Turning Trauma Into Lemonade
To me, that is the very definition of taking control of our own lives.
While taking a writing MasterClass with the great Amy Tan recently, I had a memory that went further back than any I have had before. My mother, who had a tendency to spend the majority of Saturday shopping, piled all of us in her new 1974 Plymouth Duster and took us to the Five and Ten on Middle Country Road by our first house in Centereach, NY.
A “Five and Ten” was a bit like a dollar store except instead of everything costing one dollar, everything cost–you guessed it– 5 or 10 cents. But that wasn’t the only difference. In those days, most businesses were unique and privately owned, so they all had a bit more personality than the chain dollar stores we have today
Everywhere you would look in a store like that, you’d find those plastic parachute soldiers you’d throw up in the air, matchbox cars, matchbox car knockoffs, whoopee cushions, super balls, Spaldings, nerf footballs, wiffleball bats, water guns—it was a dream come true for most children.
In an act of true maternal benevolence, one particular day in the summer, my mother bought me one of those spiral pocket notepads. When we arrived home later that day, I ran upstairs, grabbed a crayon and made an “H” on the very first page of the book.
My heart began pounding. I made an H! I had never done that before. I ran all through the house, showing and telling everyone. I made an H! Then across the street to the babysitter’s: I made an H! I made an H!
Once this little old memory movie played in my head, I deconstructed it in the most accurate way possible. First, I looked up when children usually begin writing numbers and letters and then I was able to place this in the proper year. I was, most likely, three or four years old.
I don’t know about y’all, but if anyone asked me, on the street last week, if I had any vivid memories from being three or four years old, my answer would’ve been a very solid “no.” So first, let me just mention this: I am not an “influencer” nor do I get any compensation from MasterClass, but if you are even slightly interested in working on your writing, you could do a lot worse than blow $180 on a year of MasterClass. There are full on classes from Margaret Atwood, Amy Tan, David Sedaris, Neil Gaiman, Joyce Carol Oates, Judy Blume, Roxane Gay, Billy Collins, Amanda Gorman, Salman Rushdie and on and on. Any single one of those would be worth that money.
Plus, those are just the writing lessons. There are also cooking classes with top chefs, communication classes with George Stephanopoulos, relationship classes with Esther Perel, and business classes with Richard Branson. Seriously, if you find yourself meandering into middle age, uninspired and lost, this will get you revved up and inspired to do something. Or really, anything you set your mind to.
Okay, commercial over.
Now I will come to the more important point: the trauma that we accrue in childhood can oftentimes seem like the bane of our existence. For someone like Amy Tan, it became a path to fame and fortune. Not to say, of course, that she turned “lemons into lemonade.” One gets the very obvious feeling that Tan ate a lot of sour lemons before turning some of them into a sweet nectar. And therein lies the rub of all of our lives.
Nothing is either A or B. Black or white. Wrong or right. It’s all just a nebulous stew of good and bad. The thing is, we are guaranteed the bad. One need only be born and continue breathing for that. However, if we want to enjoy the gifts of our trauma, we must put in the effort to get there. Whether it’s childhood trauma, the baggage we bring with us from our old heartbreaks, or memories from toxic relationships–the gold is there in the pan. You will only be able to get it by shaking out the water and sand.
To me, that is the very definition of taking control of our own lives. When we are passive, when we are caught in the undertow of shitty emotions, we are just allowing life to have its way with us. When we do anything even symbolically close to what an Amy Tan or David Sedaris does, we are recovering proprietorship of our own pain and we are taking back our control.
The importance of this goes far beyond expanding our creativity. When we engage in activities where we can do this, we finally possess agency over our lives. And this is a thing no one can take away from us.
When our lovers decide they no longer love us, when our children want to spend all their waking hours with their friends, when we lose jobs, face evictions, get in car accidents, or become bankrupt with medical issues (I’m looking at my American friends especially)--we will still have that.
Is there anything else we can possibly say that about?
I watched Amy Tan’s masterclass over and over and over again in the first days and weeks I was postpartum last year. There’s something truly moving and bitter sweet within it, this awareness of the pain and gift of our lives being intertwined. I think you captured it within this piece of yours. Thank you. And also... I’m gonna add to your masterclass commercial. SO worthwhile.
Heck yeah, quite vividly —every sense simultaneously activated, including imagination 🍭 it’s no wonder why the original Willy Wonka, with Gene Wilder, is my favorite movie of all time. I think we’re all trying to find that golden ticket 🎫 ✨