Human Principles

When I was in first grade, Mrs. Kauble told us to draw a map of our neighborhood. Jimmy Christian, who lived in a trailer park a few roads over from my house and rode the same bus as me, wasn’t happy about this. He had to draw at least forty little rectangles plus all the sidewalks and paths and driveways and roads that connected them.

“It’s not fair,” Jimmy said.

To which Mrs. Kauble responded: “The world is unfair, Jimmy.”

I felt for him. I felt for him because I was the kind of child who spent a lot of time taking on the burdensome feelings of others as though they were my own. I was a fraternal twin. My brain had developed under what I have come to call the same-same principle. Freud probably has a name for it too. Maybe something like Triple Backwards Projection Transference Disorder. My sister-inlaw once called it my equality narrative, and I’m pretty sure she did not mean that in a nice way.

This meant that if my brother Zach didn’t want to go feed the neighbor’s rabbits with me because the last time we fed them we discovered all the babies had been eaten by their mother, I walked down the road alone carrying his dread. Initially, I had felt only a wild curiosity about the latest litter of bunnies. I hoped they were still alive, of course, but I did not dread the discovery. Until I did—because my brother felt it and, I decided, so should I.

These feelings also had a way of sneaking up on me with other people. So when Jimmy felt indignant, I did too, especially since I was guilty of having a neighborhood map much simpler than his. This really brings to light the inauthenticity of my same-same emotional tendencies, which, I am now convinced, have less to do with true empathy and more to do with a kind of self-preserving denial of difference. Taking on the burdensome feelings of others meant that I could trick myself into thinking I was the same as any other person—or, for that matter, any other animal or reptile or bird I encountered. I could then avoid the inevitably lonesome fact that Jimmy and I were not the same. Or, even worse, that I someday might feel something that my twin brother would not also feel, and thus be left to grapple with my unique emotional conundrums all alone.

Jimmy was right: it wasn’t fair. My map was easy. Five tiny houses, a one-room cottage, one yurt, a mobile home, three large sheep pastures, Mean Old Ratliff’s strawberry field, Yvette’s neglected plum orchard, and a couple of dilapidated prune-picking shacks were all that made up dusty Fruitway Road, where I lived with Zach and Mom and Dad in the tiny town of Alvadore, Oregon. But, I realized, if I had to draw all the animals that lived there, it would probably take me at least as long as Jimmy Christian. To even the score, I began drawing sheep.

“You don’t need to draw the animals, Camas,” Mrs. Kauble said.

“What about the humans?”

“You don’t need to draw the humans either.”

Which didn’t make much sense to me—what was a neighborhood without its humans? And, more importantly, what was our particular cast of humans without its very particular cast of animals?

I didn’t want to get in trouble, so I set to work on a bird’s-eye view of everything else. After the main road that ran through Alvadore, I turned my pencil line ninety degrees east to draw our dirt road, and then arrived at Yvette’s grand old house, which lorded over the entrance to our neighborhood. Yvette owned the plum orchard—way more land than the rest of us—so her house seemed like the royal palace to our modest, commoner quarters. Yvette, a cranky, Lilliputian woman who wore green cat-eye glasses, bright floral cotton shirts, and pink polyester...