We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Laura Secord a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Laura, so great to have you sharing your thoughts and wisdom with our readers and so let’s jump right into one of our favorite topics – empathy. We think a lack of empathy is at the heart of so many issues the world is struggling with and so our hope is to contribute to an environment that fosters the development of empathy. Along those lines, we’d love to hear your thoughts around where your empathy comes from?
I was educated in empathy by my mother who expressed great compassion for everyone. I spent decades as a nurse practitioner, and felt deeply for my patients, but even after thrirty-five years of practice, I still didn’t understand the depth of empathy until I embarked upon my latest writing project.
I’d told the stories of other people— my patients, friends and family. I was about to publish AN ART, A CRAFT. A MYSTERY, a novel written in poems about my ancestors, when I got a call asking me if I could help a Rwandan woman tell her story of surviving genocide and human trafficking. I knew this woman; she’d crossed my path in health care. I knew of her struggle to write her story. It seemed this work was a divine request. This challenge to tell the story of a trauma survivor became a task of patience and attention. I had to relinquish control and learn to pay close deep attention in a new way.
How does one develop true empathy?
I had to let go of my preconceived notions and truly listen. This required me to relinquish control and breathe deeply as my friend and collaborator slowly circled closer and closer toward her hidden shame and trauma. I had to let go of all my assumptions about her as I opened myself to truly listen. I realized my imagination easily filled in blanks with distorted images and preconceived notions.
I realized that true empathy comes from attention and understanding. To write another’s story across cultures and experiences came not by comparing it to my own, but by allowing my perspective to step away and absorb another’s point of view, culture and experience.
Through four years of weekly interviews together, we found a way to open windows into her life, losses, trauma and victory. Knowing I was not the star of her story, I let go of a desire to for it to be about myself. To write in her voice, I had to learn to feel her pain, and in the process, we both had to heal. As her writer, I walked through the fire with my subject, and took on a new level of self-empathy, which came in the form of rest, napping after every session. I needed clear boundaries from other obligations, and a reasonable plan of action (a chapter a week). I became willing to let go of my mistakes and misunderstandings, which were many. Through these actions, together we were able to reach into her experiences. I was able to deeply empathize with her experiences so I could write her truth in her voice, and we completed our book, RE-TRAFFICKED: A Survivor’s Story of Hope and Rebirth.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
As a poet, writer, and teaching artist, I’ve worked as a printer, union organizer, health care activist, teacher, sex-educator and nurse practitioner in community health and HIV care. My novel in poems, AN ART, A CRAFT, A MYSTERY was chosen as a Best Book of 2022 by Kirkus Reviews. My poems appear in Poetry, Hobo Camp Review, Shift, Simple Machines, Cahoodleloodling, Finishing Line Press, Burning House Press, Voices of Resistance, PoemMemoirStory, The Southern Women’s Review, and The Birmingham Weekly. I am the Director of Community Engagement for The Magic City Poetry Festival and I’ve produced and performed in spoken word events for three decades. My lifetime commitment is to the lost and unvoiced stories from vulnerable communities. I love lecturing and reading from my work and am currently seeking agent representation for my collaborator Esperance Uwayirege Taylor’s memoir, RE-TRAFFICKED: A Survivor’s Story of Hope and Rebirth.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Three skills toward developing a truer empathy:
- Learn to deeply listen. Let go of your need to speak, share, or compare a person’s story to your own experience. You can’t really feel for another unless you’ve listened to them. I had to work on this. I was anxious and found if I learned to follow my breath I could listen. When I felt my attention drifting, or became anxious to speak, attention to my breath bought me back to listening.
- Be patient. Empathetic listening means letting go of your preconceived notions. Allow the speaker to follow the paths of their own experience. Ask questions for better understanding but avoid the “that’s like when I…” comparisons. Walk alongside the other person, with a make a goal of understanding and believing their truths.
- Have empathy for yourself as well. Know this is hard work, and a spiritual journey. Be aware of your boundaries. Rest. Applaud your own efforts.
If you knew you only had a decade of life left, how would you spend that decade?
After four years of working to tell another person’s story, along with a calculated struggle to find representation and publication for Re-Trafficked, I find it’s time to dig deep with empathy for myself. I want to be able to open my creative self again and explore empathy for my life story, writing a memoir of my experience of working as a writer and activist to become a more empathetic being. I plan to do this with poetry and prose in a hybrid form.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://laurasecordmojomamma.wordpress.com/2021/07/03/bee-whisperer/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laurasecordmojomamma/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/laura.secord.5
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6z9-OxU7fAnl-aqGZ9jx4g
- Reckon South: https://www.reckon.news/honey/
2021/05/as-a-human- trafficking-survivor-my-story- is-bigger-than-myself.html
Image Credits
Marika Johnson Jamil Glenn Shauna Stewart Larry O Gay
