Sticks and Stones

Part one of two. On judgment, and the strange arithmetic of being told you're better than the boy who just broke you

I was bullied at school. Often. I was the sensitive, musical boy in a school full of rugby players, in a country that had very fixed ideas about what a boy was for, and the other boys could smell the difference on me the way children always can.

When I came home with it, my mother had a ritual. Two sentences, always in the same order.

The first: sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never harm you.

The second: besides, it doesn't matter. You're better than them.

I must have heard that pairing a hundred times, and it took me fifty years to notice that the two sentences don't agree with each other. The first one claims there's no wound. Words can't hurt you; nothing happened here. The second one hands me medicine. And you don't medicate a wound that doesn't exist. The comfort was the confession. She knew perfectly well that words were the entire weapon, because she was reaching for words to treat the injury.

She also had the proverb exactly backwards, and so does everyone who says it. The bone would have knitted; that much is true. But a body that has been attacked keeps the record long after the plaster comes off, and the words that came with the attack keep it longer still. Nothing in that playground rhyme was ever going to leave me. I can prove it: I can still hear every syllable of what those boys called me, and I can still hear, more clearly than any of it, the sound of my mother's cure.

Because the cure is the part that did the lasting damage. Not the bullies. Her.

That sentence looks harsh sitting on the page, and I want to be careful with it, because she was not being cruel. She was being a mother with one medicine in the cabinet, and she gave me all of it. But you're better than them is not comfort. It's a training. And I want to take it apart properly, because I've come to believe it's the same training half of us got, in one dialect or another, and it runs further down into judgment, blame, and the way we speak to ourselves than almost anything else we're handed as children.

The stick

Start with what should never need saying: a child arrives worthy. Worth is the factory setting. No infant ever earned their lovability, and none was ever meant to. Whatever else gets layered on top, that's the ground floor.

Judgment is the thing that teaches a child otherwise. And judgment, I've learned, is not really about other people. It's a measuring stick, and the stick has only two ends. Terry Real gave me the language for this: shame at one end, I am less than, and grandiosity at the other, I am better than. We talk about them as opposites. They're not. They are the same instrument held two ways round, and the moment you're on the stick at all, you're in trouble, because every position on it has to be defended, and any position on it can be lost.

Brené Brown draws the other line I need here, the one between shame and guilt. Guilt says I did a bad thing. Shame says I am a bad thing. Guilt points at behaviour, which means guilt can repair. Shame points at the self, and the self can't be repaired by feeling worse about it, so shame just circles. Hold those two lines together and you can see the whole machine: shame is unbearable to stand in, so people bounce, and the nearest exit is the other end of the stick.

My mother was bounced long before I existed. I don't know her whole story and it isn't mine to tell. What I know is that when her boy came home broken, she couldn't sit with him in the one-down position, so she did what she'd learned to do with her own pain: she moved us both to the one-up end and called it better. You're better than them was her escape route, handed down. She wasn't lying to me. She was medicating both of us with the only medicine she had.

The country that said it too

Here's the part that took me longest to see: my mother wasn't the only one saying it. I was born in 1971, in apartheid South Africa, into a state that had taken you're better than them and written it into law. Park benches, classrooms, provincial borders, marriage. A whole country built one-up, with the machinery of government defending the position.

And I want to be precise about what that was, using the language this essay has already laid down: apartheid was grandiosity with a legislature. A society of people managing something unbearable in themselves by legislating the stick, so that one group of children would be trained onto the better-than end of it before they could talk. I was one of those children. The training my mother gave me at the kitchen table, the country gave me in the air I breathed. I was trained twice, in the same lesson, by two authorities I loved and trusted.

What did the training feel like from the inside? That's the question people ask, and my answer unsettles them: it felt like nothing. I don't remember the signs on the benches. I don't remember slegs blankes, whites only, though it was painted on the furniture of my entire childhood. I never questioned why, in a year group of seventy, the Black children could be counted on one hand. And I never questioned the words we used at home, though the words were doing half the work. Maria, the woman who helped raise us, we called our maid. The grown man who kept the garden, my parents called the garden boy. Together they were the servants. That was the vocabulary I was handed along with my table manners, and it did what it was designed to do: it turned people into functions. A maid is not a woman with a life being spent on yours. A garden boy is not a man. The grammar of the house had already decided who counted, and I learned it the way I learned everything else at that age, without noticing I was learning anything.

When he wasn't in the garden, that man waited on us at the dinner table, serving from the left, in white gloves. A grown adult, gloved, serving children. And when we children raised something at that table my father didn't want discussed, he had a phrase for closing it down: not in front of the servants, Adrian. I've turned that sentence over many times since. It performed discretion, as if the concern were politeness. What it actually policed was the fiction. The people in the white gloves were to remain furniture, and furniture doesn't hear, and nothing could be said that acknowledged there were listeners in the room, because listeners are people, and the entire arrangement depended on not conceding that. My father wasn't hiding information from Maria. He was hiding, from all of us at once, the fact that she was there.

That's what a successful training looks like. It doesn't feel like ideology. It doesn't feel like anything at all. It's just how things are, the way furniture is how things are.

My parents kept it that way deliberately, and I've had to sit with the fact that they did it out of love. They had friends whose children learned the truth, became activists, and had to flee the country. So the truth became a danger to be managed, and I was protected from reality the way other children are protected from traffic. Fear did the curating. I lived inside a propaganda so complete that I didn't learn what my own country was until I was a grown man standing in the newly opened Apartheid Museum, next to my then-wife, a woman born and raised in Gloucestershire, discovering that she knew more about the place I was formed in than I did. She'd grown up inside a truth that was allowed to be told. I'd grown up inside a story, and the story had been built specifically so that boys like me would never have to feel what was being done in our name. I stood in that museum appalled twice over: once at what I was reading, and once at the realisation that it was news to me.

There was one crack in it, and I've never forgotten it. Every year my father flew the family down to the coast for our holidays while he drove the car. And he flew Maria down too, which made no sense to me, because my father watched every rand. So I asked him why. And he tried to explain, to a child, that he was not allowed to be seen travelling alone with a Black woman, that if they crossed a provincial boundary together in the car they could both be arrested. I remember the unease of that answer far more clearly than the words. Something was wrong with the world, and the adults knew it, and the arrangement was that nobody said so. I had no way to hold that at the time. It just sat in me, unexamined, for decades.

I left at thirty and moved to the UK, and only then, from the outside, did how things are become visible as something that had been built. And here is where I have to use my own essay's machinery on myself, because the feeling that arrives with all of this is heavy, and I've had to learn to check which kind it is. I am a bad thing for having been formed there is shame, and shame just circles; it repairs nothing and it makes the whole subject about my discomfort, which is one more way of keeping myself at the centre. I benefited, I never questioned it, and I corrected nothing for thirty years is guilt. Guilt points at what was done and not done, which means guilt can get to work. I'm no longer interested in feeling bad about South Africa. Feeling bad is cheap. What I'm interested in is the accounting: I was trained into better-than by a mother and a state, the training worked, and the cost was carried by people who served my childhood six days a week while I didn't ask why.

The maintenance payments

Here's what nobody tells you about being trained onto the better-than end of the stick: the position doesn't come freehold. It comes with rent, and the rent never stops.

A child who is simply worthy has nothing to defend. A child who is better than has everything to defend, because comparative worth is the only kind that can be lost. So the boy who was handed grandiosity as a painkiller grew into a man who spent decades servicing the position. The bigger car. The bigger house. Each one bought, I'd have told you at the time, because I'd earned it, because I liked it, because that's what doing well looks like. I can see the invoices now for what they were. They were maintenance payments on an address I couldn't afford to lose: one rung up, wherever the ladder happened to be standing.

And the daily servicing was judgment. I became one of the most judgmental people I have ever met. I judged by accent, within seconds of someone opening their mouth. I judged by education, by schools, by the vocabulary that signals which one you went to. I judged by privilege and, with equal fluency, by the lack of it. I want to be accurate about the experience of this, because from the inside it never once felt like judgment. It felt like discernment. Taste. Standards. Reading people well. The stick had been in my hand so long it felt like a limb.

What I couldn't see, and what took me half a lifetime to see, is the arithmetic of it. A stick measures in both directions. Every time I placed someone below me, I confirmed that placing was how worth worked, and a man who believes placing is how worth works can never stop placing himself. The judge doesn't get to leave the courtroom. So the same instrument that sorted strangers by their vowels was running on me, all day, without mercy: every room I entered, every man doing better, every sign that the position was slipping. My judgment of others was never really about them. It was the sound of my own trial, running in permanent session, prosecuting a case that had been opened decades earlier by a boy who came home from school broken and was told the wound didn't exist.

That's the true cost of you're better than them. It doesn't protect a child's worth. It replaces it. Worth that was his by birthright, unconditional, unlosable, gets swapped for a ranking, and a ranking is a debt. I paid on that debt for decades and called the payments success.

The question I'm handing you

I've taken this essay as far as the formation: a boy trained onto the stick twice, by a kitchen table and a country, and a man who spent decades paying the position's rent and calling it success. What I haven't touched yet is what the stick does under pressure. Judgment at leisure is one thing, the accents, the rankings, the trial running in the background. But when something breaks, when the phone rings on a Saturday morning with real pain on the line, the same machinery runs at emergency speed, and it goes by a different name. I'll give you the name, and the Saturday morning that taught me I'm still not free of it, in the next essay. Fair warning: it doesn't flatter me.

For now, the question belongs to you, and it's the one this whole piece has been walking toward.

Somebody trained you onto the stick too. Somewhere, someone who loved you handed you a better than or a less than and called it comfort, and you've been paying its maintenance ever since, in judgments that feel like discernment, in standards that feel like taste, in a courtroom that never quite adjourns. You'll know the training by its speed: the verdicts that arrive before thought.

What did your better than cost you, and who sent the invoice?