The Misfit''s Manifesto 1 Not All Hope Comes from Looking Up Aspiration gets stuck in some people. It''s difficult to think "yes" or "up" when all you know is how to hold your breath and wait for horror to pass. There is indeed a relationship between hope and misfittery, but it doesn''t come from looking up, or rising, or climbing. Some misfits are drawn to the outside of things because they feel best when they feel different. But others of us were born through dirt and mud, trauma and violence. To forge hope, we had to invent it at ground zero. Not all misfits are born up and through violence, but large numbers of us are. Before I talk about trauma though, I''d like to take a moment to recognize the fact that at least some misfits emerge from happy families, from supportive environments, from lives and worlds that, at least from the outside, appear to be relatively stable.

The girl who begins to carve lines into her arms, faint enough not to get caught, deep enough to bring tears to her eyes, but only when she''s alone. She wears them like wrong bracelets in front of everyone. The boy who begins to adorn each wrist with bangles--more and more bangles--enough bangles to make his arms ring--just because he loves the sound they make when he reaches up to twirl his locker combination. Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club. Her glorious dandruff decorating her drawing with perfect snow. Those kids and teens who veer away from the central be-like-everyone-else path, those beautiful creatures forging weird little roads into the unknown, they remind us that beauty doesn''t always come from mirroring the universal. It can also come from the weird on its way to becoming original and transformational. Still, I''ve noticed from the stories fellow misfits tell me that many of our life paths run from rough beginnings.

Perhaps it is true, or true enough, that trauma figures in our lives in a way that disfigures our understanding of the world and others. My colleagues in other disciplines have certainly told me enough stories over the years to support that idea--in psychology, sociology, anthropology. Then again, the older I get, the more I''m left feeling like trauma touches everyone in the end. Here is a scene I''ve been writing and rewriting most of my adult life. It seems pivotal to my experience--like if I could just truly and finally figure one of these origin scenes out, I''d know something about life and how to live it. The setting is an ordinary kitchen in the 1970s. The scene is an ordinary argument between my parents. There were so many arguments they became normal even as I never stopped being terrified.

I simply learned to endure, which left me with something akin to PTSD in the face of male anger as an adult. My sister''s strategy was disassociation, and she was an expert at it, I''ll tell you. I became an expert at taking it. Some people will understand that. I''m eight. I''m sitting at the kitchen table. My sister is sixteen. She''s washing dishes.

My mother is sitting at the table with me. My father is in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. My father and mother are both smoking and drinking coffee. The house smells like nicotine and caffeine and anger and child fear. I can see my sister''s back, the motion of her forearms as she makes circular soapy patterns on each dish and places them one at a time--painstakingly slowly--into the dishwasher. At the zenith of their argument, both of them yelling, my father''s voice the low-rage baritone of a rage-o-holic and my mother''s the singsong screech of a Southern drawl, my mother stands up and slams her coffee mug on the table. Those big, extra-thick off-white ceramic coffee mugs. Coffee goes everywhere.

Some splashes onto my hand, and it''s hot, but I don''t make a sound. Everyone is wearing bathrobes. My mother walks past my sister toward the other end of the kitchen, on her way to exit through the other doorway, and my father--who once had a walk-on tryout with the Cleveland Indians--hurls his mug at the wall, missing my mother''s head by a centimeter. The bottoms of those extra-thick off-white ceramic coffee mugs are dark. Nothing moves. We are in the eye of a hurricane that does not come every season, but every other day, relentlessly. There are so many ways to read this scene once I put it on the page. For one thing, what was my sister thinking? What did my mother think? What did he think, coming so close to her head with that powerful arm, that could-have-been-an-athlete arm? Did anyone love their children in that moment, or any of the other endless moments? Or does love have nothing to do with it? The hole in the wall remained for a very long time.

What I''m saying is that this moment is one in a series of paradigmatic scenes in my memory. Misfits, we all have such scenes in our memories. It is nowhere near the worst thing that happened to me, or my sister, or my mother with my father. In that house. But it rises up like an image that won''t die. Sometimes I think everything about who we were and who we all became has its origins in moments like that. Hope was nothing about that scene. In place of hope, underneath my terror, which I had my entire childhood, was something else.

That something else was the ability to endure, to stay quiet like a still animal close to the ground, and perhaps something even more important, the art of waiting for the right moment to act. I was, without knowing it, building a form of agency. I was, I know now, learning the art of agency in the eye of a storm, the art of understanding energies, the art of understanding that everything in life--violence to be sure but also everything else--is energy. In my house, my father''s rage incarcerated my mother, my sister, and me. His abuse threaded through our bodies, through our language, through every experience we could imagine, until that abuse seemed like part of everyday life. That''s an important idea to consider. People who come from abuse or trauma or poverty don''t exactly know how to see it in the world when they leave home and become adults, if they make it that far. You want to know why? It''s familiar.

So familiar we cannot recognize it. What I mean is, you can escape an abusive household, for example, and then step right into different abusive situations out in the world because they look and feel like something we are good at; it''s what we know how to do. We gravitate toward the familiar. Couple that with the fact that our media representations and media realities are supersaturated with violence, trauma, and socioeconomic struggle as entertainment, and, well, there''s no seeing to see, is there? So what we become experts at is endurance. We can, so to speak, take it. We''re like Purple Heart combat veterans of a unique domestic and social variety. But it may be more accurate to call us ghost people who are a little haunted and always in danger of being dragged under . by depression, or fear, or failure, or our unusual relationship to reality.

I can imagine the terrible macro version of my micro story. Consider for a moment the legions of refugees fleeing the wars we''ve made worldwide: How will they fit into not only new countries, but also the stories we tell ourselves about identity and unity? I worry about them the same way I worry about individuals escaping violence in our own communities. In fact, considering our current administration''s openly racist, homophobic, sexist, and xenophobic rhetoric and policy plans, there is an urgent crisis at hand: How will we tell the story of ourselves in America in a way that does not directly harm the most vulnerable among us? Who do we want to be? But I''m sure even reading this you can see another side to the story I am telling about people born of difficulty. The broken side of coming from violence, war, abuse, trauma, or poverty. Misfits, we''re also always expecting the fist, or the transgression, or the betrayal, or the bomb, or any one of a hundred smaller forms of violence. Even when they''re not there. We carry with us the intense stare of someone who is ready at any moment to scrap to the death or surrender unto death--two sides of the same game--which can, in some cases, make us seem too quickly defensive or cranky or hard to work with or be around. We''re often hard cases.

In school, at jobs, in relationships. And yet. What if there is something else inside there, something of value? Several events in my life have caused the traditional definition of hope to be sucked out of my body. I''m not saying I''m proud of this, but it just happened. For me, what became important in moments of trauma or despair or fear was learning to breathe differently. The word aspiration has a breathing sense to it. It dawned on me that we have to breathe and to find reasons to stay alive on our own terms. There were two otherworlds that saved my life.

Swimming and art. It''s no great mystery why the swimming pool was my secular salvation. Four to six hours every day but Sunday I could leave the hell of home and enter the waters with other bodies. I could belong to something larger than myself that didn''t involve a father or a godhead. And in the water, my mind freed itself. From the age of six to the day I left home for college, the only time I felt like my body and life were mine happened in chlorinated pools all.