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Kristen’s nervous too
, she reported.
Renée’s mom says she’s scared the night
before a competition
. But I knew Kristen and Renée well, and I was
certain that they weren’t as frightened as I was.
I think it might have helped if I’d understood myself better back then.
If you’re the parent of a would-be figure skater, help her to accept that
she has heavy-duty jitters without giving her the idea that they’re fatal
to success. What she’s most afraid of is failing publicly. She needs to
desensitize herself to this fear by getting used to competing, and even to
failing. Encourage her to enter low-stakes competitions far away from
home, where she feels anonymous and no one will know if she falls.
Make sure she has rehearsed thoroughly. If she’s planning to compete on
an unfamiliar rink, try to have her practice there a few times first. Talk
about what might go wrong and how to handle it:
OK, so what if you do
fall and come in last place, will life still go on?
And help her visualize what
it will feel like to perform her moves smoothly.
Unleashing a passion can transform a life, not just for the space of time
that your child’s in elementary or middle or high school, but way
beyond. Consider the story of David Weiss, a drummer and music
journalist. David is a good example of someone who grew up feeling like
Charlie Brown and went on to build a life of creativity, productivity, and
meaning. He loves his wife and baby son. He relishes his work. He has a
wide and interesting circle of friends, and lives in New York City, which
he considers the most vibrant place in the world for a music enthusiast.
If you measure a life by the classic barometers of love and work, then
David is a blazing success.
But it wasn’t always clear, at least not to David, that his life would
unfold as well as it did. As a kid, he was shy and awkward. The things
that interested him, music and writing, held no value for the people who
mattered most back then: his peers. “People would always tell me,
‘These are the best years of your life,’ ” he recalls. “And I would think to
myself,
I hope not!
I hated school. I remember thinking,
I’ve gotta get out
of here
. I was in sixth grade when
Revenge of the Nerds
came out, and I
looked like I stepped out of the cast. I knew I was intelligent, but I grew
up in suburban Detroit, which is like ninety-nine percent of the rest of
the country: if you’re a good-looking person and an athlete, you’re not
gonna get hassled. But if you seem too smart, that’s not something that
kids respect you for. They’re more likely to try and beat you down for it.
It was my best attribute, and I definitely enjoyed using it, but it was
something you also had to try and keep in check.”
So how did he get from there to here? The key for David was playing
the drums. “At one point,” David says, “I totally overcame all my
childhood stuff. And I know exactly how: I started playing the drums.
Drums are my muse. They’re my Yoda. When I was in middle school, the
high school jazz band came and performed for us, and I thought that the
coolest one by a long shot was the kid playing the drum set. To me,
drummers were kind of like athletes, but musical athletes, and I loved
music.”
At first, for David, drumming was mostly about social validation; he
stopped getting kicked out of parties by jocks twice his size. But soon it
became something much deeper: “I suddenly realized this was a form of
creative expression, and it totally blew my mind. I was fifteen. That’s
when I became committed to sticking with it. My entire life changed
because of my drums, and it hasn’t stopped, to this day.”
David still remembers acutely what it was like to be his nine-year-old
self. “I feel like I’m in touch with that person today,” he says. “Whenever
I’m doing something that I think is cool, like if I’m in New York City in a
room full of people, interviewing Alicia Keys or something, I send a
message back to that person and let him know that everything turned
out OK. I feel like when I was nine, I was receiving that signal from the
future, which is one of the things that gave me the strength to hang in
there. I was able to create this loop between who I am now and who I
was then.”
The other thing that gave David strength was his parents. They
focused less on developing his confidence than on making sure that he
found ways to be productive. It didn’t matter what he was interested in,
so long as he pursued it and enjoyed himself. His father was an avid
football fan, David recalls, but “the last person to say, ‘How come you’re
not out on the football field?’ ” For a while David took up piano, then
cello. When he announced that he wanted to switch to drumming, his
parents were surprised, but never wavered. They embraced his new
passion. It was their way of embracing their son.
If David Weiss’s tale of transformation resonates for you, there’s a good
reason. It’s a perfect example of what the psychologist Dan McAdams
calls a redemptive life story—and a sign of mental health and well-
being.
At the Foley Center for the Study of Lives at Northwestern University,
McAdams studies the stories that people tell about themselves. We all
write our life stories as if we were novelists, McAdams believes, with
beginnings, conflicts, turning points, and endings. And the way we
characterize our past setbacks profoundly influences how satisfied we
are with our current lives. Unhappy people tend to see setbacks as
contaminants that ruined an otherwise good thing (“I was never the
same again after my wife left me”), while generative adults see them as
blessings in disguise (“The divorce was the most painful thing that ever
happened to me, but I’m so much happier with my new wife”). Those
who live the most fully realized lives—giving back to their families,
societies, and ultimately themselves—tend to find meaning in their
obstacles. In a sense, McAdams has breathed new life into one of the
great insights of Western mythology: that where we stumble is where
our treasure lies.
For many introverts like David, adolescence is the great stumbling
place, the dark and tangled thicket of low self-esteem and social unease.
In middle and high school, the main currency is vivacity and
gregariousness; attributes like depth and sensitivity don’t count for
much. But many introverts succeed in composing life stories much like
David’s: our Charlie Brown moments are the price we have to pay to
bang our drums happily through the decades.
*
Some who read this book before publication commented that the quote from Isabel couldn’t
possibly be accurate—“no second grader talks that way!” But this is what she said.
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