Make It Scream, Make It Burn

by Leslie Jamison

It wasn’t that I necessarily believed in it. It was more that I’d grown deeply skeptical of skepticism itself. It seemed much easier to poke holes in things—people, programs, systems of belief—than to construct them, stand behind them, or at least take them seriously. That ready-made dismissiveness banished too much mystery and wonder.

Stories about past lives help explain this one. They promise an extraordinary root structure beneath the ordinary soil of our days.

Even as they replaced a belief in the uniqueness of the self with an idea of interchangeability—suggesting that your soul had belonged to others before it belonged to you—they also provided an extraordinary explanation for deeply ordinary things: a shy daughter, a son with no friends, a toddler with nightmares. They turned quotidian experiences into symptoms of an exotic existential phenomenon.

This is how we light the stars, again and again: by showing up with our ordinary, difficult bodies, when other ordinary, difficult bodies might need us. Which is the point—the again-and-again of it. You never get to live the wisdom just once, rise to the occasion of otherness just once. You have to keep living this willingness to look at other lives with grace, even when your own feels like shit, and you would do anything to crawl inside a different one;

Does graciousness mean you want to help—or that you don’t, and do it anyway? The definition of grace is that it’s not deserved. It does not require a good night’s sleep to give it, or a flawless record to receive it. It demands no particular backstory.

You thought the story kept changing, but the most important part never did. She was always just a woman in pain, sitting right in front of you. Sometimes it hurts just to stand. Sometimes a person needs help because she needs it, not because her story is compelling or noble or strange enough to earn it, and sometimes you just do what you can.

have spent much of my life as a writer chasing poet C. D. Wright’s suggestion that we try to see people “as they elect to be seen, in their larger selves.” But it’s an impossible dream. Making art about other people always means seeing them as you see them, rather than mirroring the way they would elect to be seen.

But for years I would be the one wondering—with my father, my brothers, my boyfriends—What can I do to make him love me more?

The Old English steop means “loss,” and the etymology paints a bleak portrait: “For stepmoder is selde guod,” reads one account from 1290. Another text, from 1598, says, “With one consent all stepmothers hate their daughters.”

Lindenauer posits that the eighteenth-century popular imagination took the same terrible attributes that the Puritans had ascribed to witches—malice, selfishness, coldness, absence of maternal impulse—and started assigning them to stepmothers instead. “Both were examples of women who, against God and nature, perverted the most essential qualities of the virtuous mother,” Lindenauer observes. “Moreover, witches and stepmothers alike were most often accused of harming other women’s children.”

Eating was fully permitted now that I was doing it for someone else. I had never eaten like this, as I ate for you.

The psychiatrist who diagnosed me wasn’t interested in that consolidation. When I told her about being lonely—probably not the first college student to do so—she said, “Yes, but how is starving yourself going to solve that?” She had a point. Though I hadn’t been trying to solve the problem, only express it, maybe even amplify it. But how to translate these self-defeating impulses into the language of rational actors?

The story of the woman determined to have a natural childbirth felt nobler than the story of the woman who asked for all the drugs right away, just as the story of the pregnant woman felt nobler than the story of the woman who starved herself. There was something petty or selfish or cowardly about insisting on too much control, about denying the body its size or its discomfort.