In which Our Hero is the Major
It’s nice to be celebrated for crying.
The exercise is simple: receive the ball from your friend → thank your friend → declare with the vigor of a leading actor, “[Loved one], look at me: I’m the major!”
Most people fail for being too small: instantly kicked off, banished forever, like too-polite ghosts. In the summer course, I had been one of those, kicked off after one word.
Not wanting to befall this fate, I powered hard in the other direction.
After receiving the ball and thanking my friend, I turned to the audience, pulled out all the stops, and loosed a booming “YAYAAAAA!!!”
Students flinched in fear.
Head Teacher provided me lines to repeat back:
- “I’m sorry, Yaya, for frightening you with my shouting.”
Then, Head Teacher dialed me in:
- Softer
- More open
- Gentler
- Less pushing
- More subtle
When I had all the mechanics correct but was still missing joie de vivre, Head Teacher asked me who in the class I would want to kiss me. I chose a girl in the front row. Head Teacher asked, “Do you want another?” I said no, one is enough.
Then, whenever I spoke the text with all the mechanics correct but insufficient relaxed openness, Head Teacher signaled this classmate to kiss me on the neck. Later, classmates told me the kiss had opened me up: It stopped me from pushing so hard. I was, perhaps, trying to be liked. If I just sit back and show people who I am, it turns out they find me beautiful.
Eventually, as I opened up, tears began to fall. Not just mine. I saw tears in at least one audience member’s eyes.
What is this releasing? Is it a sadness or a joy or a wonder or a beauty? Is it the physical manifestation of pain being shared?
It reminded me of two events:
- One, crying in my parents’ shower seven years ago. I had just ended the most significant relationship of my life and was scouring my gut with steel wool, knocking off barnacles attached from that pain.
- Two, at Burning Man around that same time. Watching the Temple burn, I mourned the end of that relationship and grieved the pain it had caused me.
The first happened in private. The second happened in public. And bawling at Burning Man, surrounded by fifty thousand people, the funniest thing happened:
Everybody kept trying to help. Some offered a tissue; others provided a shushing noise. Well-meaning people, but they were soothing their own discomfort, not mine. Mine wasn’t discomfort. Mine was comfort for the first time in a decade. My tears were the powerful release of pain. And others, in wanting to help, tried to pull me back into their pool of internalized pain.
I’ve had a philosophy since that experience: people who are grieving should be allowed to lead. Sit with them; offer them your kind presence; maybe a hand to hold if they want to. But let them lead. Even that hand-holding is more likely to be top-down controlling than actually helpful and kind. Let them take care of themselves. You are there to serve.
Here, on stage, it was nice to finally be rewarded for my raw, open emotion. To show that rawness and have it accepted. Not just any rawness: it had to be loving (directed at Yaya) and relaxedly pleasurable (from the kiss). But still, a context in which to share my experience. To share my feelings. To share my pain.
If you have deep pain, we’ll accept that here — so long as you offer it as a light, open gift.
Four minutes on stage. One of three people who cried during the exercise. Described as a “breakthrough” by a fellow student.
It’s intoxicating.
Satisfying.
Nice to be alive.
And delightful
to be celebrated
for being myself.
—
Yaya, today, I was the major.
Julian Wise 