Wrong With Kate

“Okay, but what’s wrong with Kate, exactly?” My roommate sets down the novel with a sigh, ready for another long winded discussion on the English reading.
I just stare at her for a second and takes incredible restraint to reply “I don’t know,” instead of “Nothing.” I want to explain that there’s nothing wrong with Kate. She’s okay, she’s just lost, she’s just looking for herself, she’s just trapped by her pendulum of a dialectic. But I know that Kate is not okay. I know that Kate isn’t okay because I’ve been rehearsing okay in the mirror for years. I know what okay looks like. Okay is staring at the ceiling at 4 AM wondering “What’s wrong with Kate?” and then pretending to have slept well last night. Okay is writing a poem instead of an essay
and then deleting the file. Okay is crying alone for no reason and then telling friends “I’m fine.” Kate isn’t okay because she’s failing pretending; I’m okay because I’m acing it.
The rest of the class seems to have the same impression of Kate that my roommate had.
They see her as a puzzle to be figured out, so much less human than Emily or Binx or Sam. To me, however, she is uniquely human because she struggles intimately and desperately with self-identity and so exhibits the same continual and traumatizing shattering and reformation of identity that I have experienced throughout my life. She cannot maintain an identity for particularly long because she is acutely aware of the flaws of each of her successive masks as well as the immense pressure associated with maintaining them. When describing this feeling, she says “I am straining every nerve to be the sort of person I was expected to be and shaking in my boots for fear I would fail” (Percy 115). She knows that this pressure will inevitably destroy her identity and spends her life terrified of being no one. The more success she has in maintaining a particular identity, the more desperately she clings to it, the harder it becomes to sustain.
These changes in her sense of self and of self-worth are jagged and sudden. She develops a self, inhabits it for as long as she can bear, then all at once it breaks. This cycle can only repeat itself because she must immediately seek a new self, a new identity, some other type of person to become. I have come to describe my version of this process, which Percy calls the swinging of her dialectic, as shattering. The destruction leaves me with only splitters of self-identity
and an urgent desire to form another identity.
Most recently, I experienced this shattering as a side effect of the transition to this school. At my old school, I was smart. At least, I thought I was – everyone said so. Smart became who I was, and I thrived because of it. But here, I am barely mediocre. Every B-minus I got back, every criticism chipped away at the self I had developed and clung to for years. That self had been weakening for months when it finally shattered. I seemed to myself to have lost my skill in math, science, and analysis to writing, art, and expression simply because here I was surrounded by people who far surpass me in analytical skill. By excessive comparison and as a result of my environment, I felt that I had lost all worth in the analytical sphere and so latched gratefully onto the only sphere I consistently enjoyed and performed in well at this school. However, this new identity was so fragile that it too shattered as soon as it was challenged. The inevitable impetus for my shattering was, in this case, Dr. Culbertson's comments on my first paper for his class. While obsessively rereading his critiques, my inner voice spiraled out of control, twisting his words absurdly, though at the time it seemed quite reasonable: "well-written on the sentence level" and “I want to see deeper and/or more provocative thinking" became "you are unable to write coherent paragraphs" and "you think superficially" which in turn became "you can’t clearly express ideas" and "you have no original thoughts" and ultimately merged into "worthless." If my worth is the value of what I contribute to the world, and I cannot contribute in any of the ways I thought could, then am I worth anything? If I’m not a scientist and I’m not a writer, who am I? The void of self it leaves me with is more painful than the actual process of shattering.
Inventing a new dialectic is the easiest method of dealing with the void. The doubt and its pain are made briefer the more quickly I immerse myself in another comfortingly false identity. This is not fulfilling, but it feels that way for a while. It cannot create happiness, but it can mimic it and for a while, it’s good enough. The reason the new dialectic, any dialectic, fails is fundamentally the same reason it exists. Kate and I, we are like the rest of humanity in this respect: we desperately want to be a person. Any person will do, so long as she is well-defined. Our fatal flaw is that we care fiercely about being someone: the more we care about the struggle, about our identity, about everything, the more anxiety we create about it. Our fear of failure forces us to fail, makes it inevitable. Binx wishes that Kate would create a stable dialectic and maintain it, but that is impossible (Percy 46). There is no self she can create that will lack the flaws that interrupt her ability to fool herself. The longer she preserves a dialectic, the more fiercely she guards it, the more devastated she is by its loss. When she clings tightly to a certain self, the anxiety of losing it, of messing up, of being discovered to be nobody increases. The more effort she puts into preserving her self, the worse the aftermath of the shattering is. This solution is temporary and circular, leading only to worsening downward spirals as we try desperately to recover from each successive shattering.
Abandoning the dialectic without confronting it is a harder and even more fleeting reaction to shattering, though it is more wonderful and freeing while we can maintain it.
Kate explains this in an ecstatic rush: "I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself." In this moment of realization, she loses her most recent in a series of carefully crafted selves and replaces it with nothing. It is impossible for us to maintain this void, and so this highest ecstasy is followed by the lowest despair. If being no one is our deepest fear, why is the void the happiest state of being for us? When we realize that we can be nothing, that is, that we can escape our own expectations of who we are supposed to be, we are free. Kate explains this realization in an ecstatic rush: "I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.” (Percy
114).
To someone who doesn’t know who they are, this idea is comforting because there is no pressure to be anyone, no anxiety, no fear of failing to be a person. But then the anxiety comes back and the void collapses on itself, and we need to be a person again. These are our darkest hours. The only remedy is distraction, so we seek any idea that can occupy our entire attention. Kate explains, “They all think any minute I'm going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I'm as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself -- ah then, I would. I can do without Nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide” (Percy 194-5). Sometimes, suicide is the only idea that can fully occupy our minds. That is, it reminds us that the void is better than truly not existing. It reminds us that we choose to keep being here; it is the voice in the back of our minds whispering, “See? You are someone; you could have given up. It would be so much easier, but you aren’t doing it.” For a while, it gives happiness, but it is a dark, unstable happiness that eventually leads back to the shattering.
This is what’s wrong with Kate: she can’t escape the shattering. Every time she thinks she’s found an answer, it leads back to the void, back to the shattering, into another swing. Binx thinks that the only way to break the cycle is to pick one self, one dialectic, and inhabit it fully. “‘Hate her then,’ [he] feel[s] like telling her, ‘and love Jules. But leave it at that. Don't try another swing,’” and he fears that she will eventually end up in “some kind of dead-end where she must become aware of it” (Percy 46). He doesn’t realize that becoming aware of the dialectic is the only way to escape its swinging. I believe, though Binx disagrees, that the only way to end this cycle is to become fully aware of it, to confront it, understand it, and learn from it. If I identify it and its causes, it will become less brutal, perhaps even fade into part of a new permanent but mutable self. That self is ideal: a self that is firm only in its ability to adapt. Rather than shattering, it will bend.