Morality screamed, “At least an eye for a life of lost innocence.” Only logic managed to survive my inner battle. Good old logic reasoned it through. I could not hurt Joe. It simply wouldn't solve anything. Tomorrow there would be a thousand other pieces of walking slime and symbols of my victimization to take his place. Tears came to the rescue.

Tears are empowering. With the writing of
Nobody Nowhere
, tears had been shed for Donna's lost years and for Donna's lostness. Tears now had to be shed for Carol so that those eyes could be full of life and that smile could be real. Then the victim within myself could find strength in the knowledge that she was not dependent upon the fragile protection of others. The victim within myself would find strength in knowing she was in control of how to protect herself.

If there was one fatal blow that could be struck against the population of walking slime, it was this awareness. What had once been Carol became a part of a very real Donna Williams. She was going to go through the rest of life well-armed with insight, self-forgiveness, and empowerment.

O
ne of the most important pieces of ammunition people have for their own self-protection is the ability to ask and the ability to explain. I had gone into training but my training field was one of the most unlikely places to be found. It was with the three children of a Chinese family.

Nancy, the oldest child in the family, answered the door. I had arrived in answer to a request in very broken English on behalf of the businessman father-of-three. The job was to teach his three Chinese children English.

It seemed fairly straightforward. If anyone had analyzed language, I had. I had a huge vocabulary and knew all about sentence structure and phonetics. I had studied linguistics. I was thoroughly committed to learning languages and the value of language in general.

Nancy spoke no more than twenty words of English and her sister and brother spoke even less. This was great. There was no way that these children were going to find out that I had any difficulty with the use of language.

I made Nancy get up and touch the things we named. For every word there had to be a contrast. Floor contrasted with roof, windows with doors, handles with hooks, boxes with bottles.

We identified what everything was made of, tapping and touching everything as we went: wood, metal, plastic, rubber, and concrete. We went through adjectives—“rough” and “smooth,” “dull” and “shiny”—and moved from the names of the objects around us to their descriptions and uses.

We acted out every new verb, spinning and jumping, rolling and
running. All learning was through our bodies, and the walls of the classroom extended beyond the house and into the wider community.

Language progressed to the visual, and the house became filled with books and posters. I relived my fetish for categories, exhausting every branch of each topic. We acted out every sentence. We became the moon and the stars, the stage of a theater, and the opera singers performing there.

We moved to invisible, yet audible nouns and adjectives: “noise,” “rhythm,” “loud,” and “soft.” We drew emotions and put them on scales.

Nancy went from twenty words to hundreds of words and complete sentences in the space of three months. Then she wanted to converse with me.

I was protected within the structure of being the language teacher. I knew how long each session would last. I knew I could say stop or change the topic. Nancy had such a thirst for knowledge and a hunger for company. She wanted me to converse with her not only on the topics we had covered but to talk with her about the changes she was experiencing as a fourteen-year-old going through puberty who had just arrived in a very different new country with a foreign language and culture. In a way, we had many things in common.

Nancy was deep-thinking and deep-feeling and probably the most insightful teenager I had ever met. It was like sitting with Confucius. Somehow I felt destiny had thrown me this job so that I could give Nancy the words so she could teach me their use. I knew loads about speech. She knew loads about language. She spoke slowly enough and with space enough for me to follow her topics. As I helped her put words to her emotions, I learned better to name mine. With the innocence of a child Nancy looked into my eyes and insisted upon sharing them.

Words became no longer mere vehicles of fact collection nor auditory reminders that I was not alone as long as I heard my own voice. Words were no longer weapons or mere tools of insight upon a page. Nancy taught me that words are not merely entertainment in themselves but are put together and shared back and forth as part
of how people grow together. With Nancy I learned to enjoy conversation and how friendship grows, not in spite of language but because of it.

My ability to speak with focus was fueled by my writing and my practice with Nancy. Spoken words became user-friendly. The concept of “language to build walls and use as a strategy to keep people at a distance” found itself face-to-face with its antithesis: the concept of “words to invite people in.”

July 1991

To Theo Marek,

…Talking to Nancy, I can understand why I find it so hard socially communicating. In terms of communication, I have language like a one-hundred-year-old (the best possible), but I have the social communication skills of a badly trained young child. I can talk on many topics but when being social and language come together (with emotions and self intact) they drag my level of functioning way down…

That's it…

      Donna.

“It's been twenty minutes since you've looked at me,” announced Dr. Marek. I glanced up at him obligingly (“the world” ways—play by their rules if you are on their team).

We discussed the rules of how much time between glances is customary and normal for “the world” people. “A few seconds,” said Dr. Marek. I was supposed to make the transition from twenty minutes to a few seconds without putting on characters to do it.

Dr. Marek was “touching” me with his eyes. I was afraid. Other people weren't supposed to be able to do this, according to the laws of “my world.” Dr. Marek was breaking my laws and I felt I was being hurt even though I knew he didn't know the rules. My developing “the world” perception told me this was just feelings because I was being affected. There was an emotional connection happening because enough meaning was getting through. I was taking part in
a dance called eye contact, to which I had come willingly with a self intact. I had to allow the control to be shared. My developing “the world” sense told me this was part of the way out.

Dr. Marek knew I was scared. I had tremors from head to toe, I fidgeted like someone at the dentist, and when I stood up I sometimes swayed on my feet. Damn, all this and emotions, too. Didn't they know there was a “my world” law against being affected by people (you could care mentally all you liked but not be emotionally affected beyond your own control to be). It wasn't going to get easier.