I am a rock, I am an island.<\/p>\n
And a rock feels no pain.<\/p>\n
And an island never cries.<\/p>\n
– – – Simon and Garfunkel<\/p>\n
Back in 2016, I was feeling sad and\u00a0isolated. I had a new writing project which usually fills me up with exciting\u00a0anticipation. Not that they\u2019re easy. My projects are always challenging. The\u00a0empty page can be intimidating. It usually is. I feel the weight of creating\u00a0something from nothing, but I also feel excited to see where it will go and how\u00a0it will all turn out.<\/p>\n
Not this time. I felt sad and\u00a0lonely and didn\u2019t know what was causing it. I wrote every day like I always did\u00a0but something was missing. To quote a literary term, I felt like a dangling\u00a0participle, an unresolved state of being that results in a sense of not\u00a0belonging anywhere.<\/p>\n
I thought about my friends whom I\u00a0adored. I felt that I belonged with them but we didn\u2019t see each other much.\u00a0This was before Covid but still, we mostly talked on the phone and texted. I\u00a0missed seeing my friends in person. I missed seeing their body language. I\u00a0missed feeling their warmth. I missed holding someone when they cried. I felt\u00a0alone and lonely because I was missing a fundamental need: Community.<\/p>\n
I wasn\u2019t sure what to do. I didn\u2019t\u00a0belong to any groups or clubs that met in person. I didn\u2019t know of any. My\u00a0hobbies were things I did by myself. I used to go to a knitting store but the\u00a0owner was always in a foul mood and she barked at everyone. I stopped going and\u00a0I was alone a great deal of the time. I realized that if I was missing\u00a0community, I needed to create it myself.<\/p>\n
I decided to teach a writing class. I knew a great deal about writing. I had done more that a dozen books, some of them bestsellers, but I had never taught classes. I knew that great writers weren\u2019t necessarily great teachers but I decided to give it a try and find out if I could do it. Maybe it would help cure my loneliness. \u00a0<\/p>\n
I thought about what I would teach.\u00a0I wasn\u2019t interested in grammar or spelling or parsing sentences. Who cared if\u00a0their sentences were in order or their spelling was correct? I wanted to help\u00a0them go deeper, to excavate what was inside of them and find a way to express
it. What made them happy or sad? What made them peaceful or angry? How could\u00a0they capture these things on the page? What would make them want to leave the\u00a0class or stay? When they read their pieces out loud, could they overcome their\u00a0fear of judgment?<\/p>\n
The more I considered what I could\u00a0teach, the more I realized that I couldn\u2019t teach anyone to write. I don\u2019t think\u00a0that anyone one can teach someone else to be a good writer. What I could teach\u00a0was how to remove the blocks that got in the way: The punishment of the inner\u00a0critic. The fear of being a bad writer. Telling their secrets.<\/p>\n
I made a list of some of the people\u00a0I knew. They were friends who liked hearing what I was writing and had considered\u00a0writing themselves. I created an email that described what I was offering. I
didn\u2019t expect anyone to sign up but I like to finish what I start and see if\u00a0it\u2019ll work. I pushed \u201cSend\u201d and got back to my work. Over the next half hour,\u00a0people began signing up. I was surprised, gratified and scared. I remembered\u00a0the first memoir I ever wrote for a legendary diva. I had no idea how to do it\u00a0but I overrode my fear and figured it out. I did the same with my writing\u00a0class.<\/p>\n
When the doorbell rang and the\u00a0first person arrived to take the class, I was terrified. Talking to groups of\u00a0people was not something I liked. What if I couldn\u2019t think of what to say? What\u00a0if I couldn\u2019t answer their questions? I turned to my acting skills and pretended\u00a0I knew exactly what I was doing.<\/p>\n
The class went well. I didn\u2019t know\u00a0how much I knew. When it was over, I felt relieved but I also felt filled up.\u00a0It had been great to see all my friends in my living room and most of them\u00a0signed up for the next one. During Covid, I took my class to Zoom. I was afraid\u00a0it would lose the intimacy but it didn\u2019t. We had established a sense of
community and we all felt fortunate to have a place to deal with the isolation.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Recently, my students asked me to
arrange a writing day at my house. I did it. Six of us made up a core group
that had been returning to class since 2016 and some of them had never met each
other in person. I watched everyone hugging each other and I couldn\u2019t stop
smiling. My fear of teaching had left me these fifteen years later. If I had
let it stop me, what I was seeing would never have come to pass. Everyone loved
each other and they had become such good writers over the years, I felt more
like a guide and a fellow traveler than a teacher. I had done what I set out to
do. I had created community and we all felt connected in a way that I had never
dared to imagine.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
We all need other people to make
our lives feel safe and connected. We need to know that other people are
feeling what we\u2019re feeling, and they\u2019re going through trials, just like we are.
We need community around us to cut through the loneliness. To calm our anxiety.
To lift us up from depression. To help us think clearly and to stop seeing
ourselves as inadequate or ugly. I said to a friend who was caught in
self-recrimination. \u201cIf only you could see yourself like I do.\u201d<\/p>\n
She needed a mirror and the\u00a0reassurance that people who accepted her, just like she was. We all need our\u00a0friends to be there for us, even if they annoy us. If you\u2019re feeling isolated,\u00a0you can change it. It takes some courage to face it, some imagination to create\u00a0it, some devotion to finding meaning in your life, and some trust and belief in
the people around you. And in yourself.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe way you get meaning in your
life is to devote yourself to loving others,<\/p>\n
Devote yourself to your
community around you,<\/p>\n
And devote yourself to creating
something that gives you purpose and meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mitch Albom<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am a rock, I am an island. And a rock feels no pain. And an island never cries. – – – Simon and Garfunkel Back in 2016, I was feeling sad and\u00a0isolated. I had a new writing project which usually fills me up with exciting\u00a0anticipation. Not that they\u2019re easy. My projects are always challenging. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2743,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2744"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2745,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2744\/revisions\/2745"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}