I’ve always struggled to stand up for myself. My classmates would pick on me and boys would do things that made me uncomfortable. Sometimes they would grab me or follow me around, and I’d pretend I didn’t care. It didn’t affect me because I was strong. Things like this didn’t happen to someone like me. Someone Asian, flat-chested and curvy as a Kansas highway. What was it about me? Did people see me as someone who wouldn’t complain? Later I would look back at these incidents, thinking, “What a fucking moron. How can you call yourself a feminist? Why did you just sit there? Why didn’t you say something?”
I’d keep track of these incidents in my journal. I’ve always been a writer. Writing was my way of getting all these uncomfortable thoughts out of my head and doing something with them. After I wrote them down, I ensured that no one would ever find my notes. And no one would see what a big pushover I was.
I first considered myself a serious writer when I took a creative writing class in my junior year of high school. I wrote about my awkwardness, decisions I was not proud of and moments I would even not talk about with my friends. My teacher Mrs. Ackerman helped me communicate these thoughts more effectively. She taught me how to craft a personal account into a story, into art. She also “forced” her students to share their stories in front of the class. Listening to my classmates’ stories and having the opportunity to share my own revealed to me how we may not share the same experiences, but most of the time we have the same emotional reactions to others’ experiences. Most of my preparation for writing involved reading other poets and authors to find out how they created empathy with the reader.
How can telling a story, whether fictional or real, help other people? How can it connect people of different backgrounds? In a video interview of the poet, activist and playwright Staceyann Chin called “Radical Joy and Politicized Art,” she tells stories about her life in Jamaica and the United States. As I’m watching her talk about art and pain, it feels as if I am in the room with her, feeling everything that she feels. One second, I’m laughing at her vagina jokes. The next, I’m crying in the lobby of Wishart when she starts talking about her absent mother. In my opinion, the really good artists can bring out many emotions at once in their audience. They can drag up everything you’ve been keeping inside and intermingle your grief with their grief. You feel connected with this stranger on your computer screen.
Staceyann Chin states in the interview, “We are never in the absence of pain.” This statement rings true for both artists and their audiences. The artist brings their pain and displays it for many to see and echo back to them. Everyone carries their pain around, but we all have different ways of dealing with it. I believe pain is transformed once it is shared. Pain may turn into a joke or a compelling story. Something to laugh about, cry about or just ponder. My thoughts and feelings tend to reverberate in my head. They don’t stop when I share my writing, but somehow they echo a little less. In this sharing of art, pain gains a solidarity. For a moment, I can drown out the voice that says, “Why didn’t you do something?”
Lillie Soukup, a Contributing Writer for the Voice, can be reached for comment at LSoukup21@wooster.edu.