CHENNAI: I don’t remember what I said before my friend said to me, “This is a brave space.”
He said it intentionally, in lieu of “safe space”, a term that has entered common parlance and is used as much by those with good intentions and those without them.
We paused in our conversation, this old friend and I, because I was struck by this new term. Then I accepted its invitation and began to speak of the hard-to-speak things that required equal proportions of bravery and honesty on my part.
The next day, I found myself unexpectedly in a position of holding a brave space for someone else, a new friend. They shared from their own life openly, risking this new connection and possible hurt to themselves. This required bravery from me too, for the revelations in that space made me have to confront some of my own deepest fears and judgments.
My old friend had told me that the words “brave space” were from a poem by Beth Strano, but I learnt that they were not. They were added by Mickey ScottBey Jones, who plagiarised Strano’s work after discovering a verse painted on a door. Jones’ augmentation is arguably even more powerful than the original. It’s complicated: a cowardly act that emboldens. As a standalone concept, entirely removed from the poem and its forgery, “brave space” is precious both as an idea and as an experience.
Strano’s original poem was untitled. It opens on the lines “There is no such thing as a ‘safe space’ – / We exist in the real world.”. The line is eerily suggestive of a theme that has run through many conversations — brave, bewildering, both — that I have engaged in over the last several months.
The question that arises is: what is the real world? Neuro-atypical wirings, secrets, silences, metaphysical experiences, illnesses and wellnesses, abuses and the work of renarrativising our own lives so that we may continue to live with what we have known and now know all make the premise of a “real world” totter. Then there are the vastly different material and structural realities that make one life different from another through privilege, means, talent and luck of the draw. How many worlds there can be.
More than once recently have I told a new person in my life, as gently as I could and with as much candour as such gentleness to the other and to myself would allow, that I was cautiously open to getting to know them but that certain ways in which they were reminiscent of others who had wounded me made me wary. “I am sorry that I hurt you,” one of them sobbed.
“You didn’t hurt me,” I insisted. “Other people did, and that frightens me, but that has nothing to do with you.” In the here and now — in the raw truth that the older one gets, the older one’s scar tissues and unhealed injuries also become — life calls upon both self and self in relation to other to make bravery an act of repetition, believing that the greatest blessings may emerge from leaving the recognisable, the familiar, the so-called safe.