It sounds a bit embarrassing to write, but my life, a big chunk of it anyway, has been ruined by an orphan with a sunny disposition. There, I said it. How awful of me.
Let me complicate my point. As a child of the 80s, I am no stranger to the redeeming and heart-warming character arcs of countless orphans in the Japanese anime I watched: mistreated by adults (some of which even related to them) and then reinstated on top of the social food chain by virtue of, well, I would like to say their virtues, but beauty also plays a role. Little Princess Sara, Lady Oscar, Heidi, Pippi Longstocking and I am sure I am forgetting some. Pippi is a bit of an outlier, so let us leave her out for the purpose of this post.
These girls were virtuous, beautiful and meek. Meek like lambs. And this, well, this is my problem. Well, one of my problems, and the other problem in the context of this post.
The first problem, which prompted me to title this piece Fuck You, Pollyanna, is her brand of meekness, as exemplified in her signature Glad Game.
Since I watched the anime in Italian, I had no memory of it being called so: the Glad Game. Since my only other post on this platform so far is called the Pain Ledger, and it talks about the family game of enduring pain and extracting pain from your relatives, I was elated. This truly was meant to be my next piece of writing.
The Glad Game is etched in my memory, from that one afternoon after school about 30 years ago. Pollyanna is an orphan. Both parents keeled over before their time because, as genteel born, they could not endure the roughness of a life in poverty. But before being a double orphan, her father managed to impart her a valuable lesson in the form of this damned game: in their destitution they had applied to some charitable organisation to receive a Christmas gift for Pollyanna, who wanted a doll. Instead of a doll, a lady who does not understand the point of gifts (or maybe not when the giftee is a poor girl, who should just be glad of someone bothering to send something her way) sends a pair of crutches, with a message to the effect of “well, you did not ask for them, but given the awful life you lead, you might need them soon”. And the ascetic dad gaslights Pollyanna, asking her if she is not “glad” that she does not, in fact (yet) need them. To rejoice in the use of her legs. Dear reader, she will need a wheelchair by the end of the book.
I am a bit thick at times, but I do understand broadly the point Pollyanna’s father is clumsily trying to make: that we can look for the positive in any circumstance, and often we end up finding it. I do not object to choosing to look for positive omens in our lives. While thinking about writing this, I found and read one brief article about how optimism like the one Pollyanna displays has been denigrated in our times and regarded as an intellectually weak position.
I am not too convinced of this, and it has to do with two conjoined features of characters like Pollyanna. There is always a renunciation to perform, something to give up, and the child exhibits a preternatural ability to surrender an earthly pleasure, an uncanny willingness to “take the high road”. And all this renouncing, all this existing on a higher plane, is done by females. By virginal girls with a pure heart.
And this is the second problem I have with Pollyanna.
A few bells should start ringing by now, and not only for me, born in a Catholic country and in an era where I could not opt out of religion at school (I mean, I could, and I did, but I still had to sit in the class with everybody else since they had no other place to park me during that hour).
A young girl, not a child, a female minor, shorthand for the most defenceless among the defenceless, of, if not beauty, angelic aspect, is willingly, with no fuss, no tears, no pause, giving up an earthly possession, or an idea of a possession, or the status that would enable such a possession, because some people with more power than her have forgotten, misunderstood, chosen for them.
Male orphan anime characters did and do exist. What they tend to do, though, is to fight back, become avengers and generally raise hell. I cannot recall any boy who acquiesced to be put in a corner, or a dusty attic, or a broom cupboard (count me out of the Potterfandom).
Pollyanna taught me, or this is the lesson that I gleaned from it and seemed to agree with what the world around me was telling me, that your needs and desires can be overrun, that they are truly a bit silly and self-indulgent, that the lack of care and effort from the others was to be accepted, and that, crucially, someone else has it worse. This particular cluster of teachings explains so much of my choices (or lack thereof).
I do not think Pollyanna really taught me all of these things just in that one pilot episode, but it reinforced the ethos I was building in emulation of my environment: do not burden the others with your needs, disavow them if this makes your caretakers uncomfortable (because they failed to meet them), make do with a passing thought, a pair of used crutches, and be content that life has not beaten you into needing them (yet).
Because ostensibly other people have always had it harder than me (I am a white woman in the first world, and millions of other human beings can honestly say they have it worse every minute of every day), I never allowed myself to say, to myself and to others, that in truth I had it bad: that my silent car rides were full-blown panic attacks (much like the TARDIS, they felt much bigger on the inside, about the size of impending death). I never spelled out all the tiny moments of abandonment that the people who said they loved me allowed themselves with me.
I allowed my husband to tell me he was staying with me only because of the financial security I provided. I let that slip, and did not feel incensed about it.
Because, you see, someone’s husband was beating them raw while mine was only insensitive. Someone was always having it worse than me the very moment I was feeling the worst I had ever felt. And this was true, AND this still is true, AND I was and I am still hurting AND pain does not come with a jeweller’s scale.
Last year, I bought my child a CD reader and two books of fairy tales with CDs, the same stories my dad had listened to on vinyl and I on cassette. I was elated to share with her Puss in Boots. And it was great. And yet, interspersed with the stories I remembered, there were a few I had not bargained for: an innocent girl sequestered by a king to spin gold from hay (thanks to the tall tales told by her father) who signs away her firstborn son to get out of this ordeal alive. A little girl selling matches on a cold winter evening, who slowly dies in the cold of the night, lighting match after match, as the people inside the homes are merrymaking. And the worst story of all: a little girl who loses her will to live and lies neatly resigned in her bed under the roof, in peace with the idea of dying and warmly consoling her mother while she does so.
Some of these stories are old, but the original recordings of this version are from the 60s. The meek acquiescence, the making oneself little and compliant, even during the process of dying, the not asking for help because that would not do, it would incommodate someone, someone more deserving, speaks of an Italy that was so deeply Catholic and so suspicious of a woman who believes she deserves to live, kick a ball in the courtyard, get a square meal and maybe even a second helping, be treated as deserving in the public scene, just cause.
And some of this ethos is the same I absorbed in the religion teachings I was not supposed to sit in as a child, in all the anime heroines who suffered for three seasons to be redeemed only in the final episode, only when they had already adapted and resigned to their diminished life. This reward after you have given up feels so much like heaven, ‘the meek will inherit the earth’ kind of retoric that pushes enjoyment past the body, past the moment, past even the self.
All the women my age (and older) I know have played a version of the Glad Game, along with the Make Yourself Smaller and Agreeable Game, the Forgive and Forget Game, and my favourite: the Your Pain Is All in Your Head, Dear Game.
I have desires, and I have needs, and if they get disregarded, this pains me. And I want the people who say they love me to deal with them: not to accommodate me endlessly, but to acknowledge they exist, take space in my head, in my body, demand (from me in primis) satisfaction and might incommodate or encroach on their needs and desires, and that this is OK. This is what we developed our communication skills for. We can talk about conflicting needs and desires.
As a woman, as a mother, as a former wife, I have made the lifelong commitment to stop being glad that I did not need the crutches, that my husband did not hit me, that the company I worked for did not openly discriminate against me. I am not glad. I needed more, and I did not get it, and I will not pretend that the absence of the worst is the presence of enough.