Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [86]
Stephen said, “Gail changed from outgoing to a real loner. She didn’t like anyone. The phone stopped ringing for her.”
Gail continued, “Junior high wasn’t the worst thing. I was down about the environment. I couldn’t sleep at night because I was worried about oil spills and the rain forests. I couldn’t forget about Somalia, either, or Bosnia. It just seemed like the world was falling apart.”
I see these problems in other highly gifted girls. Often because they are so bright, adults expect them to be mature emotionally. And they aren’t. They react to global tragedies with the emotional intensity of adolescents. Though bright girls are perceptive enough to see through the empty values and shallow behavior of their peers, they have the social needs of adolescents. They feel utterly alone in their suffering. They have the intellectual abilities of adults in some areas and can understand world problems, and yet they have the political power of children.
Gail made the choices of many girls like herself. She avoided mainstream kids and gradually found a few of her own kind. She discovered the smoke-filled back room of the local coffeehouse where the alternative crowd gathered to talk. She made friends with gay men, with runaways, school dropouts and unhappy intellectuals like herself. She pierced her ears and then her nose. She went with her best friend to a tattoo parlor and had her dragon professionally done. Unfortunately, this crowd had its share of problems. Many were into drugs both as painkillers and experience producers. Soon Gail was smoking pot and dropping acid.
School, meanwhile, grew even more difficult. Gail was the only girl in her class with a nose ring and tattoos. Kids giggled and pointed at her when she walked past. By the time she was in ninth grade, she’d read more on the environment than her science teachers. The easy classes made her cynical about education. Her grades dropped. She skipped school and went to the park to smoke dope.
Stephen and Shelly knew that things weren’t going well and encouraged Gail to try therapy. She refused. Her best friend moved to California and Gail became a loner again. Last week they’d found her with the cigarette burns.
The next week I met with Gail alone. She wore the same boots and jeans with a T-shirt that said “Life sucks and then you die.” In spite of her odd appearance she struck me as beautiful and sensitive. I thought of the Allen Ginsberg line about “the drunken taxicab of absolute reality.” It had crashed into Gail in early adolescence.
I told her about reading The Diary of Anne Frank in my small town thirty years earlier. I said, “When I discovered the evil that people do to each other I wanted to die. I didn’t really want to be part of a species that produced the Nazis.”
Gail agreed with me and said she’d felt that way when she heard the public radio reports about women being raped in Bosnia. She felt that way when she read that Stalin killed even more people than Hitler, that the Khmer Rouge killed 6 million Cambodians and that the Serbs practiced ethnic cleansing. She said, “The Holocaust wasn’t an isolated event. It happens all over.”
I said, “What saved me was reading Whitman and Thoreau. Shortly after I read about Anne Frank, I discovered them. It was summer and I would take my Whitman and go to the woods. I would read and watch the wind in the trees. I sat on my back porch at sunset and read Walden. Thoreau is such a good antidote to superficial people and shallow ideas. He gives dignity to loneliness.”
Gail said, “Going to the park with my friend helped me, but now he’s gone.”
“Tell me about burning yourself.”
Gail said, “That happened automatically. I was smoking in my room and I felt helpless and angry. The next thing I knew I was burning my arm and it felt good. It felt clean. I was careful to burn only my upper arm, so I could hide the marks. Afterwards I felt calmer.”
“You were turning all your rage at the world against yourself,” I said. “You need a better way to express rage and to fight back.”
We talked about protest marches, recycling,