Design your own emotional epaulets

"My face is a gift, because my shadow side is on the outside, where I have had to deal with it. Paradoxically, I have been made whole through (and with) what originally seemed to be my flaws." –David Roche

My husband, John, and I were amusing ourselves at lunch yesterday with a conversation about something we called "emotional epaulets." (What can I say? We obviously need to get out more).

What would happen, we wondered, if people had to walk around wearing emotional medals on themselves, like so many military epaulets, thick gold fringe swinging as they saunter to the mailbox or to the gas pump? (Come to think of it, I actually knew a man who did almost exactly that. At trade shows and conferences, he was beribboned to the floor, festoons of color hanging from his name tag, giving people information at-a-glance about his roles and importance.)

But John and I were thinking of something more, something that people would have to wear daily, not just at conferences, to indicate all manner of information about themselves: their past illnesses, heartbreaks, deaths of friends and family, hopes and fears – all would be made into brightly colored medals and ribbons to be worn on their clothing. Like so many generals and girl scouts, we would make our way through grocery stores, bookshops and airports, gold stripes around the bottoms of our sleeves indicating each 5 years of life. Little red apples would make clear our educational level. Jungle gyms with the appropriate number of swings could show how many kids we had. Different geometric shapes of various colors would announce our sexual orientations, and we could wear little silver doors at varying stages of openness to indicate our disabilities. Our IQ could be shown in flashing neon lights near our head somewhere; the kind of car we drive by finely crafted dollar signs (or Yen or Euros), and the size of our mortgage would be represented by replicas of those portly little bankers from the Monopoly game. Just imagine the medals for cholesterol level and credit rating! Surgeries could be indicated by tiny little scalpels, and empty, miniature gold-plated boxes could show how lonely we are. Like the ill-conceived color-coded national threat warning system in the U.S., we could have alerts for how approachable we are at any given time: red for "don’t even try," yellow for "proceed with caution," and green for "talk! I’m listening!" (This, actually, could be quite helpful on planes, but I digress).

David Roche, in effect, has walked around his whole life with his inside stuff on the outside, watching people turn away from him as a result. In October 1999, I was invited to the White House for a powerful evening of performances by artists with disabilities, one of whom was Roche, a comic monologist and pastor of the "Church of 80 Percent Sincerity."  "He has the most severe facial deformities I’ve ever seen," writes his friend (and my favorite writer) Anne Lamott. Her description is apt. He is hard to look at, at first.

As he describes it: "I am facially disfigured. Laced along and on and through the left side of my face, head and neck, extending into my soft palate and airway, is a benign congenital tumor consisting of my own engorged and tangled veins and capillaries. My left cheek is tuberous and misshapen. My dark bluish-purple tongue is twice normal size. My face is marked by surgeries. In early 1945, when I was 15 months old, my lower lip was removed. The radiation I received as a baby caused the lower part of my face to stop growing and left me with only half a dozen teeth. At one point, small gold capsules containing radioactive radon gas were implanted in my head. I am a fascinoma. That is the medical term for someone possessing an unusual condition that doctors typically find both fascinating and instructive."

Roche is one of the most powerful performers I’ve ever seen. Funny and real, he talked about his face as a gift "because my shadow side-my difficulty and challenge-is on the outside, where I have been forced to deal with it." We all have a shadow side, but most of us can hide it, he says. As Lamott noted, "he spoke of the hidden scary scarred parts inside us all, the soul disfigurement, the fear deep inside that we’re unacceptable." 

She wrote about a performance of his that she attended: "The children, mostly sitting in the front rows, get him right away. Maybe they don’t have so many other overlays yet, of armor and prejudice so Spirit can reach out and grab them faster. Maybe it’s partly that they’re sitting so close, but whatever the reason, they gaze up at him like he’s a rock star. ‘I look different to you now, right?’ he asked them when he was done, and they nodded, especially the teenagers."

David Roche wears his epaulets on the outside everyday. Thankfully, most of us don’t have to. But if we did, what would they look like?

A colleague, Nancy Green, mused recently about conference badges and the ways in which the ribbons indicate the achievers (and I might add, the overachievers), the doers, the leaders, the contributors (the photo above is from the same site). What would happen, she wrote, if instead of ribbons with honorary titles on them, we were to "decorate our badges with symbols of who we were as people. With adjectives that described our work style. With stickers that reflected our hobbies."

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

Be a kid again: get out the stickers, colored paper, pictures from magazines, scissors, and glue stick. Design your emotional epaulets and wear them around, try them on for size – or create a name badge for yourself that reflects who you really are, from the inside out. Now create one that reflects who you really want to be. Consider the difference.