Courage, in what form and of what function?

My friend Susan over at www.litpark.com did an interview with Jordan Rosenfeld at www.writefree.us (if you’re a writer, or interested in writing, you can sign up for free to see their newsletter with the interview in full). She was asked all sorts of questions about creativity, her process, how she juggles her writing life with her family life; the one that struck me the most was the one asked regarding Writefree’s monthly theme of “courage”. Courage means so many different things in our lives; through every layer we unearth, we find it takes courage to face into it and to keep struggling.

When I was a kid, courage for me was defined in imagery. The guy standing in front of the tank in Tianamen Square. The people ripping down the Berlin Wall. Mother Teresa and Mohandas Ghandi. My parents encouraged us to delve into images of courage, but I don’t think I ever really explored it in myself. I had an admiration for it, but no real understanding of it.

I was a bullied child from elementary school on, bullied by other kids, but especially by teachers. I was a daydreamer, a drifter; I had many teachers through the years who would embarrass me in front of the class over homework and inattentiveness. Who could blame my peers for following suit? My memory of myself in the 5th grade, for instance, is of a nine year old, nearing five feet tall (I was the tallest girl in school), with size 9 women’s feet. I was terribly ill-at-ease with myself. I also thought of myself as a failure at everything. I’d had to give up on ballet at the insistence of my doctor, because of tendonitis (he also told me I’d never be able to be a runner). I’d also dropped out of swimming, flute, and lots of other things.

Moving on to middle school, the harassment worsened (I have come to feel that the town I lived in had a culture for teachers that enabled this adult bullying). I can remember getting egged by some boys from school, and when I told the principal about it the next day, he blamed it on me. By the time high school came around, I was depressed and desperate to have something better. I left my town on the auspices of a special program, and attended school one town away. At first, it got a lot worse, and I finally tried to run away from home, rather than deal with being so scared and lonely anymore. After that incident, the then-assistant principal brought me in to talk to him, and gave me my first look at personal courage. He told me that it was the job of the administration to have its students be safe, that he wanted me to feel safe; I just had to come to him and trust him to help me when I needed it.

Empowerment is one of those funny little things; when someone gives it freely, you find you don’t need it anymore.

My high school career wasn’t perfect, but after that, I wasn’t afraid anymore. And by the time I hit junior year, I found the guts to disobey my doctor, and chose to join the track team. Incidentally, I lettered during my second meet. I wasn’t filled with joy all the time, but I could at least live with who I was: nearly six feet tall, 120lbs., with feet finally at size 12. I was at peace with being gawky and weird.

After I got my degree in Classical Archaeology (and boy did that take guts – six semesters’ worth of Latin!), I went to officer candidate school for the Marine Corps. The Corps has its own distinct view of courage, in two distinctly different ways. The first is, of course, physical courage. No branch of the military could contemplate a world where its members aren’t required to occasionally jump on a grenade or eject out of a burning plane. During training, you’re expected to do various activities that highlight this, like scaling heights, crossing a three rope bridge, or doing night navigation. Physical courage is obvious. And it’s easy not to have it, and be unwilling to face into it. I’m not afraid to admit, however, that I avoid kayaking because it freaks me out, and that I run up the stairs at night, just in case something reaches through to grab my leg.

The other courage that the Corps talks about is the moral kind. They say that it’s doing the right thing even when nobody is looking. But it goes so much deeper than that. It’s got a lot to do with speaking up when things aren’t right. And facing into someone’s wrath when you’ve screwed up. My husband is an expert at the second. I mean, we all screw up multiples of times in our lives, but his philosophy is this; admit you’re wrong, really admit it (his favorite line is, “Yep, I really f*&#ed that up”), and then, give a genuine resonse to it. I will do better in the future. I am sorry that this happened. His take on this, naturally, was also shaped by the Corps, where we met each other, but also by his own childhood. We both strive to avoid giving excuses; it only clutters the apology with insincerity. Being able to offer something simple, in his words, gives the other guy nowhere to go. Imagine it. Your boss comes in screaming about something you fouled up. He or she is ready to tear you a new one, until you look him or her in the eyes and say, “You’re right. That is fouled up, I will fix it right now, and it won’t happen again.” Boom. Unpleasantness over. We all go back to our lives, fix our error, and it’s like it never happened.

I find that it’s liberating, but man, it has taken me a long time to get there. My father had something of a need for full explanations. It was not acceptable to him to hear something that bare-boned. He believed we were blowing him off if we did it.

I find Susan’s take on her writing process and her ideas about courage so interesting because she has dealt with the kind of writing despair that I have been struggling with. For me, it’s much harder to sit down and get the ideas out of my head than it is to fall asleep on the couch every night, totally exhausted by life. The last time I was able to sit and write at any length was when my older son was two, my husband was working in Virginia (while we remained in Connecticut), and I could sit with a laptop in bed, hammering away until the wee hours of the morning. I have no idea where that person has gone to, where my brain has fizzled out…it’s frustrating! It builds on itself, because it takes guts to open that vein and be honest in text. And we’re never terribly honest, even when we’re trying to be.

At this point in my life, in our life, I suppose it just takes courage not to be ground down into nothingness. I can summon the guts to go out at 5 a.m. to run, in spite of no street lights (I was really freaked out by the flashlight in the woods a week or two ago, though) on a state forest road. Courage keeps me from submitting to the kind of depression I used to let in back during my teenage years and early 20’s. What I can say for sure is that I have the guts to be an advocate for both my kids. I’ve had to take plenty of stands on issues for our older son, the Macaroon, because he hasn’t been able to talk for himself yet. And I am pretty sure that I will have to be on deck for the younger one, the Brownie, because he reminds me of me. And, of course, it takes plenty of guts not to lose your mind as a parent, when your kids are doing their level best to pry it loose from your grip. It’s both funny and exasperating when the Brownie responds to me asking him why he just lied to me about something he obviously did, and his response is, “But, I’m NOT a lion!!!”