Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [94]
What is it like, this normally elusive space of unresolved, ongoing wrongness? “The first word that comes to mind,” Anita told me, “is terror. Chronic terror. And I mean, day in and day out. I remember having this revelation at one point that I could be totally, viscerally terrified and do my laundry.” Lending credence to the notion that wrongness can be indistinguishable from madness, she said, “I know this sounds extreme, but I got about as close to insane as you can get. When you’re talking about religion, you’re talking about your whole understanding of the world. And when you start to question that, when the certainty starts to slide, you face inner chaos—an absolutely bitter battle for your life. It was just so massively disorienting. I had no idea who I was, what I believed, what I didn’t believe. I felt like a toddler lost in the middle of Manhattan.”
A tiny child alone in one of the most overwhelming places on earth: I’ve thought about this image often while working on this book—and, for that matter, while going about my life. What keeps me coming back to it is the way that it captures so much of the otherwise fugitive experience of wrongness. There is the sudden awareness of the immensity of the world, and of our own extreme smallness, vulnerability, and confusion within it. There is the utterly primal nature of our emotional response in such situations: panic, anguish, rage. There is the fear that we don’t have the ability or resources to find our way again in the world. And, somewhere in the mix, there is also the wronged and outraged and grieving sense that we shouldn’t be there in the first place—that some cruel or careless being, more powerful than we are, has abandoned us to our fate. (And how much worse that feeling must be when what you’ve lost is your faith in God, whose job is precisely to be the grown-up for grown-ups: Our Father, who art in heaven.)
Anita’s image of the lost child also captures another part of the experience of pure wrongness. In the face of radical error, it isn’t just the world that suddenly seems uncertain, unknown, and new; it is also the self. Thus James Sully, that original wrongologist, wrote in 1881 that, “any great transformation of our environment may lead to a partial confusion with respect to self. For not only do great and violent changes in our surroundings beget profound changes in our feelings and ideas, but since the idea of self is under one of its aspects essentially that of a relation to not-self, any great revolution in the one term, will confuse the recognition of the other.” Eighty years later, the sociologist Helen Merrell Lynd made virtually the same point. “As trust in oneself and in the outer world develop together,” she wrote, “so doubt of oneself and of the outer world are also intermeshed.” Anita understood all this: she described her own experience of breaking with her past as, in part, “an intense mourning of identity.”
When we are stuck inside the space of error, then, we are lost twice over: once in the world, and again in ourselves. As painful as that sounds, it can also be redemptive. This, too, is suggested by the image of the toddler alone in New York. Drastic error makes us young again, in both the hardest and the best of ways. I’ve already touched on the hard ways: we grow small and scared, sacrifice some of our self-knowledge, lose our sense of where we belong in the world. Still, put a kid in the middle