March Forth: On Being Lion-Hearted

March Forth:  On Being Lion-Hearted

I have been thinking this March 4^th about the concept of being lion-hearted.  I’ve noticed in the past few years that there’s a genre of writing I can’t get enough of.  The writer has a messy, complicated life.  She is exquisitely honest about and troubled by the messiness and her contributions to it.  She feels overwhelmed.  Perhaps she has failed at something.  She is not who she wants to be.  She starts a journey to become a different, less messy, better person. 

The writers of this genre have what I call lion-heartedness – it is the integrity to be honest about life’s difficult moments and the courage to undertake the slow process of recovery.  Lion-hearted people understand that their recovery is ultimately their responsibility.

The writers in this genre are Cheryl Strayed in Wild.  Faulkner Fox in Dispatches from My Not-So-Perfect Life. Elizabeth Gilbert and Brené Brown. Maya Angelou in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.  I started my love affair with this kind of author when I read Joan Didion’s “On Self-Respect” my senior year in high school during an AP English exam.  So enthralled was I with Didion’s raw truth, that I tore the essay from the exam booklet (this was before the internet) and have kept it with me ever since.  I re-read it in moments of personal failure. 

Essentially, Didion reminds us that self-respect cannot and should not derive from the “doubtful amulets” of “good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale.”  Instead people with self-respect “have the courage of their failures” and own their mistakes.  They “exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character … the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life.” 

The sources of these women’s pain run the gamut.  Joan Didion wasn’t accepted into Phi Beta Kappa.  For Elizabeth Gilbert, it was wanting something grittier than a life in the suburbs married to a man with whom she could not connect.  For Cheryl Strayed, it was the death of her beloved mother, an abortion, and substance abuse.  Maya Angelou survived rape and racism.  While the problems vary, the humility of the admission -- “I want to be something different/more/better” or “I want to move past this pain” -- is the stuff of true grit. 

I have evolved into my love for these writers.  As a young person, I used to say my favorite book was “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin (the feminist heroine drowns herself at the end).  I also loved Virginia Woolf (the author drowns herself), and Sylvia Plath’s poetry (do you see a theme? – but an oven, not a river).  As a budding feminist myself, I was drawn to these women’s struggles with traditional gender roles and their desire for something more against the odds and in the face of vast societal pressure.  But at that young age, it was still hard to imagine a less tragic, melodramatic end, especially one that involved the unglamorous slog of persistence and the courageous, growing self-worth I admire now.

It was after becoming a mother that I became enthralled with the writers who acknowledged the unfair or unfortunate forces working in the world and sought a way to nonetheless conquer them (or at least go Over, Under, Through! them as Tina Fey advises).  I wanted to read writers who struggled with these questions:  How do I survive grief or loss (it is as inevitable as, and the opposite face of, loving after all)?  What happens when I truly can’t “do it all”?  How do I rise when I fall? … because not getting up isn’t an option.

Right after my last March Forth post, I read the most powerful essay I have read in a decade from my beloved Cheryl Strayed.  It was called How You Get Unstuck.   It is at times bleak and sad.  In the essay, Strayed is responding to a letter from a woman who had miscarried a baby girl and wants to know how to get “unstuck” – how to “fix” her grief.  Strayed acknowledged the woman’s suffering: “This is to be expected. It is as it should be. Though we live in a time and place and culture that tries to tell us otherwise, suffering is what happens when truly horrible things happen to us.”  And then she said:

“This is how you get unstuck. You reach. Not so you can walk away from the daughter you loved, but so you can live the life that is yours—the one that includes the sad loss of your daughter, but is not arrested by it. The one that eventually leads you to a place in which you not only grieve her, but also feel lucky to have had the privilege of loving her. That place of true healing is a fierce place. It’s a giant place. It’s a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light.”

The passage took my breath away.  Grief is hard work.  Grief is putting one foot in front of the other.  Only you can heal yourself.  I was reminded of the jagged, trending line of recovery after my dad died that is still very much a work in progress 15 years later.

The essay went on to tell about Strayed’s work as a youth advocate for a group of at-risk girls in a middle school.  I recognized these girls.  I could have been one of them.  I, like the girls in Strayed’s essay, was aching, lost, angry, uncertain of my worth.  Strayed worked with these girls (giving them a journal) and advocated for them, but found that the world didn’t really care about their troubles.  It was a startling reality for Strayed, but one she said shouldn’t have shocked her.  So she shifted tack – she taught the girls that only they were responsible for their fates.  Only they could do the work of saving themselves:

“Nobody can intervene and make [it] right and nobody will. Nobody can take it back with silence or push it away with words. Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal. Therapists and friends … can help you along the way, but the healing—the genuine healing, the actual real deal down-on-your-knees-in-the-mud change—is entirely and absolutely up to you.”

I went to hear Strayed speak a few months ago.  Despite having read this essay more than a dozen times, I was jolted to attention about half way through Q&A when Strayed gave a “tough love” response to a heart-broken woman with spikey-hair and a nose-ring.  “Life isn’t fair,” Strayed said.  “Bad things happen.  People fail you.  Self-pity is a dead-end road.  Giving a bad person the power to keep you parked on a cul-de-sac of self-pity is a waste.  You have to find a way to throw it in reverse and leave the self-pity behind.”  I cringed (I’m a Myers-Briggs feeler).  Poor woman with the nose-ring.  But Strayed spoke the truth.  The courageous truth.    

There is one thing this truth is not, and two things it is.  First, it is not a “go-it-alone” admonition.  It does not suggest that you have to grieve alone.  It doesn’t suggest that the loving souls in your life can’t help you.  I have got an intrepid Team Jennifer -- a set of family and friends who provide constant, reassuring, unconditional love.  I could show up on any of their doorsteps (including my own) with a metaphorical black eye and a suitcase, and they would let me stay with no questions until I was ready to talk.  There are also houses of worship and grief groups.  And trained professionals who’s job it is to help.  And all of those forces can support you as you’re building that bridge through your grief. 

But here are two things this tough love is – first, it’s a reminder that when you’re grieving or lost, you don’t always make the best choices about who and what can help you.  Often in pain or despair or exhaustion (or all of the above), we look for crutches that don’t help us heal.  Some people use alcohol.  Some people work too much.  Some people lock away their hearts in an “air-tight casket of selfishness” (as C.S. Lewis says).  Some people find the strength to search for help but instead find careless anti-heroes.  Haven’t we all been lost in a barren emotional desert only to be approached by a “knight-in-shining armor” (said knight comes in both genders)?  He’ll extend his hand and announce he’s come to save you.  Only he’ll ride you a few hundred miles deeper into the desert and knock you off the back of his trusty steed when he sees you’re wrinkling his hero costume.  When you’re grieving or struggling, you can’t tell who’s a real hero and who’s not.  And you may look for short-cuts that only make things worse.  None of these strategies ultimately works.  

Second, healing yourself is deeply empowering.  While you have the responsibility to get better, you also have the power.  From that struggle to heal, to recover, to change, to live a life different than the one you envisioned or wanted, you gain self-respect.  You are the person who recreated yourself after a painful loss.  You are the one who had the courage to change.  You are the one who was honest about a failure and made amends.  You are the one who got knocked down and got back up again.  You are the one who is still rising.  You.  You did that. 

And it was fierce and lion-hearted.