Notes to John

by Joan Didion

I realized that I had a very closely calibrated idea of my physical well being, very fearful of losing control, that my personality was organized around a certain level of mobilization or anxiety.

You grew up, for whatever reason, expecting the worst to happen. You don’t expect good things to happen. You somehow grew up without the gene for denial.”

I want to tell the whole world I’m sorry and I don’t know for what. And it can’t be done, of course.”

It’s the expectations that are unstated – they can never ever be met, because they can never really be known. There’s always the possibility of some greater expectation.”

I said a friend had once remarked that while most people she knew had very strong competent exteriors and were bowls of jelly inside, I was just the opposite.

It’s the way Protestants bring up children. In the interests of promoting modesty in children – a Christian virtue – they massacre self-esteem. It’s always the child’s fault. Because if it wasn’t the child’s fault it would be their fault. Everything has to be somebody’s fault in this scheme. There are no accidents. When I hurt my leg this winter, naturally I blamed myself. I was talking about it to a colleague one day, another psychiatrist, a Jew. And he looked at me and said ‘You guys really won’t let yourselves believe in accidents, will you.’ It’s a way of bringing up children that can only end in one of two ways, rebellion – that’s the usual way – or overdependence. And when you match an over-dependent grown child against an overprotective parent, you reach a kind of stalemate.”

I said one reading in particular had struck me. It was a part of the Gospel I had always disliked intensely – the part about “consider the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin” – which had always seemed to me to undermine everything that made the world as I understood it work.

“Adoption is just a metaphor here. You don’t have to literally believe yourself adopted to feel not part of a family. Many people feel at some point that other parents might have loved them more, appreciated them more. There’s a deep reason for the persistence of the changeling myth. Every little child is surrounded by family members pointing out his or her resemblance to this side or that side of the family. Her mother’s eyes, her father’s temper, all that. No child can hear that and not wonder at some level, well, what if I didn’t look like them? Would they still keep me?”