Sometimes the Best Classroom is Community Theater

Note: This essay originally appeared within the author's publication Secular & Sensational on Medium.

I remember sitting in a church parking lot, tears pouring down my face. These were different from my other tears. My other tears came out fierce and fast, a direct response to immediate physical or emotional pain. These parking lot tears emanated from the center of my body and fell down slowly in time with my breath. They were not the result of pain so much as they were the result of being human.

Inside the church, my children were gathered along with teachers and students from their hybrid learning center. They were rehearsing for a Christmas play. It was their first taste of theater, and I was thrilled. It didn’t matter that it was happening inside a church and that I was agnostic.

Looking at the church from the parking lot reminded me of how I had survived my near attempt at suicide in part by foregoing religion. This is to say, it reminded me that I had survived period. I was only around 3 years out from that experience, and I felt overwhelming waves of gratitude and grief.

This year, 2019, marked the 10th anniversary of my near attempt to take my life. It also is the year I finalized my divorce and received my cancer diagnosis. Earlier this month, a friend donated my children and I a Christmas tree which had been abandoned in her basement by the former tenants of the house where she lives.

The day my children and I decorated the tree, we felt silly and strong. My daughter and son slipped stockings onto their feet and took time to carefully admire each ornament before hanging it on the tree and deciding whether it was one to keep. We strung on one long string of colored lights, and my daughter declared that our apartment’s living room no longer frightened her. It was a landmark moment this Christmas season.

Another landmark moment came last week when she performed on stage with her musical theater class. The production centered on a re-telling of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. It was a collaborative effort between our local symphony orchestra, a community theater troupe, a children’s chorus and my daughter’s class.

Even though the instructors leading the show had allegedly been communicating for weeks, my daughter’s teacher is a teenager himself whose input was not given the same weight as some of the adults’. As a result, my daughter and her peers had to make major adjustments under pressure. They did, and the show went on to great success.

Brightly colored costumes, funny lines and uplifting music had my son laughing and the audience on their feet dancing. At many points during rehearsal, and in the aftermath of the show, I was crying those slow, deep tears again.

Admittedly, part of the reason why the tears came a few years back is because the rehearsal gave me time to be genuinely still, alone with myself. And the kind of emotions I was processing always need a still, private place to be properly felt.

Since then, I’ve become better at consciously making time to be with myself in stillness, and the result has been developing much more familiarity with my tears. Still though, there is something about theater itself which feels uniquely relevant to the way I process my emotions and take stock of life as a whole.

I think, perhaps, it’s the way theater lends itself to reflection. You sit back quietly and observe a show unfold. You do so knowing that what you’re seeing has both been scripted and adapted, perhaps in real time, to meet the needs of the moment within which you’re alive. You also comprehend there is a story between all the actors themselves — unfolding as they actively collaborate, show after show, to create their art.

If you’re sensitive, you can viscerally feel the depth of that process. It’s powerful magic. And, for me, the result is thinking more closely — with pain, wonder and gratitude — about the roles we all play in life.

In the role of parent, I prioritize giving my children opportunities to be part of things like the theater. In the role of teacher, I sometimes suspect there is more to be learned from that than from books.

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