THE MEMOIR NOTES #3: When we become, for a time, them.

Using The Tools of An Actor To Practice Empathy And Compassion

The Memoir Notes is a series of real-time notes inside Heart’s Content documenting my process as I write my memoir. I share story drafts with my private community in each month’s intimate, bonus newsletter for paid subscribers. Subscribe here if you want to follow along and read what I’m writing and have a chat about it.

Image: Yuval Robichek

Once upon a time, I taught acting. Untrained or inexperienced actors often make general, sweeping, surface-level assumptions about the characters they will portray. The result? Cardboard characters with no dimension and what most people label as bad acting. This primarily means that the acting lacks depth, insight, and specificity. There’s no heart. No resonant truth. No scars on the flesh or flesh on the bones. Mostly there is no true empathy.

As storytellers, trained actors share a particular head-start (shouldn’t it be a heart-start?) in engaging empathy with the characters we create. We learn a process and a craft that enables us to practice compassion with every character we seek to understand and embody. This is a core tenet of the actor’s work. Even the antagonists or “villains” have a story, and they are fighting like hell for what they want and feel they must have to survive. To create a character onstage or on film, we have to know the character intimately, at least as well as we know ourselves, and likely even better than we know ourselves since much of our motivation remains unconscious.

Actors and writers piece together character biographies and psychologies. We attempt to unpack the character’s motivations, desires, and driving forces. It’s like learning what it means to be human. We walk around in their shoes, see things through their eyes, and feel their hurts and victories using our imagination and emotional intelligence. As a creative exercise, we re-experience their lives and we become, for a time, them.

Image: Yuval Robichek

In attempting to understand the “characters” in my own life who will be pivotal in a memoir, I too will have to dive deeper than the surface-level assumptions I have held for years. Empathy requires listening beyond our assumptions.

As I begin to write about the lives of my parents, I am engaging in a journey to try to better understand them and move beyond unchallenged assumptions. While I can never know exactly what my parents experienced or felt or struggled to overcome, I can practice compassion by filling in the story using my intuitive creativity, along with any “given facts” which I either already know or can uncover.

You don’t have to be an actor to benefit from this creative process.

We can all choose to review the characters in our own life with more compassion if we step into their story with curiosity and openness instead of our ready-made assumptions and unexamined biases. It doesn’t remove responsibility for their actions but it does help us lean into possible new perspectives on the event or story or person. In this way, we have the opportunity to open ourselves up, and the story itself, to new possibilities. To new understandings. We get the opportunity to see with the heart. We get to practice compassion and grow in empathy.

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Image: Yuval Robichek

Let me share an experience from my life this past week.

Ron and I had scheduled a carpet cleaning for our den. We had worked with this guy before and we liked his service. Let’s call him Dan. Well, Dan simply didn’t show up at his appointment. No call. Just a no-show. Our first knee-jerk reactions were things like, “ What kind of business doesn’t at least call and say you aren’t coming?” and “How rude.” We had changed our schedules, moved furniture, and now we couldn’t even leave a voicemail. All three of his business numbers had full voicemail inboxes. Initially, we were kind of irritated, honestly.

We eventually moved from irritation to “ I wonder if something happened to him?” Perhaps some emergency had come up. Ron decided to go back online to schedule a new appointment for the next day. We wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. When the appointment time came around, we wondered if he’d show up - and he did!

When Dan arrived he immediately greeted us and said, “ Please let me explain what happened. I was so relieved to see that you had rescheduled and I’m so sorry I didn’t call. I didn’t handle that well. I apologize. I’ve been really depressed lately. I’ve had two of my cousins die in their sleep in the last 30 days and I have had a really hard time getting out of bed.” We were softened immediately. We felt his pain rippling out in waves touching us. He went on to apologize and share more vulnerably. We told him how much we honored his truth-telling and willingness to share with us so vulnerably. It opened up a really beautiful conversation.

So, all of that is to say, yes we all make assumptions, but as we discover new information our perspective can then radically shift. We experienced compassion for Dan instead of irritation once we learned more about what he had been going through. It didn’t change how we were inconvenienced but it did change how we felt about it. How we feel about any situation will always shift once we hear someone’s story. Once we can empathize. We might not always get to hear “ the other side of the story” but we can practice empathy by considering other possibilities beyond our assumptions.

You’ve likely heard the expression, “When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me.” Our reptilian brains are hard-wired to assess situations, look for danger, and form opinions based on the information we have. But new information changes everything, doesn’t it?

As I wrote to you in the last letter, I have to say that even in my first pass at writing a few scenes about my parents’ elopement story, I could feel the boundaries of my heart enlarging with understanding and compassion for them both. Suddenly this story wasn’t just a whiff of a story I’d heard or a mystery to be solved for my purposes, I began immersing myself in their experience as if I was seeing and feeling the stories through their eyes. I immediately felt closer to them both. I felt their excitement and their dreams for their future. They were no longer cardboard characters who were frozen in black and white photographs, but living breathing humans hoping and desperate for a happier life.

xo Mary

Now, It’s Your Turn…

PUTTING FLESH ON THE BONES

Prompt: What is one simple story you’ve heard from a parent or ancestor that you can creatively “flesh out“ in your imagination? If that idea doesn’t speak to you, use an event from your week and practice empathy by considering the experience of someone you recently encountered. Begin with the basics and then walk around as him or her in that situation using your imagination. What do you - as them - see, feel, taste, hear, touch, smell, hope for, and notice? What happened and how did it affect “you? “ How does this potentially shift the way you understand or empathize with the other person’s experience in that story?

How does it soften you?

3 THINGS WORTH SHARING:

1. Here’s a super basic character analysis template that will give you a heart-start in the process if you are interested in exploring this idea further.

2. Building A Second Brain by Tiago Forte. I recently listened to this book on creativity and productivity with its focus on building easy-flow systems for your digital life. I’ve been looking for a book like this for years. This is not a do-more approach, it is a way to filter for what matters most to you and for actionability instead of simply amassing more and more information and feeding your overwhelm. It’s a great listen on Audible ( or Libby) and is loaded with clear and helpful tools!

3. I am currently savoring my teacher’s memoir. It was released in late March. As Thomas Merton was to Jim Finley, Jim Finley is to me. The Healing Path.

   

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