【英语美文】生命中最痛苦的时刻如何造就我们！

As a student of adversity, I've been struckover the years by how some people with major challenges seem to draw strengthfrom them, and I've heard the popular wisdom that that has to do with findingmeaning. And for a long time, I thought the meaning was out there, some greattruth waiting to be found.

But over time, I've come to feel that thetruth is irrelevant. We call it finding meaning, but we might better call itforging meaning.

My last book was about how families manage todeal with various kinds of challenging or unusual off spring, and one of themothers I interviewed, who had two children with multiple severe disabilities,said to me, "People always give us these little sayings like, 'God doesn'tgive you any more than you can handle,' but children like ours are notpreordained as a gift. They're a gift because that's what we have chosen."

We make those choices all our lives. When Iwas in second grade, Bobby Finkel had a birthday party and invited everyone inour class but me. My mother assumed there had been some sort of error, and shecalled Mrs. Finkel, who said that Bobby didn't like me and didn't want me at hisparty. And that day, my mom took me to the zoo and out for a hot fudge sundae.When I was in seventh grade, one of the kids on my school bus nicknamed me"Percy" as a shorthand for my demeanor, and sometimes, he and hiscohort would chant that provocation the entire school bus ride, 45 minutes up,45 minutes back, "Percy! Percy! Percy! Percy!"When I was in eighthgrade, our science teacher told us that all male homosexuals develop fecalincontinence because of the trauma to their anal sphincter. And I graduated highschool without ever going to the cafeteria,where I would have sat with thegirls and been laughed at for doing so, or sat with the boys and been laughed atfor being a boy who should be sitting with the girls.

I survived that childhood through a mix ofavoidance and endurance. What I didn't know then, and do know now, is thatavoidance and endurance can be the entryway to forging meaning.After you'veforged meaning, you need to incorporate that meaning into a new identity. Youneed to take the traumas and make them part of who you've come to be, and youneed to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph, evincinga better self in response to things that hurt.

One of the other mothers I interviewed whenI was working on my book had been raped as an adolescent,and had a childfollowing that rape, which had thrown away her career plans and damaged all ofher emotional relationships. But when I met her, she was 50, and I said to her,"Do you often think about the man who raped you?" And she said,"I used to think about him with anger, but now only with pity." And Ithought she meant pity because he was so un evolved as to have done this terriblething. And I said, "Pity?" And she said,"Yes, because he has abeautiful daughter and two beautiful grand children and he doesn't know that, andI do. So as it turns out, I'm the lucky one."

Some of our struggles are things we're bornto: our gender, our sexuality, our race, our disability. And some are thingsthat happen to us: being a political prisoner, being a rape victim, being aKatrina survivor. Identity involves entering a community to draw strength fromthat community, and to give strength there too. It involve ssubstituting "and"for "but" -- not "I am here but I have cancer," but rather,"I have cancer and I am here."

When we're ashamed, we can't tell ourstories, and stories are the foundation of identity. Forge meaning, buildidentity, forge meaning and build identity. That became my mantra. Forgingmeaning is about changing yourself. Building identity is about changing theworld. All of us with stigmatized identities face this question daily: how muchto accommodate society by constraining ourselves, and how much to break thelimits of what constitutes a valid life? Forging meaning and building identitydoes not make what was wrong right. It only makes what was wrong precious.

In January of this year,I went to Myanmarto interview political prisoners, and I was surprised to find them less bitterthan I'd anticipated. Most of them had knowingly committed the offenses that landedthem in prison, and they had walked in with their heads held high, and theywalked out with their heads still held high, many years later. Dr. Ma Thida, aleading human rights activist who had nearly died in prison and had spent manyyears in solitary confinement, told me she was grateful to her jailers for thetime she had had to think, for the wisdom she had gained, for the chance to honeher meditation skills. She had sought meaning and made her travail into acrucial identity. But if the people I met were less bitter than I'd anticipatedabout being in prison, they were also less thrilled than I'd expected about thereform process going on in their country. Ma Thida said, "We Burmese arenoted for our tremendous grace under pressure, but we also have grievance underglamour," she said,"and the fact that there have been these shiftsand changes doesn't erase the continuing problems in our society that we learnedto see so well while we were in prison."

And I understood her to be saying thatconcessions confer only a little humanity, where full humanity is due, thatcrumbs are not the same as a place at the table, which is to say you can forgemeaning and build identity and still be mad as hell.

I've never been raped,and I've never beenin anything remotely approaching a Burmese prison, but as a gay American, I'veexperienced prejudice and even hatred, and I've forged meaning and I've builtidentity, which is a move I learned from people who had experienced far worseprivation than I've ever known. In my own adolescence, I went to extreme lengthsto try to be straight. I enrolled myself in something called sexual surrogacytherapy, in which people I was encouraged to call doctors prescribed what I wasencouraged to call exercises with women I was encouraged to call surrogates, whowere not exactly prostitutes but who were also not exactly anything else.(Laughter) My particular favorite was a blonde woman from the Deep South whoeventually admitted to me that she was really an ecrophiliac and had taken thisjob after she got in trouble down at the morgue. (Laughter)

These experiences eventually allowed me tohave some happy physical relationships with women, for which I'm grateful, but Iwas at war with myself, and I dug terrible wound sin to my own psyche.

We don't seek the painful experiences thathew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painfulexperiences. We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain ifwe believe that it's purposeful. Ease makes less of an impression on us thanstruggle. We could have been ourselves without our delights, but not without themisfortunes that drive our search for meaning. "Therefore, I take pleasurein infirmities," St. Paul wrote in Second Corinthians,"for when I amweak, then I am strong."

In 1988, I went to Moscow to interviewartists of the Soviet underground, and I expected their work to bed issident andpolitical. But the radicalism in their work actually lay inre inserting humanityinto a society that was annihilating humanity itself, as,in some senses,Russian society is now doing again. One of the artists I met said to me,"We were in training to be not artists but angels."

In 1991, I went back to see the artists I'dbeen writing about, and I was with them during the putsch that ended the SovietUnion, and they were among the chief organizers of there sistance to thatputsch. And on the third day of the putsch, one of them suggested we walk up toSmolen skaya. And we went there, and we arranged ourselves in front of one of thebarricades, and a little while later, a column of tanks rolled up, and thesoldier on the front tank said, "We have unconditional orders to destroythis barricade. If you get out of the way, we don't need to hurt you, but if youwon't move, we'll have no choice but to run you down." And the artists Iwas with said, "Give us just a minute.Give us just a minute to tell youwhy we're here." And the soldier folded his arms, and the artist launchedinto a Jeffersonian panegyric to democracy such as those of us who live in aJeffersonian democracy would be hard-pressed to present. And they went on andon, and the soldier watched, and then he sat there for a full minute after theywere finished and looked at us so bedraggled in the will of the people. If you'llclear enough space for us to turn around, we'll go back the way we came."And that's what they did. Sometimes, forging meaning can give you the vocabularyyou need to fight for your ultimate freedom.

Russia awakened me to the lemonade notionthat oppression breeds the power to oppose it, and I gradually understood thatas the cornerstone of identity. It took identity to rescue me from sadness. Thegay rights movement posits a world in which my aberrances area victory.Identity politics always works on two fronts: to give pride to people who have agiven condition or characteristic, and to cause the outside world to treat suchpeople more gently and more kindly. Those are two totally separate enterprises,but progress in each sphere reverberates in the other.Identity politics can benarcissistic. People extol a difference only because it's theirs. People narrowthe world and function in discrete groups without empathy for one another. Butproperly understood and wisely practiced, identity politics should expand ouridea of what it is to be human. Identity itself should be not a smug label or agold medal but a revolution.

I would have had an easier life if I werestraight, but I would not be me, and I now like being myself better than theidea of being someone else, someone who, to be honest, I have neither the optionof being nor the ability fully to imagine. But if you banish the dragons, youbanish the heroes, and we become attached to the heroics train in our own lives.I've sometimes wondered whether I could have ceased to hate that part of myselfwithout gay pride's technicolor fiesta, of which this speech is onemanifestation. I used to think I would know myself to be mature when I couldsimply be gay without emphasis, but the self-loathing of that period left avoid, and celebration needs to fill and overflow it, and even if I  repay myprivate debt of melancholy, there's still an outer world of homophobia that itwill take decades to address. Someday, being gay will be a simple fact, free ofparty hats and blame, but not yet. A friend of mine who thought gay pride wasgetting very carried away with itself, once suggested that we organize GayHumility Week. (Laughter) (Applause) It's a great idea,but its time has not yetcome. (Laughter) And neutrality, which seems to lie halfway between despair andcelebration, is actually the endgame.

In 29 states in the U.S.,I could legally befired or denied housing for being gay. In Russia, the anti-propaganda law hasled to people being beaten in the streets. Twenty-seven African countries havepassed laws against sodomy, and in Nigeria, gay people can legally be stoned todeath, and lynchings have become common. In Saudi Arabia recently, two men whohad been caught in carnal acts, were sentenced to 7,000 lashes each, and are nowpermanently disabled as a result. So who can forge meaning and build identity?Gay rights are not primarily marriage rights,and for the millions who live inun accepting places with no resources, dignityre mains elusive. I am lucky tohave forged meaning and built identity, but that's still a rare privilege, andgay people deserve more collectively than the crumbs of justice.

And yet, every step forward is so sweet. In2007, six years after we met, my partner and I decided to get married. MeetingJohn had been the discovery of great happiness and also the elimination of greatunhappiness, and sometimes, I was so occupied with the disappearance of all thatpain that I forgot about the joy, which was at first the less remarkable part ofit to me. Marrying was a way to declare our love a smore a presence than anabsence.

Marriage soon led us to children, and thatmeant new meanings and new identities, ours and theirs. I want my children to behappy, and I love them most achingly when they are sad.As a gay father, I canteach them to own what is wrong in their lives, but I believe that if I succeedin sheltering them from adversity, I will have failed as a parent. A Buddhistscholar I know once explained to me that Westerners mistakenly think thatnirvana is what arrives when all your woe is behind you and you have only blissto look forward to. But he said that would not be nirvana, because your bliss inthe present would always be shadowed by the joy from the past. Nirvana, he said,is what you arrive at when you have only bliss to look forward to and find inwhat looked like sorrows the seedlings of your joy. And I sometimes wonderwhether I could have found such fulfillment in marriage and children if they'dcome more readily, if I'd been straight in my youth or were young now, in eitherof which cases this might be easier. Perhaps I could. Perhaps all the compleximagining I've done could have been applied to other topics. But if seekingmeaning matters more than finding meaning, the question is not whether I'd behappier for having been bullied, but whether assigning meaning to thoseexperiences has made me a better father. I tend to find the ecstasy hidden inordinary joys, because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me.

I know many heterosexuals who have equallyhappy marriages and families, but gay marriage is so breathta kingly fresh, andgay families so exhilara tingly new, and I found meaning in that surprise.

In October, it was my 50th birthday, and myfamily organized a party for me, and in the middle of it,my son said to myhusband that he wanted to make a speech, and John said,"George, you can'tmake a speech. You're four." (Laughter) "Only Grandpa and Uncle Davidand I are going to make speeches tonight." But George insisted andinsisted, and finally, John took him up to the microphone,and George said veryloudly, "Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please." Andeveryone turned around, startled. And George said,"I'm glad it's Daddy'sbirthday. I'm glad we all get cake. And daddy, if you were little, I'd be yourfriend."

And I thought — Thank you. I thought that Iwas indebted even to Bobby Finkel, because all those earlier experiences werewhat had propelled me to this moment, and I was finally unconditionally gratefulfor a life I'd once have done anything to change.

The gay activist Harvey Milk was once askedby a younger gay man what he could do to help the movement,and Harvey Milksaid, "Go out and tell someone." There's always somebody who wants toconfiscate our humanity, and there are always stories that restore it. If welive out loud, we can trounce the hatred and expand everyone's lives.

Forge meaning. Build identity. Forgemeaning. Build identity. And then invite the world to share your joy.

Thank you.