Adolescent Shame, Mature Honor

I risk losing a few readers, but nevertheless I’ll begin with a brief quote from Proust:

“[In adolescence] one lives among monsters and gods, a stranger to peace of mind. There is scarcely a single one of our acts from that time which we would not prefer to abolish later on. But all we should lament is the loss of the spontaneity that urged them upon us. In later life, we see things with a more practical eye, one we share with the rest of society; but adolescence was the only time when we ever learned anything.”

I was deeply unhappy as an adolescent and looked for opportunities to shock, confront, and insult. There are many things I did and said that I am now ashamed of. I will describe one, certainly not the worst.

In high school, I disliked most of my teachers and my classmates, because I thought they disliked me, which, as you will read, they had every right to do!

In my senior year, I had to take art to graduate. I was bad at it, I thought it was a worthless activity, and I made no secret of my opinion. I also was a good enough student that I could miss classes and still do well. So I instituted for myself, with the aid of notes from my mother, a four day school week, deciding that I ought to make all Fridays a personal holiday. I even wrote an article in the school paper suggesting the school adopt my four day week policy.

One Monday after I’d missed a Friday art class, my art teacher asked, “Roberts, what if I decided to take all Fridays off?”

I replied, “You’re paid to be here, I pay to be here. That’s the difference.”

He was stunned into silence at my insolence, my rudeness, and my arrogance.

His revenge was that he blackballed me from graduating with honors (all departments had to concur). And he was right to do so.

The art teacher died a while ago so I cannot apologize for what I said. But the shame I feel for my 17 year old self is indelible. I remind myself of this incident all the time and am unafraid to “own it,” as  it propels me to do two important things as often as I can manage. One is to think carefully before speaking. Unlike Proust, I do not lament the loss of my adolescent spontaneity. The other is to honor teachers whenever I can as indispensable to our society. I strongly believe that teachers are underpaid and undervalued, particularly those who teach adolescents and might have to put up with adolescents like me! (By coincidence, one of my favorite people I have met recently is an amazing art teacher.)

There are other, worse things I said at younger ages than 17. I’m too ashamed to write them down. But they also propel me to act honorably. In part as contrition, in part because it is important to my self-esteem to think of myself as an honorable person, as a good example to friends and family.

I am convinced that the shameful memories of my verbal violence in adolescence, my insufferable and undeserved arrogance, helped form me as much as anything else. And again, I’ll  disagree with Proust that adolescence is generally not the only time we learn something, unless of course we live our entire lives failing to escape our adolescent brain.

Certainly, we all know people who never seem to have grown up. Some of those people can be pure sweetness and fun. Others are permanently stuck in the mode of adolescent rage and resentment, seeing the world starkly as either gods or monsters.

 That latter group are people who never feel shame and therefore never understand what it means to seek honor. For truly, I don’t think one can learn honor without learning shame.

In present day America, one cannot use the word shame without thinking about how we as a country elected Donald Trump to be our president. I cannot come up with a better illustration of a person whose brain never escaped adolescence than Donald Trump.

In 2016, I cast my vote against him, but that was it. As a New Yorker,  my vote had no impact. I could have done so much more, because I knew Trump had an awful character.  His behavior was and is exactly like the behavior in my story about me talking back to that teacher: an entitled, arrogant, non-self-aware adolescent. My acting out like that was rare, thank goodness. But that’s the consistent behavior we always got and get from Trump. Always.

We ought to have done so much more to prevent Trump from ever occupying our highest office. We as a country should share the shame and never forget it.  That’s how we reclaim our national honor.