Fear is not as terrifying as humiliation
Once again the book that I'm reading this month made me rethink truths about life that I accepted as something concrete before analyzing why I thought of it that way. This time it was the classic stephen king’s “IT”, i’m on a mission to read at least the most famous of his books after one of my friends that is a huge fan got me into “Revival” and that shit changed me for life, IT is as good as revival and bigger! I love novels, i love getting attached to the characters, to commit to something for weeks and feel that emptiness when it’s over, it was a perfect choice of book for my college break and i’m really mourning all of my teenage years spent on not being a fiction reader, I could have found that in 2018 and getting into the whole fandom thing that came with the movies when it was huge. It’s okay i’m used to being late to all the things I like, it sort of feels like being too early, there’s not many people left so it is a small thing, but it’s better than being early because all the people that left, contributed in they’re time, and now i have this huge amount of fandom content to consume plus the official stuff, i’m having so much fun! Back to the self realization thing, to expand my thoughts on the matter, first here’s the part of my review immediately after finishing the novel that I need to expand on. I made one of these for all the characters. I really love them all, but Stan is something I can’t explain:
I LOVE STANLEY URIS, perfect character, adorable little thing. At the beginning I couldn’t care less about him being there, he even seemed like a supporting character sometimes. His individual arcs didn’t move me, but then, suddenly, without me realizing it, subtly, I started noticing his presence even when he wasn’t saying anything. I could paint the images described in my head and, even while staring at words on a page, with him not making himself present in any of them, in any line of dialogue, I could feel that he was there. Kind of bizarre. I started noticing that he was the most mature kid of the Losers. Bill was the leader because, as Georgie says at the beginning of the book, “he can see things,” but Stan’s rational side was surprisingly greater than any of theirs, including Bill’s. A silent leader. He won my heart when I connected one of his lines to the suicide he would commit in the future.
“You can live with fear, I think, Stan would have said if he could. Maybe not forever, but for a long, long time. It’s offense you maybe can’t live with, because it opens up a crack inside your thinking, and if you look down into it you see there are live things down there, and they have little yellow eyes that don’t blink, and there’s a stink down in that dark, and after awhile you think maybe there’s a whole other universe down there, a universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some of them have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything, he would have told them if he could. Go to your church and listen to your stories about Jesus walking on the water, but if I saw a guy doing that I’d scream and scream and scream. Because it wouldn’t look like a miracle to me. It would look like an offense.”
It’s such a rationalized thought, such a meticulous and terrifyingly adult line of reasoning for a child to have, and I felt such a huge sympathy for him. I, as a fellow kid who also had suicidal episodes induced by the terror of the divine unknown, in my case out of fear and not pride, still felt that identification I mentioned up there. He couldn’t accept the idea that everything he was so certain about was wrong, that, if something like that could exist, then his entire existence and everything he knew could be put into question. It was HUMILIATION. He also lived by the rules of his own religion and, at some moments, seems to imply that he feels, at least unconsciously, a little trapped by it. Accepting that that thing was real meant accepting that what held him back might not be, and that doesn’t just scare him, it makes him look like an idiot.
He also mentions a few times that he can handle fear, but he can’t handle being dirty. He really had such a huge disgust for humiliation that he’d rather die. A lot of people might see this kind of attitude as pride and pettiness, I think it’s synonymous with integrity and wisdom. It’s knowing yourself extremely well and being true to your essence until the very end. That was who he was. That was what offended him, and offense is the one thing he couldn’t endure. He knew himself well enough to know that his limit was never death, his limit was going back to Derry and getting dirty again. I don’t know, he became my comfort character. Divine little guy, completely autistic coded. I’m with him until the very end in this! I fucking love you, Stan Uris. You’re my goat, and you weren’t a coward, you were brave and you did keep your promise. You were there because you were inside all of them, and, because even if you weren’t in all of them, Bev saw you, so you were at least in her, and that is enough.
This got to me really deeply because everytime someone asked for my flaws and qualities, the first flaw I listed was fear, “I’m kinda of a coward”, I overthink, I always expect the worse and that paralyzes me, that stops me from living, always trying to prevent disasters, sadness and suffering, even though it’s impossible. At least I thought of it that way, now I don’t think that’s entirely true, it’s not just an anxiety and hypervigilant thing, my fear also, and most of the time, comes as a means to protect myself from embarrassment. I cannot analyze myself on a deeper level to understand where this panic of making a fool of myself comes from, I guess it could be from being someone easy to embarrass, minorities and all of that, the need to be better not for yourself but for your equals that suffer from the same things. That is where the “autistic coded” part of Stan that I got also gets to me. He, although part of a group of outcasts, has the most routines, problems with sensorial things like that part:
“I’m all right!” Stan said loudly, still crying. “I can stand to be scared, but I hate being dirty like this, I hate not knowing where I am—”
I know it’s only a headcanon but simple things like this make you relate to a well written character. My fixation in not hiding but proving that being who I am, how I am, I can still do things and not be the joke, it’s proving that people like me can as well, even though some of them don’t have the means to do so, also is in an ugly way, proving that I'm better than them. It’s hard to live under some stereotypes relating your neural functions, the way you as a person that thinks, work. So involuntarily, I tend to prove that I don’t fit those stereotypes, that I’m different and more capable than other autistic people, when in reality I share most of the symptoms of the disorder with most of them. There’s no way to prevent being the subject of the bullying, the joke, the failure, the embarrassment, when all the things around you are built not to accommodate you, but to use you as a scape goat, the example of who not to be to be a functional person.
Apart from the neurological disorder side of things, I, Stan and a lot of other people that are perceived as being only introspective, too worried, too calculative, put together, even a loser, are people that just have this aversion to being in a place where the attention is on you for a period of time not for a good reason. Not just aversion, that anyone has, we can’t STAND, we can’t get over this situations, it ends in the material world but not in our heads, it goes on forever, you are in that scene FOREVER, that is your punishment, you can’t forget, yet can’t live with the memories. Stan killed himself because he couldn't stand humiliation. “It” humiliated him, the memories came back, and while all the others that only felt fear also got them back, only he couldn't live with it. Even if he got to kill the thing, nothing would guarantee that he would forget after, and the others could take the risk of remembering, because the fear would have ended, they defeated it, stan’s embarrassment would follow him forever. It doesn't end with you killing your monsters, the feeling you felt in the time it’s what will always be, even things you are not embarrassed by anymore, if in the time you were, the memory will be forever humiliating.