Impact
I heard from a former student today. “I’m grieving,” she wrote. “I used to be able to write what I was feeling, but I can't anymore. I feel like I've lost something.” She is in medical school, and her journey to that career began, ironically, in her introduction to creative writing course with me in 2001 (I think it was 2001—is that possible?). She is a gifted writer—this was clear about her from the first assignment she submitted—but she is also gifted at connecting deeply with others. This was clear when I observed her for the first time in the Alzheimer’s unit, where she had been assigned to visit weekly and to record the residents’ words and write found poetry from them. That year, she wrote a beautiful essay for the families of the residents with whom she worked, one that I still use in my student manual as an example.
N finished her English and Spanish majors, then went on to try working in a nursing home in the activity department, then a hospital as a translator. Eventually, she realized she wanted to be on the front lines, helping people with dementia as a doctor and medical researcher. And, she has succeeded as thoroughly in her work in this area as she did as an undergraduate in the Alzheimer’s unit at the nursing home. I am, in short, proud of her, and proud of the small role I played in her passion and success.
But today, she is grieving because a professor called an essay she’d written for a special medical internship “vanilla.” He asked her where her passion was, why the essay was so dry. “Medical school sucked my ability to write creatively right out of me,” she wrote to him, and then repeated to me. I knew right away that wasn’t true. Nobody as gifted as N loses her ability to write.
But when I read her essay, I understood why she felt this way; it was a very thorough accounting of her journey from college to her current research, but there was, as her professor had identified, one problem—there were no stories, nothing to connect the work she’s done to the people for whom she has cared.
I didn’t know what to advise her exactly, so I did the simplest possible thing: I sent her that essay she wrote in 2001, writing that it might remind her of some of the stories that had first inspired her work and also help her to think of other similar stories and people she’s encountered over the last seven years.
In the essay, she’d written beautifully about how she’d found connections to these women despite their cognitive failings, how she’d discovered who they were even though they weren’t, really, at all who they were. In fact, she wrote these things more profoundly and beautifully than I have ever been able to manage.
I have the strange privilege of getting to know quite a few people in my small town at the end of their lives. I am often the person at a funeral who has known the deceased for the shortest amount of time and in the most narrow context—only during his or her stay at the nursing home. And yet, my students’ poems always make an appearance in the sermon or the memory table; the project, which began in 2000, has affected many people’s lives.
For some reason, though, N’s words got under my skin, and I couldn’t, at first, pinpoint why. Finally, though, I recognized the reason: I have the same feeling about my own work. My passion for social justice and community building, for parenting a special needs child, for teaching—these passions have taken the place of what was once my passion for writing. I used to love solitude, hours alone in front of the page. The act of putting things on paper was transformative, but I also dreamed that the words would be my contribution to the world—that my work would change people in the way writers like Edna St. Vincent Millay and Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde had changed mine. Now, I seem to crave community more than solitude (though I still need a good daily dose, and a longer dose on the weekend, to feel like myself). I crave time reflecting with others over time at the page.
But, I miss writing. I don’t think about it much, but I really do miss it. There was a night this past semester when I stayed up almost until dawn working on a piece. There have been a few other nights like that one over the last year, actually—but I rarely have the time to follow up, to do the hard work of revision. And, I haven’t sent my work out for publication in over a year. I have two finished poetry manuscripts that sit on my desk, waiting to be copied and mailed out. I have a first draft of a novel and enough creative nonfiction pieces, in first draft, to be turned into another manuscript. I can’t seem to get motivated to send out the finished work or to finish the unfinished work. And it is a source of sadness for me, though I rarely have the time to think about it—except at times like these, when answering a question like the one I got from N makes me feel somewhat like a fraud.
I know I’m not a fraud. In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe commercial success makes a person a writer. I don’t think being a writer is the same as having a wide readership. I know the process matters more than the outcome, that my life’s work is not my writing as I imagined when I was much younger that it might be, and that this is OK, and makes me no less a writer.
But then I get to thinking, morbidly, about what people will say about me at my funeral—as if this will somehow be the measure of my life. This is likely due to the fact that there have been an unusually large number of nursing home deaths lately, or because I recently lost a friend, or even, perhaps, because my 20th high school reunion is this year—yikes! This would mean little to me—I mostly want to forget about high school—except that recently I’ve been back in touch with people I know “back then” and am realizing just how much those early years shaped me—and how much all of us have changed for the better. Things like these make a person look forward as much as they make a person look back.
Recently, one of the nursing home’s youngest residents, who had a rare debilitating disease, passed away. His funeral was beautiful; he is Buddhist, and there was chanting that felt comforting in the way chanting always is to people who grew up surrounded by ritual. People told stories. There was incense and music and poetry. I was proud because my students’ poems, as is often the case, were displayed at the service, but I was also struck by how narrowly I knew him and felt deeply sad about this.
“How well do you think you know me?” my daughter asked me recently.
“Better than I did yesterday,” was all I could think to answer, and I believe that’s true; I am attentive to her in a way I’m not to everybody, of course, and I learn new things about her every day. I added, as an afterthought, “But not well enough, of course.”
This is, in a way, the answer to this question for everybody we encounter. There is always room to release whatever holds us back from a deeper knowing of another person. There is always room, as well, for humility—there are limits to what we can know about each other, and even about ourselves, and it’s important to recognize these limits. So much of what it means to be human, to be in relationship, is mystery.
I asked my daughter how well she thought I knew her. “Better than you think but not well enough,” she said, and this, too, is likely true. It is easy to think we don’t know what we do about the people we love; it is easy, also, to get lazy, to stop continuing to work toward deeper knowing, or to stop allowing the other person, or oneself, to grow and change.
I first got interested in writing because of the personal connection between writer and reader, the intimate knowing of another person’s soul. Millay’s poems about her mother’s death comforted me when I was 13 and confronting my own mother’s death. The same year, Dickinson’s poems made me aware of the wonder in the natural world, opening my heart so that it felt like a deep, rushing river, a feeling I still get when I read a really good poem. Later, that connection changed, becoming more about understanding the large themes of life, building community, creating change—I believed writing could be the guide through these processes.
My social justice work had a similar path. It started with a desire to help this person, or that one—to reach out to a girl at my church who lost her father a few years after I lost my mother, to reach out to the developmentally disabled girl in my grade who was getting teased. It wasn’t until later that I understood how helping these individuals did not impact the social realities that created the lives they had (one friend’s poverty, the other friend’s disassociation with the life of the community due to her disability). I came to believe that reaching out to one person was not enough—that it was more important to work on the political level to change things.
St. Paul (not my favorite writer of Biblical chapters by any means) wrote (and I paraphrase) that love was a required impulse for any good action. I think that, about this, he was right. Wanting to change things that are wrong in our world without also being willing to be in relationship with the hurting people is as wrong an impulse—perhaps a more wrong impulse--as thinking that reaching out one person at a time is enough.
N is struggling not just with her writing, but with the overarching narrative of her life, with how to tell it. She doesn’t know where the focus should lie—on the list of achievements, the academic reasons for wanting to go to the next logical step in her research about dementia, which has the potential to impact many people, or on the stories of the people who have inspired her. It is hard to find a way to do both in an essay, but even harder, of course, in a life. Finding a balance between any two equally good impulses is difficult.
My daughter, for instance, is beginning to feel shame for the first time. She doesn’t want help from a para in her classroom—it’s too embarrassing, she says. She is realizing she doesn’t have the social skills to connect to kids her own age, whereas before, she was clueless (happily so) and therefore didn’t get embarrassed even if what she said and did was, well, a little “off.” “I don’t know what’s better, knowing or not knowing how different I am and how much my past messed me up,” she said tonight, crying a little.
We talked about when it both should and shouldn’t matter what others think of her—how she can use this new awareness to become more compassionate person, and to make a greater impact in other’s lives, but how she also needs to make sure that, in the process, she doesn’t begin to hate herself as so many people going through this transition do.
“What really matters?” I asked her, stroking her hair.
“How I treat other people,” she said. “And what I do with my life.”
She is wiser than I am.
Tonight, at the diner in town, the son of an elder who had been in the project in its early years—I believe she died in 2004—approached me to ask if we were still doing the project. When I told him we were, he thanked me for the poems, saying they mean even more to him now, but that, more importantly, he was glad to know there was still a steady stream of young people at the nursing home. “I always meant to keep going after mom died,” he said, “but things get in the way.”
“I know how that goes,” I said.
“Actually, you don’t,” he answered, surprising me. “You’re still doing it after all these years, and that’s admirable. Thank you.”
S stared at me for a minute after he left, then said, “You don’t always know how people feel until much later, isn’t that true, mom?”
“Yeah, it is,” I said. “So let’s try to pay attention.”
She nodded, and even though I only vaguely knew what I meant, I think she really got it. Like I said, wiser than I am in so many ways.
Back at home, I read N’s message and sent off the essay, then read another message from a student struggling with her student teaching. She didn’t give details, but her struggle came through it what she didn’t say.
Be sure you take the time to figure out what you’re learning about yourself as a person and a teacher, and about your students, I wrote back. Nobody’s going to give you that time. You have to take it, or else you’ll get lost in the day to day business of it all.
Good advice for me to follow, too, as the craziness of a new semester begins for both S. and me. Ultimately, I can make the time to write if I want to—but I at the very least need to make the time to reflect (something I do mostly through writing) so that I will know what I’m learning as I learn it. Whether or not these musings make their way into stories or poems or creative nonfiction pieces is a whole different question.
So is writing a tool toward finding balance between all the extremes we must balance—caring what others think and not giving a damn; solitude and connection; love for the individual and love for the cause? Or is writing the path itself, one writers are called to pave so others can ponder such questions? Is writing an act of love, or the love itself made concrete?
In a way, it doesn’t matter. We come to the page and write. We care for others and ourselves and the causes that stir our hearts, and we act, and reflect, and act again. In the process, we make an impact in small and large ways every day, and we work to make that impact positive, transformative, even.
N finished her English and Spanish majors, then went on to try working in a nursing home in the activity department, then a hospital as a translator. Eventually, she realized she wanted to be on the front lines, helping people with dementia as a doctor and medical researcher. And, she has succeeded as thoroughly in her work in this area as she did as an undergraduate in the Alzheimer’s unit at the nursing home. I am, in short, proud of her, and proud of the small role I played in her passion and success.
But today, she is grieving because a professor called an essay she’d written for a special medical internship “vanilla.” He asked her where her passion was, why the essay was so dry. “Medical school sucked my ability to write creatively right out of me,” she wrote to him, and then repeated to me. I knew right away that wasn’t true. Nobody as gifted as N loses her ability to write.
But when I read her essay, I understood why she felt this way; it was a very thorough accounting of her journey from college to her current research, but there was, as her professor had identified, one problem—there were no stories, nothing to connect the work she’s done to the people for whom she has cared.
I didn’t know what to advise her exactly, so I did the simplest possible thing: I sent her that essay she wrote in 2001, writing that it might remind her of some of the stories that had first inspired her work and also help her to think of other similar stories and people she’s encountered over the last seven years.
In the essay, she’d written beautifully about how she’d found connections to these women despite their cognitive failings, how she’d discovered who they were even though they weren’t, really, at all who they were. In fact, she wrote these things more profoundly and beautifully than I have ever been able to manage.
I have the strange privilege of getting to know quite a few people in my small town at the end of their lives. I am often the person at a funeral who has known the deceased for the shortest amount of time and in the most narrow context—only during his or her stay at the nursing home. And yet, my students’ poems always make an appearance in the sermon or the memory table; the project, which began in 2000, has affected many people’s lives.
For some reason, though, N’s words got under my skin, and I couldn’t, at first, pinpoint why. Finally, though, I recognized the reason: I have the same feeling about my own work. My passion for social justice and community building, for parenting a special needs child, for teaching—these passions have taken the place of what was once my passion for writing. I used to love solitude, hours alone in front of the page. The act of putting things on paper was transformative, but I also dreamed that the words would be my contribution to the world—that my work would change people in the way writers like Edna St. Vincent Millay and Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde had changed mine. Now, I seem to crave community more than solitude (though I still need a good daily dose, and a longer dose on the weekend, to feel like myself). I crave time reflecting with others over time at the page.
But, I miss writing. I don’t think about it much, but I really do miss it. There was a night this past semester when I stayed up almost until dawn working on a piece. There have been a few other nights like that one over the last year, actually—but I rarely have the time to follow up, to do the hard work of revision. And, I haven’t sent my work out for publication in over a year. I have two finished poetry manuscripts that sit on my desk, waiting to be copied and mailed out. I have a first draft of a novel and enough creative nonfiction pieces, in first draft, to be turned into another manuscript. I can’t seem to get motivated to send out the finished work or to finish the unfinished work. And it is a source of sadness for me, though I rarely have the time to think about it—except at times like these, when answering a question like the one I got from N makes me feel somewhat like a fraud.
I know I’m not a fraud. In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe commercial success makes a person a writer. I don’t think being a writer is the same as having a wide readership. I know the process matters more than the outcome, that my life’s work is not my writing as I imagined when I was much younger that it might be, and that this is OK, and makes me no less a writer.
But then I get to thinking, morbidly, about what people will say about me at my funeral—as if this will somehow be the measure of my life. This is likely due to the fact that there have been an unusually large number of nursing home deaths lately, or because I recently lost a friend, or even, perhaps, because my 20th high school reunion is this year—yikes! This would mean little to me—I mostly want to forget about high school—except that recently I’ve been back in touch with people I know “back then” and am realizing just how much those early years shaped me—and how much all of us have changed for the better. Things like these make a person look forward as much as they make a person look back.
Recently, one of the nursing home’s youngest residents, who had a rare debilitating disease, passed away. His funeral was beautiful; he is Buddhist, and there was chanting that felt comforting in the way chanting always is to people who grew up surrounded by ritual. People told stories. There was incense and music and poetry. I was proud because my students’ poems, as is often the case, were displayed at the service, but I was also struck by how narrowly I knew him and felt deeply sad about this.
“How well do you think you know me?” my daughter asked me recently.
“Better than I did yesterday,” was all I could think to answer, and I believe that’s true; I am attentive to her in a way I’m not to everybody, of course, and I learn new things about her every day. I added, as an afterthought, “But not well enough, of course.”
This is, in a way, the answer to this question for everybody we encounter. There is always room to release whatever holds us back from a deeper knowing of another person. There is always room, as well, for humility—there are limits to what we can know about each other, and even about ourselves, and it’s important to recognize these limits. So much of what it means to be human, to be in relationship, is mystery.
I asked my daughter how well she thought I knew her. “Better than you think but not well enough,” she said, and this, too, is likely true. It is easy to think we don’t know what we do about the people we love; it is easy, also, to get lazy, to stop continuing to work toward deeper knowing, or to stop allowing the other person, or oneself, to grow and change.
I first got interested in writing because of the personal connection between writer and reader, the intimate knowing of another person’s soul. Millay’s poems about her mother’s death comforted me when I was 13 and confronting my own mother’s death. The same year, Dickinson’s poems made me aware of the wonder in the natural world, opening my heart so that it felt like a deep, rushing river, a feeling I still get when I read a really good poem. Later, that connection changed, becoming more about understanding the large themes of life, building community, creating change—I believed writing could be the guide through these processes.
My social justice work had a similar path. It started with a desire to help this person, or that one—to reach out to a girl at my church who lost her father a few years after I lost my mother, to reach out to the developmentally disabled girl in my grade who was getting teased. It wasn’t until later that I understood how helping these individuals did not impact the social realities that created the lives they had (one friend’s poverty, the other friend’s disassociation with the life of the community due to her disability). I came to believe that reaching out to one person was not enough—that it was more important to work on the political level to change things.
St. Paul (not my favorite writer of Biblical chapters by any means) wrote (and I paraphrase) that love was a required impulse for any good action. I think that, about this, he was right. Wanting to change things that are wrong in our world without also being willing to be in relationship with the hurting people is as wrong an impulse—perhaps a more wrong impulse--as thinking that reaching out one person at a time is enough.
N is struggling not just with her writing, but with the overarching narrative of her life, with how to tell it. She doesn’t know where the focus should lie—on the list of achievements, the academic reasons for wanting to go to the next logical step in her research about dementia, which has the potential to impact many people, or on the stories of the people who have inspired her. It is hard to find a way to do both in an essay, but even harder, of course, in a life. Finding a balance between any two equally good impulses is difficult.
My daughter, for instance, is beginning to feel shame for the first time. She doesn’t want help from a para in her classroom—it’s too embarrassing, she says. She is realizing she doesn’t have the social skills to connect to kids her own age, whereas before, she was clueless (happily so) and therefore didn’t get embarrassed even if what she said and did was, well, a little “off.” “I don’t know what’s better, knowing or not knowing how different I am and how much my past messed me up,” she said tonight, crying a little.
We talked about when it both should and shouldn’t matter what others think of her—how she can use this new awareness to become more compassionate person, and to make a greater impact in other’s lives, but how she also needs to make sure that, in the process, she doesn’t begin to hate herself as so many people going through this transition do.
“What really matters?” I asked her, stroking her hair.
“How I treat other people,” she said. “And what I do with my life.”
She is wiser than I am.
Tonight, at the diner in town, the son of an elder who had been in the project in its early years—I believe she died in 2004—approached me to ask if we were still doing the project. When I told him we were, he thanked me for the poems, saying they mean even more to him now, but that, more importantly, he was glad to know there was still a steady stream of young people at the nursing home. “I always meant to keep going after mom died,” he said, “but things get in the way.”
“I know how that goes,” I said.
“Actually, you don’t,” he answered, surprising me. “You’re still doing it after all these years, and that’s admirable. Thank you.”
S stared at me for a minute after he left, then said, “You don’t always know how people feel until much later, isn’t that true, mom?”
“Yeah, it is,” I said. “So let’s try to pay attention.”
She nodded, and even though I only vaguely knew what I meant, I think she really got it. Like I said, wiser than I am in so many ways.
Back at home, I read N’s message and sent off the essay, then read another message from a student struggling with her student teaching. She didn’t give details, but her struggle came through it what she didn’t say.
Be sure you take the time to figure out what you’re learning about yourself as a person and a teacher, and about your students, I wrote back. Nobody’s going to give you that time. You have to take it, or else you’ll get lost in the day to day business of it all.
Good advice for me to follow, too, as the craziness of a new semester begins for both S. and me. Ultimately, I can make the time to write if I want to—but I at the very least need to make the time to reflect (something I do mostly through writing) so that I will know what I’m learning as I learn it. Whether or not these musings make their way into stories or poems or creative nonfiction pieces is a whole different question.
So is writing a tool toward finding balance between all the extremes we must balance—caring what others think and not giving a damn; solitude and connection; love for the individual and love for the cause? Or is writing the path itself, one writers are called to pave so others can ponder such questions? Is writing an act of love, or the love itself made concrete?
In a way, it doesn’t matter. We come to the page and write. We care for others and ourselves and the causes that stir our hearts, and we act, and reflect, and act again. In the process, we make an impact in small and large ways every day, and we work to make that impact positive, transformative, even.
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