Susan Popper is practicing resurrection, to borrow a line from one of Wendell Berry’s poems. She is a complex person, pain and laughter live side by side in her very expressive face, but she has set out to reclaim her life, work through her obesity and fulfill her destiny – she is just learning that she is a very good person.
In my life nothing has altered my reality or done me more good than my decision to be authentic and share my life. One by one, I shed my secrets and my shames by writing about them as honestly as I could.
When I see it in others, I am deeply touched and inspired. And this week, I saw it in Susan. As long as I have known her – three or four years – she has been unable to even speak about her obesity, her life-long shaming by her mother and others had rendered her mute, unable even to speak the word.
Last week, and on her blog, she rose from the spiritual dead in a sense, and awakened. She wrote about the challenge and awful suffering of obesity on her blog in a powerful and viscerally authentic way.
She can say the word now, and she can confront the reality now, and has decided to tell her own story openly and on her blog. Her authentic writing has opened the door for her, she is on the move now, she no longer has any dreadful secrets or shame to hide or avoid.
I love taking portraits of Susan, she had the radiant smile I saw so often in the face of Kelly Nolan from the Bog. There is no more Bog, but there are plenty of smiles. Susan has some of the best ones.
She shed her life on Long Island, left the ordinary and familiar behind, and moved to the country to seek out the truth about her life, and find her purpose. My own feeling as a friend of hers, is that she has just found it, this is why she came here, to finally come face-to-face with the very thing that tormented her all of her life, and that almost cost her life a few years ago.
Writing can do that for you. Susan, I should say, is a student in my Writing Workshop, and she is a wonderful student – open, gifted, determined. She has made me a better teacher, and reminded me of the great power of writing to heal and inspire and uplift.
It is not a simple thing to write authentically, especially about a subject like obesity. I’m writing this because it’s compelling, but also because I hope some of you will cheer her on, as you have so many others. I’m coming along.
Susan is on her hero journey now, and it will be a great ride for her and for those of us who wish to follow it. Her life is in her own hands, no one can confront this demon but her, and she is up for it, she says. She promises to share the journey.
Susan is a good person, and what has been done to her is wrong. She plans to right the wrong. She knows how hard that will be. “In my lifetime,” she told me,”I have gained and lost whole villages.”
Susan’s own blog is a good place to start, her story, “Tears Of A Clown” a manifesto of sorts. it is a landmark moment for her, and it is also beautifully and powerfully written.
It is a life-changing piece of work for her. She is practicing resurrection, every day.
It’s not my blog or my story, but I told Susan I was doing to invite my own readers to come along for the ride and she said that would be wonderful.