Session Seven

A Sunday in May. Thoughts on shame, connection, and collective effervescence. 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hi, and welcome back to Cedar Sessions. I'm Cassie and I'm your host, and today's session is a reading from an essay written on a Sunday in May. Thanks for being here. It took me a while to realize that we aren't alone. I knew it on a cellular level, and it would come out in some of my work. In my last stint in the corporate healthcare world, I got as close as I could to the real purpose juice of my soul within that context, at least. I was working with well-being of clinicians and found myself on a stage in front of 300 nurse leaders talking about collective effervescence, which is that synchronization you feel in a room full of people sharing the same purpose. One of the most palpable displays of it being at a concert where the entire room, arena, stadium moves with the same energy and sings the same words at the top of their lungs. Uninhibited collective connection. When I was in my 20s, I went to concerts religiously. They were my Catholic girl replacement for Sunday Mass. I wouldn't have named it then, but my body, in anticipation of all that was to come, was craving connection. At a concert, you can stand next to a stranger, and when that song comes on, you're singing a duet of wagon wheel, like you're 18 years old dancing on a booth in your favorite college bar. It took another decade before accepting the stunning reality that there is a continuous undercurrent of connection in every moment of our life. The one that we inevitably shut the door on in an attempt to hide and preserve our shame. For a while, shame is what fuels us. You have to be a better mother, a better friend, a better dresser, have a better profession, a better whatever. As an only child with a single mother, I certainly moved through my life trying to dodge the shame I felt every time someone around me could buy something I couldn't or could live in a better apartment at college. It ran deep for my small liberal arts elementary and high school, where the kids touted the popular brands of clothes and went on big vacations for spring break and summer. I started working summers at the age of 13. I wanted desperately to be able to buy cool things, things that would say, look, me too. I wasn't much for camp, and I'm quite sure my mother was pleased not to have to pay for it. I bought my own lunch like an adult and splurged on atrocious teal von Zipper sunglasses. The summer after I turned 16, real freedom hit. I drove an ice cream truck, having only had my license for three months and had a tip jar that said college fund. The act of being older and more mature from my childhood took on a new level. My cousin went to Tulane, so I said I did too. A cool college, far away from the small beach town I had grown up in. We worked 10 hours every other day, and on my days off, I'd drive up and down Coastal Highway, daydreaming about my eventual escape to college, to the University of Virginia. The summer before my senior year in high school, I was driving an ice cream truck wondering what I would actually do for college. Could I get out of this small life? Where? How would I afford it? Everyone around me had big name schools on their lists, with the only stress being their admission, and even that felt like a given. My interest lay in music, art, sports, none of which were developed for college-level engagement. About a month before the start of my senior year, I was standing in the kitchen of my cousin's house before another hot day in the truck. We had gone to a concert the evening before, and through my groggy eyes, I saw my mom pull up outside. It was 8 a.m. What was she doing here? The next few moments felt a bit like a time warp. I walked out the side door in the kitchen into the summer heat, the kind that greets you like a wall and immediately brings a bead of sweat to the back of your neck. The air stiff and thick. My best friend and boyfriend had been in a horrific car accident. All I could hear was it's D. It's D. Time stood still. He had been flown to shock trauma at the University of Maryland Medical Center. The only place you want to have access to in the event of the unthinkable. We didn't know it at the time, but he was paralyzed. What strikes me about the next six months was the intense clarity that came into my life. The first was that I was not going to be driving an ice cream truck that day, and ultimately the rest of the summer, because I was headed to Baltimore. A friend who I had worked with for several summers agreed to take my shifts. She was in that final stretch of summer trying to really bolster her payload. But my family, who owned the business and who drove several of the other trucks, didn't quite get it. The shame was laid on thick and not returning to work. And I have never had such clarity in a decision in my life. Maybe it was because there was a possibility that I might have been in the car, that the option had been extended to me the night before, and I chose no. Something told me to choose no. As senior year began, I spent many weekends driving back and forth to Baltimore. I sat in trauma-based hospital rooms and rehab rooms, filling waters, moving blankets, lifting arms or legs, and yet it still came as a complete shock to everyone when I walked into my college guidance counselor appointment with my mother and announced I was going to nursing school. There was a lot of silence and blank stares as that landed on the women in the room. And then silently my teacher took a post-it note, wrote three schools on it, and handed it to me. Villanova, Towson, the University of Virginia. I thought my mother was going to throw up, especially when she saw the last one. I could practically see the dollar signs floating above her head like a cartoon character. Oddly enough, I had never actually considered what school I would actually make it to. Driving around in my Jeep, I had only ever imagined getting out of the small beach town, never really sure how or towards what. But UVA, UVA felt big. Like, who am I? We went to Villanova first, and all I remembered was feeling cold there. Everything felt dark, and I knew the moment we parked it wasn't right. A few weeks later, we drove the six hours to UVA, my mother holding her breath, my body buzzing with some energy I hadn't yet made friends with. We arrived to pouring down rain. I'm talking a torrential downpour. The tour of the grounds that is meant to make everyone fall in love with the place was canceled, and we found ourselves in a brightly lit classroom with a panel of student and alumni speakers. It was in that moment that I realized the energy. It was a recognition. At the Shock Trauma Center, I had watched these superhuman people save my friends' life. They were tough and kind and fucking badasses. They were saving lives, and you could feel the direct pull in their bodies to the work that they were doing. I felt it again with people talking to us on this rainy day, confined to a classroom, away from the visible magic, but showing us the real magic. The people. That's it, I said. This is the place. My mom looked stunned. Really? What? We didn't even get to see the school. I didn't need to. I had found the people. I was admitted to the University of Virginia School of Nursing to the shock of most people in my life. One notable comment, oh, did you apply to nursing school so that you could transfer into the larger school? The answer to that question was no. Nursing school was actually much harder to get into. And a realization that unkindness offered to us is often a result of other people's shame in trying to be anyone other than themselves, in recognizing that they too have hidden themselves. And when they're struck with the image or the experience of someone else becoming fully themselves, the shame starts to bubble. And again on that rainy day in a brightly lit classroom at UVA was the same thing I felt at every concert I'd ever been to. The unmistakable feeling of connection, of being with complete strangers and having a common understanding, a common experience. Collective effervescence. What I've since realized, what I have felt moment after moment, is that collective effervescence lives beyond the concert. It lives beyond the walls of a hospital or the walls of a classroom. If you're present enough, if you're quiet enough, you will find that collective effervescence is buzzing through us at every moment. It's the stranger that you're standing next to on a sidewalk, the door that someone holds for you. Collective effervescence is what connects us and what brings us into this world wholly and fully connected. Thanks for listening. I hope you have a great day and I'll see you at the next session.