Good Guy/Bad Guy

Why do we love black-and-white thinking and how can we make space for something better?

A wonderful and terrible thing has happened in our household in the past three months: our son has become obsessed with Star Wars. We tried to keep it at bay, giving him as little information about the whole thing as possible (“mama, there are Star Wars movies??!) but then like all things the slope got real slippery and whoops we let him watch Return of the Jedi unsupervised at six-in-the-morning and now I can’t take one sip of my never-strong-enough coffee without having to be Princess Leia fighting some kind of aliens and failing. Playing with a four-year-old is like being a member of the world’s worst improv troupe — “no mama, you can’t shoot me cause I have a shield and your lasers are carrots, and now your ship turned into a black hole, and you’re not Princess Leia anymore, you’re a kitten.” To my close friends, and now to you, I often compare the feeling of playing with a child who tells you everything you are doing is wrong to being in a live-action torture-porn. Dude, haven’t you heard of yes and??

Not surprising that the sneaky hands of culture and consumerism are steering my precious angel towards big brands and things you can shoot people with. Even the kids at the Waldorf preschool who aren’t allowed to wear logo t-shirts develop some kind of superhero fetish eventually. What is surprising about the whole thing is the character my son has chosen as his intergalactic alter-ego — not the doe-eyed Luke, or the gruff-and-tumble Han Solo, or even wise Yoda, but Jabba the frickin’ Hutt. Yes, he is fascinated with Jabba the Hutt, even refers to himself in the third person as “Baby the Hutt.” Jabba, he points out, does not work for the dark side and of course is not with the rebels either. He is, my son claims, “half bad guy, half good guy” and this, I am have come to understand, is what makes him so intriguing.

One of my favorite discussions to have with children (other than whether snakes have butts, that’s a great one) is about how you can feel two very conflicting things, at the same time, about the same situation. I first encountered this idea not in my own childhood, but in the otherwise dry and dinky social-emotional curriculum I was handed as a young teacher (I often imagined the room where this series of lifeless lessons was created and what these people, who had obviously never met children, discussed — “you know what kids will love? 11x17 laminated cards with black-and-white pictures of white kids from the 80s!”). There was really only one lesson that interested me or felt remotely true, which was the one about “Conflicting Feelings.” There was something essential, I felt, in naming for a child that one thing (say, your birthday) could bring about very different, equally strong feelings (say, total exuberance and utter disappointment) and that all of these feelings were equally valid.

The reason it’s necessary to teach this explicitly is that the human brain works tirelessly to split and hyperbolize, to identify which things are good, which are bad, which are safe and which are dangerous. As one article puts it, “Our minds seem to like simple categorical ways to divide up information in the world. This is kind of interesting given how terribly complex and nuanced most things are.” This “splitting” or “dichotomous thinking” isn’t necessarily healthy, but it is automatic. Consider the famous gestalt images, like the one below. Our mind sees either the vase or the two faces — it is very difficult to see them both at once.

My therapist, who is almost always right, has pushed me hard over the years to challenge my black-and-white thinking, and it is not easy. She assures me (though I still don’t 100% believe her), that there is no such thing as being a “bad person” or a “good person” and that there will not be some ultimate judge, waiting for me on my death bed, ready to pronounce me “bad” because I got a parking ticket or yelled too loudly at my children in the Target One Spot or failed to be offered the first HBO comedy special that was all about child psychology or to live up to the potential my Kindergarten teacher told me I had. She insists that I can, for example, be very angry with someone I love, at the same time as I love them, and I do not need to apologize for my anger because it does not diminish my love. She stops me, annoyingly, to remind me to say “and” instead of “but” — as in “I have a loving, stable marriage and sometimes I want to get in the car and drive until I run out of gas and make a new life in that place and change my name to Cassandra and become a grifter.” Good and bad. Bad and good.

Recently, our family has reflected on how “the germs” are keeping us from going to school (I actually think my son’s fine with that one, it’s us parents who cry about it every night) and seeing Grammy, and they also mean we get to play together a lot more (more torture porn!). Standing at a protest in Oakland last week, watching people of all ages, styles (there was some really impressive protest chic), and backgrounds stream past with the same message of fighting against racism and violence, we talked about how the way people were being treated in this country was 100% bad, and the way people were coming together was most definitely good.

I am noticing that while kids readily understand this concept, adults (myself included) are less skilled. Maybe we’ve just logged too much dichotomous thinking time to turn back, like some kind of Malcolm Gladwell 10,000-hour-expert gone wrong. My friends express a great amount of guilt and shame at finding even some modicum of joy in quarantine — as if recognizing the good somehow depletes the power of the bad, or visa versa. I struggle to assess whether various situations (handing a fresh-picked blueberry to a neighbor, going back to daycare, eating a croissant that fell on the sidewalk in San Francisco — ok that last one might be clearer) are safe or unsafe, when they are probably both. How can I dream every night of leaving my children with another adult and at the same time get a pit in my stomach when they are away from me? How can I watch Top Chef All Stars at the same time that I am outraged at the state of my country and afraid for my friends and family? Both of these things can exist at the same time, without threatening one another, or without our needing to apologize.

On a larger scale, many Americans have convinced ourselves that since equity has become a buzzword, things must be going great. In the past few weeks, or months, some have been blindsided by the idea that things are in many ways quite bad, that they have been bad for a long time, even for those of us who felt like they were going swell. We would have liked to keep chugging along as if things were hunky dory. Our brains prefer the simplicity of that. And now that it doesn’t look like that will fly anymore, many of us will go hard into that bad space. It’s good to see and feel the bad. And if we flip wholeheartedly into that extreme, refuse to acknowledge any good, it will be so painful, so depressing, our brains will figure out the quickest way to get back to the good place, at which point we will stop attending to the bad entirely. In all sincerity, this is what I have done since Trump was elected — put my blinders on and taken in the sunshine and told myself things are gonna work out fine because the pain of the other extreme is too much to bear. But the truth is, our country, our culture, it’s not one thing. Good and bad. Same time, same place. The siren song of black-and-white thinking is a tool of the oppressors — if people cannot tolerate more than one thing at once, they will choose good every time, and the fight in them will soften.

It is not the fact that we can have two conflicting feelings at once, but our efforts to integrate that idea into our schizoid thinking that causes us the greatest stress. Spending so much time with our children is beautiful and really, really fucking unbearable. We are in a time of great pain and great healing. I’m starting to think this may be the secret to taking the anguish and anger of this moment and neither letting it destroy me nor running from it as fast as I can as soon as it’s socially acceptable to do so. “Good and bad” I will tell my brain. Do you hear me? Rather than get sucked into the splitting vortex, where the nuances and difficult truths get swallowed up, I will let this big blob of slime, who feasts on some kind of giant bug and feeds people to monsters, and who can be reasoned with like a real equal for the right price, be my guide.