Reviving Ophelia (23 page)

Her mother laughed. “We’re an odd family. We talk about philosophy and science at dinner. We know more about chaos theory than we do about movie stars.”

Monica said flatly, “It’s my looks. I’m a pimply whale.”

Monica’s parents were eager to turn her over to someone younger and more knowledgeable about teens. I agreed to meet with Monica and discuss “peer relations.” Monica wasn’t optimistic, but she was desperate.

Most of her social experience was on computer networks. Nightly she used her computer modem to communicate with teenagers all over the country. They didn’t know that she was chubby. On the modem she could use her wit and intelligence to make friends she would never have to meet face-to-face.

Under her drab, tentlike clothes and depressed demeanor, Monica had real personality. She delivered insightful comments about her situation with a wry twist. She had the social scene down. She said, “All five hundred boys want to go out with the same ten anorexic girls.” She said, “I’m a good musician, but not many guys are looking for a girl that plays great Bach preludes.”

“Boys get teased if they even talk to me,” she moaned. Most boys treated her as if she were covered with invisible ink. A few actually harassed her. One boy called her the Killer Whale and pretended he was afraid she’d smash up against him. Her Spanish lab partner couldn’t look at her without smirking.

Monica had given up on girls too. She told of sitting with all these “tiny girls who were on diets and complaining how fat they were. If they think they’re fat, they must view me as an elephant.” Some girls giggled about her and teased her. Most just chose prettier friends. No one was all that eager to be seen with her on Saturday nights.

Monica had more perspective on her problems than most girls her age, but unfortunately insight does not take away pain. She told me ruefully that she hated her fat body and hence, herself. She showed me her poems, which were full of despair about her large, unlovable body. She said, “Let’s face it, the world isn’t exactly waiting for girls like me.”

She’d resisted the culture’s definitions of what was valuable in girls, but she was tired. She said, “When I walk down the halls I feel like a hideous monster. I understand my parents’ point that looks aren’t that important in adulthood, but I’m not in adulthood.”

I encouraged Monica to fight her depression by exercising regularly. Monica said that she came from “a long line of slugs.” She agreed to break tradition and walk and bike. She chose these activities because she could do them alone and without wearing a swimsuit.

At first she had trouble. She told me, “I hate to sweat. Ten minutes out and I’m red in the face and sweating like a marathon runner.” Once, when red-faced and panting, she biked by a tennis court and some guys pointed at her and laughed. She thought of a million excuses not to exercise, but she managed to make her goal of three times a week.

She also decided to fix herself up and bought some “semi-punk” clothes. She had her hair cut by someone who knew what they were doing and started wearing a little makeup.

She respected the fact that her parents were not big consumers of the mass culture. She said, “In some ways it’s been good. I wasn’t exposed to all these messages that women were sex objects and that bodies were what mattered. But in some ways it’s been bad. I wasn’t prepared for real life.”

I asked her to elaborate. She told me, “I guess I thought we’d all sit around and discuss books we’d read. I was shocked by how superficial everyone was, how into looks.”

We talked about what kinds of relationships Monica wanted. She wanted to be appreciated for her wit and her musical gifts. She wanted to be seen as a person, not a dress size, and she wanted friends who cared more about her ideas than her weight.

I suggested we start slowly. Rather than worrying about popularity, we focused on making a few new friends. Monica liked the idea, but was hesitant about the actions required to carry it out. She’d been rejected so often that she was reluctant to take more risks.

Because she was a Suzuki viola student, I used the Suzuki method as a metaphor for how we would work. Dr. Suzuki believed that any student could learn to play the most difficult classical works. All that was necessary was that the steps be small and the practice regular. Thus a small child practices holding the bow, touching the bow to the strings, curving her fingers correctly and playing a note beautifully. Eventually this child will play a Vivaldi concerto. We could do the same things with social experience. Eventually small steps would lead her to a fuller and richer social life.

Monica pushed herself—to speak in class and to smile in the halls. It was scary because sometimes she was rewarded, other times scorned. In spite of her talents and intellect, she had feelings like everyone else. Rejection stung. I encouraged her to focus on her successes instead of her failures and to view her occasional rejections as stones in the path to a healthy social life. She learned to walk around them.

Monica joined the writing and political clubs at her school. One day she announced to me that she was “tearing up the Young Democrats with her political satire.” Another day she said she’d been elected secretary of the Writers’ Club. “It’s a job reserved for terminal geeks,” she said proudly.

I encouraged her to think of boys not as dates, but as friends. Monica selected a sensitive poet from her writing club. She shyly tried a joke on him and he laughed. He began joking with her. After a few weeks he offered to let her see his poetry.

At the same time that she made some friends, she remained aware that there were many students who would never give her a chance. She said, “I can see people look me over, size me up as unattractive and look away. I am not a person to them.”

Monica came in most of her sophomore year. She was a large, big-boned person who gradually became physically fit. She actually began to enjoy exercise in spite of all her predictions to the contrary.

She, like most adolescent girls who do not fit our cultural definitions of beautiful, needed a lot of support to make it through this time. Her self-esteem crumbled as she experienced taunts and rejections. Still Monica built some friendships that held. She spent time with her poet friend and a few others. She still enjoyed communicating with teenagers around the country by computer modem, but it was no longer her primary social scene. She could actually go out on Saturday nights, an experience that helped her depression enormously.

Monica had found a niche in an alien environment. She was happier, but still aware of how tough life was going to be for her. She knew that she would never be a pretty package and that many guys were intimidated by her smarts. She knew that some people were so put off by her plain appearance that they never gave her personality a chance.

She made a good adjustment to a bad situation. She didn’t deny her brightness or musical talents so that she could fit in, but she developed some skills for diffusing the tension her gifts created. She used humor to diffuse some of her pain about being chubby.

Monica was lucky in that even though the culture was hostile to her development, she had many resources of her own. Her life had exposed her to ideas not explored by popular culture—she had some perspective on her experience. Her parents were by no means agents of the culture. Both were feminists who decried the narrowness of women’s roles and their lack of public power. They did all they could to help her through adolescence—music lessons, a bicycle, new clothes and therapy. They encouraged Monica to be true to herself and resist the message that she got from peers. They knew she was wonderful.

 

Monica had a mild case of depression which has many manifestations. It makes some young women sluggish and apathetic, others angry and hate-filled. Some girls manifest their depression by starving themselves or carving on their bodies. Some withdraw and go deep within themselves, and some swallow pills. Others drink heavily or are promiscuous. Whatever the outward form of the depression, the inward form is the grieving for the lost self, the authentic girl who has disappeared with adolescence. There’s been a death in the family.

There are numerous ways in which this death occurs. Some may destroy their true selves in an effort to be socially acceptable. Others strive to be fully feminine and fail. They aren’t pretty enough or popular enough in just the right ways at the right times. Others make the sacrifices necessary to be fully feminine, even as they are aware of the damage they are inflicting upon themselves. They know they have sold out and blame themselves for their decision. They have chosen a safer path, but it’s a path with no real glory. When they lose their subjective fix on the universe, they are adrift and helpless, their self-esteem hostage to the whims of others.

Some girls are depressed because they have lost their warm, open relationship with their parents. They have loved and been loved by people whom they now must betray to fit into peer culture. Furthermore, they are discouraged by peers from expressing sadness at the loss of family relationships—even to say they are sad is to admit weakness and dependency.

All girls experience pain at this point in their development. If that pain is blamed on themselves, on their own failures, it manifests itself as depression. If that pain is blamed on others—on parents, peers or the culture—it shows up as anger. This anger is often mislabeled rebellion or even delinquency. In fact, anger often masks a severe rejection of the self and an enormous sense of loss.

Depression is not an absolute quantity, but rather a matter of degree. If we picture depression on a continuum, at one extreme would be severe depression with some biochemical basis and disturbed family functioning. At the other end of the continuum would be ordinary adolescent misery. At the severe extreme, I think of a client whose family history was filled with depression and alcohol abuse, who had an alcoholic father and psychotically depressed mother. When she hit adolescence she had neither internal nor external resources to support her. She ended up on medication and in the hospital for several months. At the other extreme are psychologically healthy girls, such as Monica, who suffer as they catch on to the diminished roles women are offered. Most girls suffer depression somewhere between these two extremes.

Adolescence is a time when development and culture put enormous stress on girls. So many things are happening at once that it’s hard to label and sort experiences into neat little boxes. And there are many casualties. For example, a girl who is suffering from a mild case of adolescent misery may try to kill herself, not because her life as a totality is so painful, but because she is impulsive, reactive and unable to put small setbacks in perspective. Some girls are suicidal because of biochemical factors, some because of trauma and others because of the confusion and difficulty of the times. Obviously they need different kinds of attention, but all are potentially dangerous to themselves and must be taken seriously.

I first heard about Cindy from her school counselor, who said she seemed to be suffering from “failure to thrive.” She wasn’t growing physically, socially, emotionally or intellectually. Indeed, even her baby teeth weren’t falling out. She wandered about her classroom as if in a dream. Cindy had few internal or external resources. She had no perspective on herself other than what she was told by her critical parents and peers. At a time when most adolescents are involved with peer culture, she had no positive relationships with kids her age.

The counselor hadn’t been able to involve Cindy’s parents with the school. They worked at a truck stop and claimed to be too busy to come to staff meetings. The one time the mother had come to school, when Cindy was sick and needed to be taken home, the counselor had smelled alcohol on her breath. I asked about other resources. “There is no other family that we know of. Cindy is in a special class with two girls her age and they ignore her.”

I felt discouraged before I even met the family, but I agreed to try to help. A week later Delores and Cindy sat on my couch, a study in contrasts. While Delores was heavy and energetic, Cindy was small and childlike with tiny motionless hands. She hugged an old blue car coat to her chest as we talked.

Delores said, “Joe couldn’t come. It’s crazy at work and he doesn’t believe in this stuff anyway. And don’t count on me coming in regular. I’ve got work myself. Cindy is the one with problems.”

Delores had a litany of complaints: Cindy didn’t do her homework or chores. She wouldn’t talk to people or make friends. She was sullen and sulky.

I asked Cindy what she thought, and she agreed that her mom was right.

Her slow movements and apathy clearly indicated depression. I thought of those monkeys isolated from their mothers in a famous psychology experiment. I remembered their haunting pictures in textbooks : small, sad monkeys embracing their towel mothers. Cindy’s posture and eyes reminded me of those monkeys.

I wanted to run from this seemingly hopeless situation, but Cindy’s eyes kept me from saying no. I wanted to hug her, to take her out for a hot fudge sundae and to see if I could make her laugh.

I saw Cindy alone and gradually we got acquainted. Rarely had I known anyone with a more emotionally impoverished life. She woke up after her parents left for the truck stop, dressed, rode the bus to school and sat quietly through her school day. Some days she spoke only to her teacher and then rode the school bus home. When Cindy arrived home she fed the dog, fixed herself a frozen TV dinner or potpie and watched television till bedtime. She liked the Disney and shopping channels.

Once she was so lonely that she called the shopping channel and pretended to buy a garnet ring, but she got in trouble for that and never tried again. Usually her mom called home about eight to check on her. Then Delores and Joe hit the bars. Usually they came in long after Cindy was in bed.