JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

I’m setting a pattern of assigning blame to someone else. First it was Doc’s fault I burned the soup. Then it’s due to Dave that I didn’t make lunch on time yesterday. Next I should blame our architect for designing a desk in my kitchen so that I developed the habit of checking aggregators while preparing meals.

Yesterday Dave Winer linked to the New York Metro’s article on Lawrence Lessig titled The Choirboy. I don’t know Lawrence Lessig. I’ve never met him although I’ve been in the same room with him. [at BloggerCon III…I might have gone to his session if it hadn’t been opposite mine.] I don’t know him yet at the same time I admire him for his work with copyright law and Creative Commons. His book Free Culture inspired me. Yet after reading the New York Metro article, I feel I know him better and admire him more.

In the piece, Lawrence Lessig revealed he was molested while a child at a boychoir school. The first paragraph read:

As head boy at a legendary choir school, Lawrence Lessig was repeatedly molested by the charismatic choir director, part of a horrific pattern of child abuse there. Now, as one of America’s most famous lawyers, he’s put his own past on trial to make sure such a thing never happens again.

I clicked on the link from Dave’s blog, and as I started through the pages, I ached. I forgot about making lunch, only wanting to finish the article to its final page. Lessig’s story became relevant when he decided to take a case and represent John Hardwicke, another student from the same school who had also been abused by the same man.

I know many people who have been sexually abused. It’s not a fact shared in casual conversation. “How are you?” “Fine. Did you know I was raped as a child?” Sometimes it’s not even whispered between close friends or family members. It’s often a secret kept under lock and key.

Lessig is by nature a shy, intensely private person. The fact of his abuse is known to almost no one: not the reporters covering the case, not the supreme-court justices. The fact of his abuse isn’t even known to Larry Lessig’s parents.

Yet I know from statistics I’ve read and stories I’ve heard that there are many others out there like Lessig and Hardwicke who were abused in both one-time incidents and chronic patterns that lasted years, across generations. Extend the description of abuse in principle to include people who have been dominated, deceived and oppressed by those in authority and power over them, and the circle of those included in the same category widens. I imagine it might include a majority of humanity.

An interesting aspect in the article detailed the difference between the two men, their responses and lives, even though they were both abused by the same man.

Lessig described his perspective:

…For a kid cut off from everyone else in this weird universe, to have the most important person in the world give you love and approval is the greatest thing you can imagine. What else is there?”

Hardwicke’s insight is powerful imagery:

“Within 24 hours after Hardwicke told Samuelson about being raped by the school’s cook, Hardwicke’s mother was killed in a car accident, propelling his paranoia to imponderable heights. His daughter was in the car, too, but she “walked out unscathed,” he says. “And I got to thinking later it was a metaphor for molestation. Some are killed, some are scarred, some are crippled. Others walk out untouched. It all depends where you were sitting in the car.”

When I read stories like John Hardwicke’s and Lawrence Lessig’s, I wonder why abuse has to happen. I wonder where God was. If God exists, why does He allow children to be molested? I have an ideology and theology that can intellectually explain the existence of evil. I could write a thesis and argue it with logic. I’d draw a diagram and point out God’s position: X marks the spot. But it is as I enter into the emotion, as I imagine the reality of repeated rape, as I see the scars and wounds left behind in lives decades later, the warped and twisted wreckage of pedophile sex, I don’t have an easy answer. I’d be lying if I denied the doubt.

One of the memes going through blogs recently is a survey of world view. One of the questions asked is There are no more heroes like there once were. I strongly disagreed. There are plenty of heroes. Lawrence Lessig was a hero of mine before I read the article. Now he’s more of a hero to me. Few people are brave enough to do what he did.

Who is responsible for abuse? From what I understand, that is the question of the law suit. Why won’t the school claim responsibility? Lessig: It’s this failure to take responsibility for what they did that just began to make me furious.”

“It is real,” Hardwicke says. “There’s a snake that was put inside me, and it coils through my intestines and has become mixed up in my whole being.

I’m joking about assigning responsibility of my actions to others, blaming Doc and Dave for my kitchen errors. But I wonder where I can assign the general blame for abuse. Who put the snake inside? Surely, the child is innocent. Is it the pedophile? The larger society? Humanity as a whole? Devil? God?

In the world view survey, I said that I agreed with: In the end there will be a togetherness (or oneness) of all things. I believe there will be a day when all things will be made known. All secrets will be said. All closets opened. On that day, even more stories like Lawrence Lessig’s will be revealed. My heart aches in anticipation. I can only imagine the pain and sorrow, the stories hidden, the raw realities. But I have to imagine too that there will be purpose and explanation, redemption and reason revealed along with the secrets, healing and beauty beyond what I can believe. I have to hope.

In the meantime, there are glimpses of goodness amidst the mess. Sometimes our situations shape us, guide us and make us even better people than we might have been in an easier life.

This thing happened to me,” Lessig says, “and I can see how it changed me. But to be too angry about it would require me to kind of hate myself. Now, there are certain things I did hate about what it did to me: the way I would destroy relationships and the pain I would inflict on people when I did. But there are other parts—the weirdness of me and my relationship to the world. Being deeply reflective about institutions, responsibilities, and my role. Spinning deeply from the age of 14 about issues. And it’s like, well, if this hadn’t happened to me, who would I have been? Maybe I would have gone to work with my dad and run the steel plant and become a Republican congressman from Williamsport. I would have been a totally different person.”

Liza Sabater pointed out her in post that Lawrence Lessig has been a crusader for freedom from oppression:

What Lessig is doing with this case is more than letting loose his demons. He is getting at the core what we do on a daily basis that allows a culture of domination of control to thrive and go unchecked.

As evil as the abuse may have been, it may have made him the hero he is today.

Perhaps another purpose of pain is to bring us out of ourselves and into each other, to let our lives intersect in surprising simple ways that speak of mystery and meaning. As we connect and communicate, as the secrets slither into the sunlight, we know we’re not alone any longer. We find ourselves bound to other human beings with new depth, wiping away one other’s tears with compassion and hope. Thank you, Larry, for your courage to connect us together. Thanks to Dave and to Doc and many others for being a part of the connecting too.

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution linked to a Financial Times article titled To love, honor and overrate. Both the post and the article implied that the two options for married couples are delusion/distortion or divorce:

Psychologists believe that what they are observing in couples who endorse these and similar sentiments are strongly selective memories that ignore inevitable negative events over the course of marital history. Maybe a distorted view of your marriage that emphasises the positive and forgets the negative is crucial to accounting for who stays and who flees when it comes to relationship endurance

[snip]

This series of new psychological studies suggests the real issue in marriages is not the faults you notice in your spouse and try to point out. Rather they suggest that the best therapy for couples is to encourage more deluded thinking.

If you are going to insist on being realistic, then maybe marriage is not for you.

I disagree with the concluding statement by FT’s Raj Persaud that marriage is for those who don’t want to be realistic. Marriage, I would argue, makes one more realistic.

Why have relationships? Are they to satisfy oneself? Or to bring happiness to the other partner?[see Halley’s comment on Sex and the City selfishness] I’m disturbed by the implication in these pieces that we stay married only when we feel satisfied. Is getting married like purchasing a product? Where’s my money-back guarantee?!

But sustaining this belief in the face of partners who sometimes disappoint seems to require a protective buffer, one that is afforded by the perception of special virtues in the partner. Once achieved, Murray argues, this positive bias allows satisfied intimates to dispel potential doubts or reservations almost in advance of their occurrence.

I argue that of course my partner has special virtues. He’s married to me. Anyone who has put up with me for 14 years has to be special.

Relationships require the ability to be realistic. I’m not advocating shoving things under the carpet; that’s destructive. In marriage or any long-term relationship, we become familiar with who we are, if we see accurately. We will disappoint. We may break promises. We won’t be perfect. We’ll fight. We’ll have a crisis. We’ll have to accept that we don’t love the way we want to love. What do we do when we mess up with each other?

Marriage doesn’t mean wearing rose-colored glasses or refusing to see ugly aspects of your partner. I’m sure that if Ted and I wanted to do so, we could each rip the other into shreds with the truth. But we don’t because we know that the dance of marriage is grace.

Through our years together, I’ve seen enough of myself to know I’m a mess. Marriage has revealed my rough spots. Yet Ted still loves me, lives with me, stays with me. He has his faults. I have mine. But I know he’s wonderful. I’m not delusional. Instead I’m someone who has been loved when she didn’t deserve it. When you’ve been loved in a deep way, beyond reason, the automatic response is to love in return with deep passion and gratitude.

Relationships require flexibility. The ability to bend. Relationships must be resilient to stand the test of time, like rubber bands, able to stretch and accommodate changes: for better or for worse, in sickness and in health.

Forgiveness isn’t forgetting. But it is going forward in hope and trust. Perhaps in a sense it is even extending credit into future situations. That’s what love does.

Love may be blind. Love may make you crazy. But marriage doesn’t make you delusional. No, it will break any blindness and leave you groping for grace in the brightness of reality.