How does she do it?
She does not
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The other night, I had a moment (a few minutes, hours, a lifetime?) when I couldn’t sleep. My brain was completely overrun with the words of other people, but also questions about my own life, my identity, my family, who I am and what I’m doing, all the greatest hits. I’ve been working on a big writing project, as some of you may recall, and it’s required that I spend hours over the past four months talking with people about their personal lives—and I mean personal, like how they understand desire, pleasure, love, and connection. It has me thinking thoughts, a lot of them.
I also just wrapped three classes, two on memoir, another on women’s work. I hold a lot of space for my students. I take in their stories. I want to care for them. I want to nurture them, not just tell them how things should be. I don’t know how things should be. On the page, yes, I can see a thing and quickly diagnose it, see the shapes that are underneath the details a writer may be preoccupied with, or those they are having a hard time parting with, that actually aren’t central to what a reader might want or need. But teaching memoir requires meeting writers on another level—an emotional level— and acknowledging that there may be reasons writers want things a certain way on the page, reasons that have to do with years of trauma, pain, sadness, or disempowerment. Those reasons are different for every single writer. It’s a lot to take in— an honor and a privilege, but sometimes it gets pretty psychically full in my mind.
I hate words like “empath” or “highly sensitive person.” The title of this newsletter more than implies that I am interested in unpacking how we talk about feelings, and the very practice of diagnosis—the broad habit we all have of ushering feelings and ways of being into preordained, power-laded understandings of the complexity of living in bodies, as people. But I guess I define in that direction.
In any case, a very wonderful, generous student and I were talking the other day and she asked me how do I do it? Hold everyone’s stories but also juggle so many work pieces.