More Than Enough

More Than Enough

I am an only child. When I was seven, I begged my mother for a brother. She told me that I was more than enough.

When I tell my friends this story, they always laugh. “Of course you were!” they’ll say, “who could blame her?” These are the same people who always say, “Well that explains everything,” with a knowing smirk when they discover that I’m an only child.

Those with siblings still outnumber those without, and they have interesting ideas about what kind of people only children are: we’re spoiled, self-centered, socially inept. There’s the usual backpedal after a statement like that: “You turned out okay—but for the most part the only children I’ve met…” These exchanges don’t bother me—anymore. I used to go into detail about all the time I had to spend alone amusing myself, how having all of your parent’s attention led to receiving not only all of their love but all of their expectations too, and how I’d never ever received that electric car racing set I begged for three Christmas’s running. Now I laugh and say, “You poor sibling-saddled folk are all alike: insecure, competing for attention, beholden to fads. Of course I don’t mean you, you’re not like any of the others I’ve met.”

Both views are, well, fashioned from the cloth of bigotry. In the same way that men will never understand what it’s like to be women, only children will never understand what it’s like to have siblings (and vise versa).

Having done little more than talk about myself to this point, I expect the sibling camp is snickering behind their hands, and rightly so. My self-examination stems, however, from a recent realization that being an individual is less important than being a community member.

Most people think of an individual as any person, but I don’t. People are not individuals simply because they exist and are entities. No, being an individual requires more effort than that. The existentialist definition comes to mind: a single person coming to grips with a deterministic universe. But frankly, there’s so much goo attached to the existentialist camp I try to steer clear. I think of individuals as people who do as they are: who ignore social mores, trends, desires, and simply “be.”

While watching a nature show about lions I discovered that the only lions really dangerous to people are lone males. This is due to their diminished success taking down animal prey—people make easier targets and the fat ones are slow without being unduly strong. Lions are pack hunters. The community works together for its success. Wolves are much the same, or ants, or Orcas (I watch a lot of nature shows—boyhood dream #1: to be Gerald Durrell, a zoologist and writer). All these animals are social animals. The success of the individual lies in the success of the group. Like it or not, humans are social animals too.

The nature shows did not bring the importance of this realization home to me. Instead, it was Mike, a middle-aged dumpster-diver who did. Mike lives on the edges of society, on the street. He’s a scavenger, an individual, a lone wolf--at least that’s what the everyday person sees, if they see him at all. When I see Mike, poking his head out of a heavily graffitied dumpster, in the alley behind a polished glass box office building at four in the morning, he smiles and says hello. Because I’m a security guard he gives me news about who’s making messes at dumpsters because they’re on heroine again, or who he saw cause an alarm, or bust a window. Mike is tied into a community and the role he plays in that community is important to him.

People in all walks of life are tied into groups. We are indoctrinated into the group mentality at an early age: by junior high kids carve themselves up into castes complete with dress codes, cultural distinctions, and special languages. They call themselves preppies, rockers, skaters, ravers, brains, Goths, geeks, jocks, stoners, punks, skinheads, mods, spice girls, whatever the latest trends dictate. Adults aren't free of this tendency either--remember hippies, yippies, yuppies, gen-Xers? The blue-collar versus white-collar dichotomy? There’s safety and strength in the group.

Adults take a keen interest in the shaping of young minds. Four years of personal hell ended when Upper Canada College requested I not return for grade eleven because I was “a disruptive influence” (a euphemism for New Democrat—okay I might have been disruptive too, but it was motivated by the highest social and political concerns). That private school was in the business of cranking out suitably indoctrinated Tory captains of industry (preparatory school: prepare-a-Tory school—coincidence? I think not.). Three years later when I ran into Doug Brown, my old English teacher, and told him I was at Dalhousie University studying philosophy and political science, he told me he was glad I’d stuck to my guns and got the hell out of Toronto. Doug was a bit tipsy. We were standing on the manicured lawn of a mansion in Forest Hills, gulping red wine, swaying gently beneath the twinkling white Christmas lights strung in the trees. I could smell fresh cut grass and pot smoke wafting up to us from the foot of the yard on the warm July air. I had no idea what Doug was talking about and I told him so.

“You never bought what the school was selling—shit, you never bought what anyone was selling. You’re a rare thing. A real individual,” he said. I gave up at that point. We’re all individuals, or so I thought. I was missing his meaning, but it sounded as though he meant I was something good so I decided to let it go.

That’s just it: people can’t make up their minds about whether it’s good to be an individual, or not. Movies are full of John Wayne heroes standing alone against corrupt societies, and we love them because they are strong individuals who maintain their convictions despite the desires of the group. Movies are full of Dr. No villains striving to undermine society, and we hate them because they are strong individuals who maintain their convictions despite the desires of the group. I guess it all comes down to the individual’s convictions: if the convictions are good, then the individual is good; if bad, then bad. Because we find simplicity more palatable, the entertainment world oversimplifies the issue: we tend to forget that heroes and villains are created by their communities, and how they choose to interact with them.

Hermits, perhaps the only true individuals, are a rare breed, and I expect that on the whole we view them as weirdos, not individuals. Even in their heyday (the early Christian era) I'm sure that many thought the ascetics ridiculous. Oh sure, the Church canonized them in droves, but did the everyday populous believe that hermits were setting a useful example for how people should live with one another by suggesting we all stay away from each other? And if hermits were motivated by a desire to teach people a better way to live were they not in fact concerned about their community?

Sometimes, I think hermits just wanted to get away for a while without having to explain why. I went on a lone vigil when I was fifteen. This was a twenty-four hour sojourn alone in the wilderness (the just-south-of-Algonquin-Park-where-boaters-are-frequent kind of wilderness) from my summer camp. I decided to go because I wasn’t getting along with my group, and I wanted a break. The group thought it a brave act because I went on Friday the thirteenth with a full moon--flouting all summer camp conventions, whether wise or superstitious. A day and a night spent on a remote point overlooking a quiet bay surrounded by woods, amidst the chittering of woodchucks, boiling up Sumac tea, was just the needed environment for some honest navel-gazing. I accepted that I was warring with an enormous number of hormones and that my group wasn’t really made up of the evil demons that I’d come to think them. I used my brief hermitage to return to the group.

The truth is that hermits, heroes, villains, leaders, icons, idols, are all tied to community. They may be recognizable individuals but they are nothing without their group. So, in a way, they aren’t individuals at all—they’re social constructs. I recognize how this idea will annoy a lot of people (including myself) but what is the alternative: To suggest that we’re all individuals individually agreeing in groups to work together for a common goal? I don’t think we make conscious decisions everyday to work with each other. Rather we are educated by the society in which we are born and rarely look beyond the scope of that teaching: it’s easier to work with what we know.

Once again I have jammed myself into a philosophical cleft-stick of my own design. I have become...abstruse. I stopped taking philosophy courses years ago so that I would no longer have to address chicken-and-egg arguments. These arguments are a form of mental masturbation frequented by—you got it—only children. I'm breaking free. Screw the argument...chicken! There, now I've said it. I've chosen.

While I maintain that community is more important than individualism, it's not really important that anyone agree: after all, it's my assertion—my individual assertion—and it works for me. And I've changed my mind about it too. I used to be an ardent believer in the individual. I cultivated individuality. Wore myself like a weapon, a challenge, a battle call. I sneered at those who bought in to society, those who believed in it, because I saw it as the big lie, the enormous imposition. I remember my frustration with my dad during a dinner conversation about altruism. How I’d gotten red in the face, yelling, “People do do good, just to be good—they don’t need anything in return!”

“They do what makes them feel good. They do it because it gives them pleasure,” he replied. His face was the picture of calm, his eyes serene. Mom looked on with a smirk that said, “How can you be so stupid? Of course he’s right.” It was more than this thirteen-year-old could bear. I ran from the dinning room crying and vowing to do good, but not for myself.

My parents were hippies. They challenged authority wherever they could (they are both successful professionals now so I expect there was a certain amount of hypocrisy going on). My grandmother always encouraged me to "follow my own path," even though it made me the black sheep of the family. She followed these encouraging moments with tales of how she gave up her career in real estate to have children (once she said children, though, she'd usually stop and smile and say no more). Even Doug Brown, who as a teacher was a hard-ass, tow-the-line kind of guy, encouraged me to be an individual.

Oh yes, I pursued my oneness. But I derive little pride from it now. I cringe at the memory of a kid who would stalk from the playground alone because one of the popular kids made a bad call at second base for his buddy. I shake my head at the twenty-year-old who ran off to Europe to escape his life in Canada, not discover another place. These moments of intentional individuality, are negative, combative, and destructive. I have done a bang-up job of isolating myself in the past, and the road to reintegration is long and arduous.

Reintegration, that's what school is for me. It's opting in. But writing, there's an irony. It is a solitary endeavor. J.D. Salinger thought it best done in a cinder block shack. There is no surer way to set foot on the road of isolation than writing. Yet this is what I desire to do, and I feel connected doing it. When I sit in a couch in the corner at a party and watch the room, listening in on conversations, trying to figure out the social dynamics so I can use them in stories, or bastardize them, or just learn about what makes people tick, I feel connected. I feel the strings of the grand puppeteer tugging me through time and space, tangling me with the other marionettes, untangling me. I am at one with a great sublime...something. And since my brain is too small to comprehend the universe in its entirety, I name that something community.

Much as I love community, I can’t make any sense of it now. Even as I sit in my little apartment writing about the virtues of community, I realize I’m stuffing a single-serving something into my disinterested face as my eyes melt before a computer screen. When I need a break I go to chat rooms and “meet” people who may be what they claim to be, but are more likely twelve-year-old girls trying to find perverts to laugh at, or forty-five-year-old perverts trying to find little girls to laugh at them. Our world is being broken into pieces; community is being splintered by technology. Sometimes I feel like a member of a collective of shut boxes. From my childhood I hear a frustrated call: “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

I am an only child. While growing up, I first learned to sneer at society, and then later to stand gaping in awe. I believe that being an only child made me susceptible to the desire to be an individual, to be separate; an "other." Perhaps this is the trait that gives us only children such a bad rap. Still most of us come around, and in some ways, I think, we're the better for the journey. So I thank my mom for thinking that I was more than enough, and I imagine myself approaching a metaphysical softball diamond through a creaky gate, swinging in a warm summer breeze. Someone tosses me a worn mitt. I smell leather and linseed oil. "We need someone in center field," they say.