Bad Luck

I realised something the other day. I realised that identities are contiguous parts of our bodies. And that we prefer guilt over bad luck.

This week, in acting class, we were discussing an exercise called the Assumptions Game. In this game, you pair with someone and give them a good looking over and observe the sort of thoughts that cross your mind. Perhaps, "this person is a musician" or "this person is kind" or "this person likes to wake up early" (often the person you are paired with is a complete stranger). Then you take turns to share these assumptions - you look straight at your partner and say "you like to wake up early". Your partner's job is to accept the statement, with a "yes I do" or "yes I am", after which you swap roles. As you can imagine, this exercise can quickly push people out of their comfort zone. In regular life, we self-censor for a reason. The first few things that occur to you are always more psychotic, obscene and offensive than you feel comfortable admitting, even to yourself.

Anyway, in this discussion, I kept referring to the Assumptions Game as the Prejudice Game, named so by my paranoia. While playing, I had felt this constant anxiety, like what if I am really a bigot only masquerading as a decent person. Bigotry is a sure path to ostracism, where I'm from. So I called it the Prejudice Game. For some reason, this seemed to annoy the teacher and eventually he cut me off, if gently, by insisting that I please call it a game of assumption not prejudice. 'Prejudice', he explained, 'would be if I were to say to you something like - if you can afford to live in London without working, then your father must be a dentist'.

That is when it happened. Had I been anywhere else, my brain would have happily just parsed the message and moved on ("prejudice is an offensive assumption, here is an example, you should call the thing by its proper name lest you put others off it" etc). But because I was in acting class, where we are conditioned to pay special attention to our breathing and posture and other physical sensations, I immediately realised I felt, for a moment, genuinely upset. First, I think I must have blushed. Certainly, I tensed, my pulse quickened, I felt an unpleasant lightness in my head and I mumbled in reply something I cannot now remember, which is a classic fight-or-flight response. Next, a cold shiver ran me over and my energy sapped. I had to fight the impulse to slide off the chair and curl up on the floor. For a few moments, I was speechless. Finally, I felt this wave wash over me, a wave of overwhelming sadness, in which were mingled a raw and silent rage and a vague sense of anguish and vexation. All this, in what must have been thirty seconds, if not less. I was astonished. You understand that I was fully aware this was all just conversation and that I was being a bit of a fool and that no harm had been intended. Yet a certain part of my brain had reacted to this simple, off-the-cuff remark the same way you might expect a two-year-old to react if you slapped it. I was so intrigued that I spent the next hour analysing this. And here is what I realised.

First, that I had reacted to having my identity threatened the same way I might have reacted to an actual physical threat. That is, what had in fact been upsetting had not been the put-down (which I fully deserved), but the notion, the illustrative example notion you understand, that I was living off my parents. I cannot emphasise enough how crazy this is. Turns out that being a strong independent woman is a core feature of my identity and that to have someone question it, even in jest, is wired to send an atavic part of my psyche into anguish. The fight-or-flight reflex proves it. What is more, under normal circumstances, I would have had no awareness of any of this. None at all. The higher faculties of my brain would have censored the initial reaction, on account of being completely crazy, and would have put in its place something more appropriate. But, returning to my metaphor that being human is like trying to get a full pint through a bustling crowd, at some level, splash splash. Identities are contiguous parts of our bodies!

Second, that it hurts to be misconstrued. It would have bothered me less, or not at all, had the thing been true. The real injury was being misjudged. Is that not fascinating? I mean, why? I searched my memories and concluded that this is always the case, I am always more upset at being rejected or put down because of a misunderstanding than an actual character flaw. Partly, because a misconstrual is to an identity what an injury is to a physical body. But partly, because I can forgive myself for being an idiot, whereas a misunderstanding is bad luck. And how do you forgive bad luck?!

There is something about bad luck that is utterly intolerable. I don't know what it is, but humans seem to be hysterically antagonistic to the idea of bad luck. We would rather feel guilty than unlucky and certainly we would rather feel guilty than unfree. The illusion of free will might be causing us to be angry all the time - at others as well as ourselves - but better that than to feel like a powerless "moist robot". I think this must be, at least in part, why even unsuccessful people seem to prefer to imagine that successful people deserve to be where they are. I find that fascinating.