In February 2007, Lisa Nowak was arrested after driving from Houston to Orlando to assault a woman in a romantic rivalry over a man. So intent was she on getting there that she even wore diapers so she wouldn’t have to take bathroom breaks on the way.
That story falls into the category of bizarre things humans do, but one facet that made the story especially surprising was that Nowak belonged to the elite group of highly screened people who make up our national space-shuttle crews. If before hearing this news, we’d had to guess what sort of a woman would engage in this strange behavior, our first thought would not have been of a member of the astronaut corps. Maybe a lady mud-wrestler or a roller-derby queen, but not an astronaut (pardon the stereotyping).
Nowak belonged to a group who, despite their out-of-this-world mission, are assumed to have their feet planted firmly on the ground, so the news surprised us. But it’s also likely that if, a year earlier, we had told Ms. Nowak what she was going to do, she’d have been surprised, too.
And here’s why: Most of us are conscious that we are not exactly like the public image of ourselves. We all think thoughts we’d just as soon not have everybody else know. We also know the expression, “putting our best face forward,” means that we have a couple of other faces we think are best left in the closet. At the same time, however, most of us who try to be decent people do not usually conceive of ourselves as doing something especially bad. When we are not feeling wild passion, as apparently Nowak was on that crazy day, we cannot picture ourselves behaving in a bizarre passion-driven way.
But if something happens and we cross a boundary we shouldn’t, a new reality about ourselves confronts us. It is probable that since that day, Nowak has had to face the realization that she is not the person she had thought she was.
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