Camp Pep: The Cycle of Vulnerability

Are you tackling a writing project this April at Camp NaNoWriMo? Our incredible participants have words of wisdom to share with their fellow writers. Today, Emily shares what the Peace Corps taught her about writing:

As a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa, I’d like to think that I’ve learned a thing or two about both rustic living and resilience; two topics that are central to the Camp NaNoWriMo experience.

At Peace Corps training, our teachers talked a lot about the Cycle of Vulnerability and Adjustment: a tortured sinusoidal wave designed to describe the process of getting used to an entirely new culture.

Basically, sometimes you feel awesome, and sometimes everything sucks.

Now, I’m the kind of person whose skepticism takes on a life of its own whenever she encounters anything systematic that purports to accurately reflect the inner lives of a large, diverse group of people. The Cycle of Vulnerability and Adjustment in particular seemed almost offensively simplistic. How could it possibly be accurate? And if it was, didn’t that make people’s feelings seem mechanical and predictable—almost invalid?

After moving to my village, however, I began to understand what the Cycle was really meant to teach us. It’s not that every single person has the same experience, although it’s true that there are specific times during Peace Corps service, as during Camp NaNoWriMo, when most people can be expected to feel a bit downtrodden (Week Three, anyone?). But the more important lesson of the Cycle—easy to hear but harder to make yourself believe—is that everyone has their ups and downs and that’s normal.

What the Peace Corps and Camp NaNo have both taught me time and again is that, just as surely as bad times come, good times follow. You might not experience a perfect moment of clarity where you know exactly what a trial is supposed to teach you, but I know for a certainty that you can move past whatever’s bothering you right now. Your main character’s obnoxious, but not in the way you intended? Your writing sounds unbearably awkward? You’re woefully behind schedule? The solutions to all those problems, and pretty much any Camp NaNo problem, are the same: keep on writing, keep on writing, and keep on writing.

Keep on writing until the problem’s solved or you forget about it—you’ve got all of May to fix anything that’s still bugging you.

I’ll see you at the finish line.

emilybrehob is a community health educator with the Peace Corps in the Northwest region of Cameroon.  When she’s not brushing up on her Pidgin and Meta or working hard to eradicate malaria, she enjoys reading, knitting, exercising, and participating in luxurious virtual writers’ retreats. You can find her on Twitter: @EmilyBrehob.

Top photo by Flickr user Maja_Larsson.