Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma.... — Diane Arbus

Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.

Author: Diane Arbus

Insight: There's something counterintuitive here that stops you cold: Arbus is suggesting that people marked by difference or difficulty actually have an advantage, not a disadvantage. They didn't get to choose their trial. But because they got it early and couldn't avoid it, they've already done the work that most people spend their whole lives anxious about. Think about how much mental energy we waste bracing for the worst. We imagine catastrophe, plan escape routes, build armor. We treat hardship like a debt we haven't paid yet. But people who grew up visibly different, disabled, poor, or otherwise outside the norm couldn't do that. They couldn't pretend they were safe. Their "trauma"—really, their difference—was immediate and undeniable. Which means they got to stop waiting and start actually living. There's almost a freedom in that, if you can see it. Not freedom from pain, obviously. But freedom from the exhausting fantasy that you'll somehow avoid difficulty entirely. That you'll get to be normal and therefore untested. Arbus saw in outsiders a kind of maturity that comes only from having already faced what most people fear. They'd already become who they were going to be.

Source: An Aperture Monograph, p. 50, 1972