Solomon

Andrew Solomon has written two great books that taught me a great deal about the wounded world in which we live and the wounded bodies we inhabit too. The Noonday Demon is "an atlas of depression" and Far From the Tree an epic collection of narrative and lit review about children and parents with "horizontal identities" from one another (including chapters about transgender children, autistic children, etc, etc--each chapter focuses on some type of significant difference and the familial experiences that result). He's an amazing writer, to be sure.

Nicole shared this TED talk to me in which Solomon sums up some key ideas from Far From the Tree but with a more personal bent, drawing on his own stories of being a bullied, gay kid growing up. Trauma is part of our narratives, he says. His point, I think, is that we all need to get busy "assigning meaning to those experiences." He calls this process "forging meaning" and it's a process wherein we don't assimilate to the bullshit world but rather establish go out and transform--by sharing joy, by changing what needs to be changed, and by being visibly different when that is who we are and that's what the world needs to see.