X.2 — Misfits
My favorite people are the ones who hold onto their personhood despite all odds. But how is it possible?
Hello there. This is the second entry in a series called “X,” a loose collection of speculations about how we make ourselves at home in a hostile world. You can find the first entry here, or feel free to dive right in.
This week’s newsletter should feel lighter than last week’s, in part because I’m in a better headspace. I had a lot of anxiety last week (perhaps unsurprising, considering the heavy subject matter). This week has been a little easier, since I’ve cut my coffee and alcohol intake, prayed more, exercised daily, and stopped watching that mesmerizingly depressing show Mr. Robot. Crazy how much these little adjustments can help.
Lastly, I wanted to note that I welcome replies. I read all comments, and I often respond. It’s a pleasure to hear how things land with you and where you might sympathize or push back. One of my chief goals for this newsletter is to start interesting conversations, so talk back to me.
I have always been drawn to misfits. In elementary school I was friends with a loner kid who smelled like his pet rats. In middle school my closest friend was shunned by the cool kids because he still whirled through the neighborhood playground with a Darth Maul lightsaber. In high school my best friends were Christian kids who prayed in public and skipped class to loaf around with our English teacher, herself a misfit: a fat, kind woman who was in AA and told wonderfully irreverent stories.
From a young age, I knew that the most interesting people are often found at the margins of polite society. I still feel that way. I like weird people—which is another way of saying, I like people.
I enjoy observing that slow process of transformation whereby, year by year, people grow more into themselves. I love that moment when a friend says or does something that is completely unexpected, yet completely in keeping with their truest self. The shock of it usually makes me laugh out loud. It's like a plot twist in a movie that in hindsight seems inevitable—"That's exactly what you would say!"
When I talk about misfits, I'm not thinking of a douchebag in a french beret. I'm thinking about quiet friends of mine, good moms who go about their hard work with all the artist's attention and none of his ego. There are quieter ways of being a nonconformist. In a world of hype and self-promotion, the hard-working mom is a revolutionary.
In my homespun definition, misfits are normal people who have somehow escaped being sanded down into more generic versions of themselves. They are not mass-produced. The misfits I befriend are strange yet unassuming, motivated less by calculated rebellion against societal norms as by innocent authenticity. They are making their weird way in the world.
If I ended my last newsletter with a prompt to detach from the totalitarianism of Megaphone Guy, misfits are the embodiment of that idea. They won’t (or can’t) conform to the world’s patterns. They hold onto their personhood; the image of God in them is preserved and elevated.
For me, this seems like a superhuman feat. I wonder what makes such a life possible, how they are strong enough to swim against the current. When I think of that power which is at work in the world to X us, it seems a marvel that they have managed to emerge intact.
•
All of my heroes are misfits. There’s Rich Mullins with his bare feet and hammer dulcimer; Flannery O’Connor with her peacocks and southern gothic fiction; Fred Rogers with his puppets and Presbyterian sweaters; Wendell Berry with his cranky agrarianism and poems about rest. Despite some level of worldly success, I count them as misfits because they are, to an almost off-putting degree, uniquely themselves.
Think of Rich Mullins. If you aren’t familiar with that name, Mullins was a songwriter who found a large following in the 1980’s with his worship song, “Awesome God.” But even though he has success as one of the early voices of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), he was a poor match for mainstream Christian culture.
In contrast to the positive, largely bloodless music of today’s CCM radio (“Safe for the whole family”), Mullins’s songs were heart-on-sleeve honest and imbued with loneliness. While today’s Christian artists would write a song like “Hold Me Jesus” and say they were inspired by a time of prayer, Mullins told his fans that he wrote the song after a red-eyed night in a hotel room, waiting for his friend to fall asleep so he could watch porn. He modeled his life after Saint Francis of Assisi, inspired by his vow of poverty. Fame didn’t sit well with him. At the height of his powers he left the Nashville area to live on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico and teach music to kids.
When I say that Rich Mullins was a misfit, I mean that he did not feel at home in this world. He writes about the nations raging, about exhaustion, about death. He tells us, “It won’t break my heart to say goodbye.” When he died at the age of 41, he had not lost his faith or his humanity.
As I try to figure out how he pulled it off, I notice his similarities to Flannery O’Connor (hereafter referred to as “Flannery,” from fondness not disrespect). In 1949, after receiving initial drafts of Flannery’s first novel, Wise Blood, her editor returned anxious feedback. It was a weird novel, and he didn’t know what to make of it. She responded in a letter:
I can only hope that in the finished novel the direction will be clearer, but I can tell you that I would not like at all to work with you as do other writers on your list. I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.
…In short, I am amenable to criticism but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not be persuaded otherwise.
I love this response. As a young writer with minimal published work, Flannery comes across as remarkably self-assured. On days when I feel poorly judged this letter often comes to mind, especially that fine-tuned phrase, “I am amenable to criticism but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do.” It’s a great retort, not only for a writer, but for anyone trying to live an unconventional life.
There is also something in that “aloneness” she describes, the same quality I notice in Rich Mullins. In the beginning of her writing career, Flannery lived among fellow artists and writers in New York. But when her lupus flared up she returned to live with her mother in rural Georgia, where she stayed for the remaining years of her short life.
By all accounts she was a misfit—a Catholic in the Protestant south, a Christian in a secular market, a writer of grotesqueries in a mannered society. She was strange to her neighbors, who hid her first novel in sock drawers, scandalized by its gruesome content. She was no more at home among her peers in publishing, who found her Christian symbolism baffling and distasteful.
Misfits, by definition wrongly placed, or “mis-fit,” are exiles in their native countries. In my last newsletter I wrote about how easy it is to slip into codependence with dominant cultural narratives, with the voice that tries to eradicate us. Flannery seems to have somehow detached from that voice. I’m tempted to believe she had an inherent trait that most of us lack, but that would cheapen her hard labor of persistence. It would also let me off the hook. I was born with just as much personhood as Flannery, so I have no excuse if I let it fade.
•
I’ve spent some time in nursing homes, an instructive experience for younger folks. Some old people are bright-eyed and tender-hearted: behind their old eyes and slow movements you can still sense internal combustion, a fire that is not extinguished by death’s slow encroachment. You feel the ease of strong grace in repose, a solidity that isn’t hampered by frailty. Even their past mistakes have somehow been folded into the rich dough of their lives.
Then there are others, the old folks I try to avoid, the cruel old women, the handsy old men. Lacking the energy to put on a pretense of goodness, their gross lusts and selfishness are on full display. You get a sense of unaddressed pain, wounds that have festered and dehumanized them.
Of course, I’m speaking in generalizations here. Aging affects everyone differently, and even the best souls can be distorted and seemingly lost under the hand of Alzheimers and other ailments. But I think the point still holds. The passing of years is not kind to all: it has a revelatory effect. Some people’s misfit nature, unweeded and unredeemed, hardens into a face that is painful to behold. Others somehow engage their misfit natures and, through seasons of woe and triumph, cultivate them into something beautiful. The quality of goodness is so potent that you would almost feel ashamed to sit in their presence, if you weren’t so buoyed by the light in their eyes.
If none of us are quite at home in the world, if we all bear that singular human quality of aloneness, how do we age into it with grace? By the end of their short lives, Flannery O’Connor and Rich Mullins were on a hopeful trajectory. But that’s not something automatic.
•
Today, misfits are ascending in pop culture. Just look at the latest superhero and Disney movies, and you’ll notice that outcasts and rejects are trending. Suicide Squad and Guardians of the Galaxy. Cruella and Maleficent and Joker. The heroes and antiheroes of our stories are all people who share that feeling of aloneness I’ve described.
But there’s a difference. While superheroes have always been misfits, our current moment exalts a certain breed. We have transitioned from families of misfit heroes to gangs of misfit orphans. The superheroes of the early 2000’s were fathered, mothered, mentored, adopted. The X Men are brought into a home by Doctor Xavier. Batman has Alfred as a surrogate father. Peter Parker was adopted by his aunt and uncle.
By contrast, look at the misfit stories that are popularized today. (And yes, I realize I’m fully geeking out here.) The Guardians of the Galaxy are not adopted into a family; they are orphans who adopt each other. The Suicide Squad is a gang of criminals who is brought together—or, rather, exploited—by the US government. Does Deadpool have a compassionate uncle or even butler to take him under his wing?
If my tone is coming across as finger-wagging, I’m actually more intrigued (and saddened) than critical. I think that the stories a community tells itself are revealing. For the millions of people buying movie tickets, what resonates beyond the special effects and humor? Is it the feeling of being orphaned, the fear that we might not be the good guys, the determination to survive and make the best of a badly dealt hand, the crass laughter in the face of childhood trauma, the certainty that no father or mother is coming, the belief that we me must name ourselves?
The superhero movies of my childhood are filled with father figures who lecture about the great responsibility that comes with great power. These storylines are what people now call “patriarchal”—a critique that may be justified. When we talk about the ability to name someone, to adopt them into a family, we are talking about a power that has often been misappropriated. The people we wish would affirm our identities—all those fathers and mothers and coaches and pastors and teachers—have often missed the mark, wounding us by misnaming us.
When I read pop culture as a projection of our communal life, I see misfits who are no longer willing to risk being identified by someone else. Maybe they have been wrongly named; more likely they have not been named at all. Either way, they have decided to define their own identities, critics be damned. The communities they form are a strange mix of open doors and strict policing. They will not be rejected again.
This is in sharp contrast to what I see in my heroes. For all her sarcasm, Flannery O’Connor loved her neighbors. For all his loneliness, Rich Mullins loved the world. The close reader of their stories will notice that, for all their individualism, they were also deeply committed to communities that spoke to their identities.
Rich Mullins was spiritually adopted by Brennan Manning, who led him into healing and a greater acceptance of God’s love. Even in her most isolated months of sickness, Flannery O’Connor had an assortment of pen pals—church fathers, nuns, intellectuals, and doubters—who rallied around her and affirmed her identity.
•
It’s easy to see the divide between the way of exile and the way of community.
The way of exile calls us to stand out from the crowd, to embrace our identities as a lone voice in the wilderness, to revolt. It is forward-facing, striving after an ideal that has been glimpsed but not yet realized. It sets itself apart to preserve its unique nature from damage. (Follow exile to its extremity and we find narcissism, cult leaders, assholes.)
The way of community invites us to set aside disagreements in pursuit of a worthy goal, to make allowances for imperfection, to gloss individuality in favor of shared culture. It is backward-facing, honoring history and preserving a legacy. (Follow community to its extremity and we find groupthink, communism, sellouts.)
Inherently, these two paths seem to be at odds. But in the lives of my favorite misfits I see the paradox of a full belonging that does no harm to a person’s identity. I see staunch individualists deferring to others, submitting to loving authority, and using their voices without fear of reprisal. I see people who were in danger of being Xed suddenly rise up as family assembles to uphold them. I see misfits forgiving those who wronged them and turning to find their place in communities.
If these last couple paragraphs seems vague, it is because I am rushing in the final stretch because I have to go to bed. I’ll write more in future letters. For now I want to say that, if there is any hope for a generation of misfits, it is not in people’s desperate plan to name themselves. It is in adoption.