Yesterday was the final meeting of my Micro-Memoir class for this spring session.
It’ll come back around later summer, but my goodness how I love teaching this class.
See, when students start out in Memoir, they are ever so guarded. I’ve noted this across years and years of teaching Memoir, both spoken and written. But within a couple weeks, as they share and hear each other’s stories… well, basically they all fall in love with each other.
They learn to see each other with empathy and grace.
They discover their specific, discrete, individual experiences and feelings are, in fact, universal, precisely because they are specific, discrete, and individual.
They make friends.
They experience the spirit of vulnerability walking among the rows and chairs, laying comforting, healing hands on their shoulders.
Without fail, by the end of the class, they start joking with me about how being in Memoir class is often better than therapy, and that I deserve a big ol’ pay raise. I never disagree. 🙂
Each week, I give a prompt for them to write about for the following week. Last week, the prompt was “Lost and Found.” A time in your life you were lost—literally and physically, or emotionally, or metaphorically, whatever—and you found your way back.
And the stories that came out yesterday… well my goodness. A couple were on the lighter side, like coming out of a Sheryl Crow concert at midnight in San Fransisco and realizing you had no idea where you’d parked your car.
But most were harder than that. Several women revealed they were widows. Told the story of losing their husband, and what it took to come back. Another told about losing her daughter, age 38, and how there’s no coming back from, only moving on with.
Another told of becoming the caregiver for the final seven months of her ailing mother’s life. At one point in her story, as she is learning to give pain medication, this student’s cousin gives her a piece of advice: “When giving medication, just stay ahead of the pain.”
Stay ahead of the pain.
It struck me that when it comes to literal pain of this kind, that is sage and kind advice.
But when it comes to emotional or spiritual or mental pain… we are perhaps far too adept at staying ahead of the pain (our favorite medication for doing so is distraction, whatever its form).
Today I’m thinking maybe we need to let the pain catch up… so that we can heal.
I’ll speak for myself. When protected by the structures of writing or theatre-making, I can dance a jitterbug with vulnerability. When playing the role of teacher or coach, I can help others embrace vulnerability.
But in my “real” life, outside the constructs of storytelling… well my goodness. I so fear vulnerability wrapping a cold hand around my throat that I shrug its comforting hands off my shoulders.
The last few weeks, I’ve been trying. My beloved partner Rebecca has been irreplaceably instrumental in helping me to slow down, so the damn pain can catch up. Healing? That’ll come. But for now, simply sitting still as vulnerability walks up behind me… that’s enough.
It’s fitting that this week’s Page and Stage Podcast episode is entitled “Wildly Healing.” My guest, the brilliant and prolific playwright Sandy Rustin, very specifically talks about humor, comedy, and laughter as being “wildly healing.” I encourage you to give her a listen, and to give everyone in your life a little extra-long glance.
They might be—no, they almost certainly are—going through something you have no idea about.
And you’re probably going through something, too.
And there is zero shame in that.
A couple weeks ago I signed off by saying I was honored to be a part of your story. Today, I want to thank you for being part of mine.
Jason “Pay Raise” Cannon