Show Notes
What happens when the moments you've spent years avoiding are the very ones you need to face?
This week, my friend Nadia returns to discuss Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory, Sarah Polley's 2022 essay collection about the transformative power of returning to the past. We start with Sarah at fifteen, playing Alice on stage with a curving spine, a newly broken heart over her mother's death, and a father whose fascination with Lewis Carroll shaped far more of her childhood than it should have.
Nadia shares her own experience losing her mother to ovarian cancer and the unexpected gift her mother gave the family by facing her death head on. We talk about why we can hold compassion for Sarah's father and still call his parenting a failure, how lawyers can believe women and still warn them not to come forward, and why a NICU nurse's line about martyrs and mothers stopped us both in our tracks.
Then we get to the essay that gives the book its name: a concussion, three lost years, and a doctor who told Sarah to do the opposite of everything she'd been taught. Together we wrestle with the line between knowing your limits and setting them too soon, and why growth almost always lives on the other side of the thing that scares us.
Share this conversation with the friend who has been listening to her body a little too closely and is ready to run towards something.
"So much of coming to terms with hard things from the past seems to be about believing our own accounts, having our memories confirmed by those who were there and honoured by those who weren’t. Why is it so hard for us to believe our own stories or begin to process them without corroborating witnesses appearing from the shadows of the past, or without people stepping forward with open arms when echoes of those stories present themselves again in the present?" - Sarah Polley | Run Towards the Danger
Books referenced: Run Towards the Danger by Sarah Polley
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Xx, Alex
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