Excuse me
A few years ago I sat in a crowded auditorium listening to a speaker lecture on a topic I don’t remember. What I do remember is that fifteen minutes into his lecture, he was interrupted by an audience member who jumped to his feet and, under the guise of asking a question, began to harangue the speaker. The speaker, who was elderly and softspoken, was clearly stunned at the interruption, which had clearly been planned. The audience member grew taller and louder as he launched into his own, counterpoint lecture. He gesticulated. He menaced.
Everyone in the room was instantly on edge, disturbed and deeply uneasy. You could feel the tension in the air. We looked at each other, wild-eyed: What do we do? What should we do? No one moved. But something had to be done. So I jumped up and waved my hand until the angry audience member saw me and paused for a second.
“Excuse me, but your original question has nothing to do with your comments,” I said. “Please sit down.”
This was someone not used to being challenged. He didn’t know what to do with my interruption. He started questioning me, in annoyance and surprise, lost his train of thought, fumbled, sat down.
It sounds like such a simple thing, but interrupting this man was extremely hard for me. My heart raced and my hands trembled and I couldn’t stop shaking. But my mission –to put a stick in the spokes of the runaway heckler– was accomplished.
This incident, and others like it, comes back to me a lot these days. We have so much more power, as a group and also as a single human being, than we think we do. People take their cues from leaders, and every day I remind myself that I can be a leader. That I am a leader. Every single one of us is, if we choose to be.
We are surrounded right now with daily assaults, some of them deadly, to human decency and our sense of our country as a functioning democracy. In the midst of this, it helps to remind yourself that you are a leader. Leaders act more often than react. Acting out of optimism, hope, faith and determination to make this world better will give you far more energy than reacting with despair and outrage to every day’s fresh hell.
What I tell myself: Alison, there are too many fresh hells right now to handle, so don’t try to handle them all. But every single time there’s a chance to be kind, to stop a bully, to thwart a racist or sexist remark, to look someone in the eye and smile, to take positive action, do it.
Concrete actions that are helping me right now:
In-depth conversations with people who believe differently from me but who remind me that we have far more in common than our voting records.
Hand-writing postcards to get out the vote.
Teaching creative writing classes on the Transformation of Trauma for free.
Distributing poems to all my neighbors.
Donating money, a little every day, to a good cause.
Reading: history, novels, poetry.
History is full of examples of leaders who fomented violence and hate wherever they went, with deadly consequences. We are seeing that right now in our own country. But violence and hate can be counteracted at every turn. Take action. Don’t lose the faith.
Long ago I left behind the simple prayers of my childhood, the ones spoken in unison with others in church, or around the table at a special meal when everyone named something they were thankful for. I’ve never known what God is, and I don’t know what God is to others. If forced to come up with a definition, my definition of God would be something like the feeling of my children on either side of me in bed as I read them to sleep when they were little. God would be the high school students I used to teach, ringed on the floor in our classroom on the giant pillows I’d made, still and silent and sometimes falling asleep on Friday afternoons as I read them stories. God would be the idea and the feeling of peace, of a place where nothing bad can happen, where only love and comfort dwell. God would be the poems that swell my heart open in a way that almost hurts, like this one below.
Me to a roomful of high school students last week: “Raise a hand if you’ve lost someone you love to murder.”
eight and were the reason my nickname for her was Dry Salty Crunchy Carbohydrate.
When my children were little one of our favorite books was The Philharmonic Gets Dressed. Such a simple story. In apartments all over New York City, orchestra musicians are dressing for the evening performance. Everyone wears black. They muscle their instruments, large and small, into cabs and the subway, and they head to work. My children and I read this book over and over, usually at bedtime, where it soothed their way into sleep. It’s long gone from my shelves, but I still think about it. 
The men I love most get it, with “it” being the malevolence of treating women as if we’re not equal. At one point the other night, when I could suddenly barely talk because of the rage that filled me, a male friend said about sexism, It’s like air, invisible and everywhere. And you breathe it in your whole life, but when the switch flips and you suddenly realize how deep it goes and how awful it is, it’s fucking overwhelming. 
It was the summer of a long pink skirt, ice cream cones, cartwheels on the beach, waitress shifts followed by late nights at the bar followed by breakfast at the diner, a little rented room and a refrigerator shared with twelve other girls. This was Cape Cod, a long time ago, and my buddies Doc and RJ and Stu would descend on weekends. After we walked back from the bar I’d hold the back door open for them and they’d sneak upstairs to my room (guests weren’t allowed) to sleep on the floor around my bed. One weekend they brought a new boy with them, someone I’d never met, and I instantly liked him. That night we all decided to sleep on the beach instead of sneaking into my room. We spread quilts and looked up at the stars, waves lapping at the shore. 
Every summer in my teens I canoed with friends through the Rideau region of lakes and canals in Ontario. We camped every night, swam, cooked, laughed, told ghost stories and played games. One annual camping spot was on a lake with an enormous rope swing tied to an overhanging tree. You grabbed the rope, stepped back as far as you could, swung out over the water and then plummeted. The rope swing took nerve. The drop was steep and the water cold, and once you committed, you had to leap – if you swung back you’d crash against the tree and the rocky bluff. Leaping from it was wild and exhilarating. Once, as I swung out, I looked down to see a long water snake swirling in the water directly below me. My fear of snakes is lifelong and deep-seated, and I was horrified, but there was no going back. I plummeted with my eyes closed and struck out for shore the second I surfaced.
A few years ago my brother sent me a photo of my nephew, with the caption Getting his mind blown at Nickelodeon Universe. Nickelodeon Universe is a crowded and noisy place, but in the photo, my tiny nephew stands alone in a huge open space, his head craned up, staring at something I can’t see. The photo conveys profound stillness and concentration. Sometimes it pops up on my screensaver and I wonder again what my nephew was staring at, what was going through his mind. 
Alison McGhee 