A Newsletter About Sister Act 2 and German Poetry

Hi Everybody,

If you are reading this, well then that means I have finally plucked up the courage to share some of my thoughts on life in the form of a newsletter! Full disclosure, I do not know how newsletters work, am not super interested in learning, and am really afraid of what this does or does not become, but here we are.

If you know me you know that Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit is one of my favorite movies of all time for many reasons. In it, there is a scene in which Sister Mary Clarence (Whoopi Goldberg) chases after Rita (Ms. Lauryn Hill) outside of their Catholic school in the hills of San Francisco in order to give her a book and cute little lecture that only a tough love teacher can deliver.

For context, if you have not been privileged enough to watch the 1993 coming-of-age-musical classic, Rita has an amazing gift for music and loves to sing, but has left music class and the school choir after a showdown with her teacher. What I have gathered in the 100+ watches of this movie —excuse me— film, is that Rita is afraid to love something that hard because, well, what if it doesn’t work out? What if she loses it? Better not to try and thus, never be stung with needles of rejection or loss. Her fear shows up as anger and self-isolation as she tries to run from the one thing that brings her the most joy: music. Sister Mary Clarence, probably recognizing some of herself in Rita, tells her a story:

I went to my mother who gave me this book called “Letters to a Young Poet” Rainer Maria Rilke. He’s a fabulous writer. A fella use to write to him and say “I wanna be a writer. Please read my stuff.” And Rilke says to this guy: “Don’t ask me about being a writer. If when you wake up in the morning, and you can think of nothing but writing, then you’re a writer.’

I’m gonna say the same thing to you. If you wake up in the morning and you can’t think of anything but singin’ first, then you’re sposed to be a singer, girl.”

- Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit

For most of my life, I thought that Rainer Maria Rilke really said those lines, as the quote is attributed to him all over the internet. For most of my childhood I also thought Rainer Maria Rilke was a woman, though had I known that his full name was René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, maybe I wouldn’t have misgendered him so much in my mind. I digress. I only discovered that the screenwriters and Whoopi Goldberg riffed these iconic (to me) lines as I sat down to write this post and ended up reading the entirety of Letters to a Young Poet looking for them. My life is forever changed by the book, duh, but that’s a story for another time. The original bit reads:

You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all-ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple "I must," then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.

-Letters to a Young Poet

If you are in love with words and the way they loop together to dip in and out of truth, but no one ever reads them, are you a writer? Here’s the thing. The words “I’m a writer” feel like razorblades cutting up the inside of my cheeks every time I think about saying them. Many questions eat at me when it comes to writing, but the loudest one is “who am I to tell this story?” feeling simultaneously unqualified and arrogant for thinking that maybe I do have something to say? Only recently have I come to the understanding that no one can tell my stories like I can, and that is why I must. So, Rilke’s advice, by way of Whoopi Goldberg, feels like balm on the cuts. If you feel that you must, then you are. And maybe it is that simple. Easy? No. But simple? Maybe.

For me, I have always written because I felt I had no choice: it was all I could do to keep all of my threads from unraveling completely. I keep pens and paper everywhere and have turned many napkins, receipts, envelopes, and pairs of jeans into receptacles for my deepest thoughts. I have always needed to get my questions out with a pen if there was any hope of understanding them. Writing allowed me to hold and see that which felt so elusive to me when it stayed trapped inside my body. The pen, more often than not, set something free and helped me feel a little lighter growing up.

In fifth grade, I had a teacher who taught me to look at words as puzzles and possibilities, and he helped me unlock different parts of myself with language. Suddenly, I could hold in my hand the questions that used to render me silent, frustrated, and worried. I could now write them down and point to them and use them to better understand the people around me and possibly, eventually, be understood by them as well.

For a while, writing scared me because paper to pen felt like chisel to stone. I thought, naively, that in order to write I had to be certain. That once it was written, I could not change my mind. This is probably one of the residual scars of schooling (writing was always product over process) combined with the anxiety of viral internet humiliation for tweets gone wrong (the internet is forever dun dun dun). So, for the most part, I’ve kept my words hidden in the pages of bound journals and legal pads under my bed. They travel with me from apartment to apartment, the boxes becoming a bit heavier with each move. But isn’t that just the lowest hanging metaphor you’ve ever heard? At a certain point, those boxes you hide from everyone get too damn heavy to keep schlepping around. And as you get older, fewer and fewer friends help you with the Uhaul. In the words of Pink Sweat$: we all got bags full of shit that we don’t want. i can’t unpack it for you, baby. Ouch. But yes.

In my quest for Whoopi Goldberg inside of Rilke’s letters, I came across something that impacted me just as much as the original lines:

There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain, to which I am grateful: patience is everything!

Learn it daily. Learn it with pain. I learned young to be afraid of pain, and I contorted my existence dramatically in order to avoid feelings of loss and shame. Plot twist: it didn’t work. Because in that contortion, I also stopped being able to recognize myself. Unsurprisingly, we cannot escape pain, but I really appreciate the frame of learning with pain. Not against it or despite it, but with it. Pain is a part of life, but maybe suffering doesn’t have to be.

All of this to say, I don’t know how to write a newsletter, and when it comes to sharing my writing with other people, I am a beginner. But, I think I am finally ready to start learning with pain. No amount of schooling, courses, degrees, or praise will create for me an authentic identity or a credible voice. For better or worse, I have to do that myself.

So whatever your passion is, whatever you wake up and feel you must do or you might die, whatever heavy box you’ve been carrying around, I hope you are giving yourself permission to get curious about it. No one else will, and no one else’s blessing matters. In the words of one of my favorite poets:

do not choose the lesser lifedo you hear me. do you hear me. choose the life that is. yours.the life that is seducing your lungs.that is dripping down your chin

―Nayyirah Waheed, nejma

If you’d like to keep receiving newsletters about my thoughts on writing, teaching, learning, and living or share them with a friend, make sure y’all are subscribed! Do I know when the next one will be or what it will be about? Absolutely not. Until then, I love you and be well!

XO,

M

Notes: Texts Referenced in this Newsletter- Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (film)- Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Wilke (book)- Honesty, Pink Sweat$ (song)- nejma, Nayyirah Waheed (poem)