For Bill
A few lessons from a former teacher
I’m writing this essay for one of my college professors. I first met Bill (as he requested I call him by the time I’d graduated) when I was a sophomore and not having the easiest time at school, and two years later he graciously accepted the role of thesis advisor for my senior year of reading and writing about Milton’s Paradise Lost. Bill was a brilliant, kind, serious man who reminded me a bit of my grandfather if my grandfather was a foot and a half taller and dressed the part of English professor rather than flannel-clad fisherman. I say “serious” not because Bill was one of those stuffy, too-smart-for-kids, five-syllable-wielding kind of guys who lectures about his topic as if it’s the only important subject matter on campus. He had certain gravitas to him; he took people seriously, and he took books and writing seriously. He knew the wealth in the kinds of books on his curriculum and their ability to reveal great truths about the inner turmoils and joys of any reader, including the dozen young English majors in his English Renaissance class who didn’t always seem to keen on analyzing Shakespeare and Milton at 8:30 on a Thursday morning. He saw our need for these authors and their words in our lives before any of us realized it, and he made it his task to impart even part of this message to us despite my stubborn insistence (I’m sure that’s true of more than one peer, but I’ll speak for myself) that no Renaissance Englishman could possibly fathom the emotional perils that life as a nineteen-year old college student entailed.
Bill saw what I failed to see when I considered myself. I remained mostly mute in that class for a while. I was struggling with life outside the classroom, and though I found the readings fascinating on some level, I failed to see their relevance in my life. I saw school as something else I had to do on top of just getting through the day in one piece. I saw myself as a broken sad girl trying but failing to be a happy girl, but Bill saw someone with a voice, someone who needed connection, someone who mattered. He helped me find a voice through writing, and he’s the first teacher who made me understand two valuable truths. I learned that good art (i.e. literature, theater, film, etc.) has the capacity to reveal truths about ourselves and our place in the world. Shakespeare’s Hamlet calls it holding “a mirror up to nature.” I’d enjoyed reading before, but Bill taught me to experience it and to read for connection with self and others. He also led me to a relationship with writing as something more than an assignment with a right or wrong answer. With his encouragement and guidance, writing about literature became my way of exploring my thoughts and feelings and giving a voice to them. The larger than life characters we studied became reflections of my own experience as well as those of the people in my life, and their narrative trajectories revealed truths about relationships and personal growth that I couldn’t have accessed on my own at that point in my life.
As I think about it now, I see the value in these two practices - reading for connection and writing as exploration - as particularly relevant to what we do in recovery, though I’ll substitute reading with listening and writing with speaking. When we listen to the stories of others, we’re encouraged to identify rather than compare. And when we share our own stories, we don’t do it to impress anyone or say the exact right thing; we’re encouraged to be honest and vulnerable. I struggle a bit with this second practice; I’m more comfortable listening than speaking, but when I do speak I find that the experience of sharing my thoughts in a community setting frees me in a way that my excessive thinking can’t. Writing these essays has become one of the ways I carry on this lesson from Bill. He may not have explicitly told me to use books or essays as a means of connection, but he prompted the practices and thoughts that led me there, and I remember his comment on Eve’s heroism in Paradise Lost. She’s not as dynamic as Satan or as intellectually driven as Adam, but she’s the one who cultivates the connection that ends the epic on a hopeful note even as she and her husband are forced to abandon their Paradise for a world of pain and uncertainty. They walk out of Eden with a newfound sense of connection with each other, and that’s a cause for hope. Connection with self, others and God gives us this same hope in recovery
At the time, I may have only experienced this connection in small pieces that flashed and faded, but it was there. I felt that sense of not being alone in his classroom and as I wrote papers or read books for his course. I listened not because I believed he knew everything or because he was this dynamic titan of English literature, but because he emanated kindness in the sense that I knew he was like me. He knew what it was to hurt, and he knew there was a way through that hurt. This level of kindness is fundamental to our cultivation of connection with our fellows in recovery. I thought about this at a recent meeting as I listened to the speaker share his experience with the twelve steps. I’d heard the speaker before and know him as a guy whose story bears little in common with my own if you’re looking at plot points and personality. But I had this experience of being totally present to the feeling emanating from his share; I remember parts of what he said, but it was the feeling that remains most strongly with me. I listened to how he felt, and it gave me this sense of connection that I’d felt was missing from my past couple days. Sometimes when I’m going through something stressful or sad, I slip into this bubble sort of state. I’m in the bubble, and there is a wall keeping me from really connecting with the people and environment around me. That’s my way of describing it, but I know others have their own versions of the bubble. We put up walls when we experience fear, and the walls keep us from genuinely connecting with the people in our lives. We can break through the walls when we channel kindness rather than look for reasons not to connect.
Bill gave me tools to break through this wall, even if at the beginner’s level of using books; reading and writing are small ways of cultivating that kind of connection, but they’re a start for someone who really had nothing else she knew how to access. In addition to Bill, I had had a couple other professors who fostered that same kind of relationship with literature and art in my time at school. A lot of the time, I tend to remember the darker parts of my college experience, but the hours I spent in their classrooms and office hours were some of the most fulfilling and formative of my educational years. The time I spent talking with and listening to them led me to practice reading and writing as extensions of myself and asking for help with each of these pursuits, and these practices quickly became lifelines for me. I lost sight of these practices as drinking gradually became my most trusted means of accessing what I thought to be a solution for everything. Possibly every English major who drinks too much imagines her and himself as some modern offshoot of Hemingway or Fitzgerald. We think we have to figure it out alone and even glamorize our dismal mess as the tragedy allotted to us. I stopped reading for connection, stopped expressing my honest thoughts through writing, and stopped asking for help. Drinking put me right back into that mindset of believing that nobody and nothing could possibly understand the mental and emotional perils of life as a however-old version of myself. I can see now that this drinking thinking parallels the perspective of so many tragic heroes from the books Bill and his colleagues introduced to me. We think we’re alone in our struggle so we cling to whatever we think is in our power to deal with life and put up walls to prevent anyone from thinking we’re less than we need to be. They may seem heroic in their conviction and self-sacrificing downfall, but they’re missing that kindness that would grant them a more hopeful narrative. Kindness and connection may not guarantee triumph, but they nurture the strength needed to endure the kind of misfortunes that otherwise would be downright tragic and ruinous. My struggles may not be on par with those of Renaissance protagonists of literature, but the feelings are the same. I can choose to go it alone and be the kind of tragic hero whose selfish world view and pride are a downfall or I could choose to connect, to accept kindness and be vulnerable and find myself capable of facing the worst of my fears with my sanity intact.
Something that’s always remained with me from my time reading Milton with Bill is a line spoken by Adam. The first ever man is talking with an angel about the heavenly things that feed his curiosity, and he feels moved to say, “For while I sit with thee, I seem in Heaven” (VII). Adam explains his feeling, saying that this discourse with the angel feels sweeter than anything he could taste or feel with his senses, and this is the essence of true connection. This feeling of being in heaven or home merely by being in the presence of and sharing a connection with someone kind. The work of recovery has helped me experience this kind of connection even more today; I find that when I read for connection with the people in my life, I can read between lines that might have caused me to compare, contrast or disconnect.
When I learned that Bill passed away, I was in tears at the news; but I’ve been thinking how he would want me to carry the memory of him. I’m sad because losing someone and thinking about the ways in which that loss may weigh on his people is a sad thing. Maybe I’m sad too because I miss who he was for me and feel that I’ve somehow let down him and the other professors who made such a difference in my life. But I’ve come to the thought that his role as teacher in my life hasn’t been lost. I haven’t seen him in close to a decade, but his insights and lessons have resurfaced in my thinking in a new, stronger light during my time in recovery, and I can see now that the time I spent learning with him had that element of connection that Adam so aptly describes in his line to the angel. That kind of connection doesn’t fade with time or diminish when we lose a physical space or the person with whom we experience it. It endures even when we forget how to access it or think we’ve lost it entirely. Our capacity for connection waits only for us to recognize kindness in others, to see their stories as mirrors of our own, and to be vulnerable on our part so that our people have the chance to do the same.
