Can you sit with another’s truth, story and experience and not disconnect?

The power of writing what's real

‘Write only what is truly urgent to you’ ~ Lee Kofman.

Lee is a writer, respected author and new friend. I first heard her say this at a writers festival nearly ten years ago. Recently she placed it in her top three memoir tips on a social media meme and I immediately scribbled it on to a card that sits in front of me on my desk.

There isn’t a writing statement that resonates stronger with me today. It’s essentially been the theme of my last ten years. Before that I wrote for others; writing was a tool I used as part of my employment. I didn’t write about what was urgent for me, I wrote about what was urgent for others, or more accurately, what made others money. Now writing is the tool, or one of the tools, I use to express and share myself, with or without a financial bonus.

If I was to hone in on that statement even tighter, in the last 13 months I’ve added the ‘truly’ part to the urgent, because I’ve learnt that there can be a lot of urgent things but sometimes there is only one that is truly urgent.

For me the truly is my current experience of being a Jewish woman, rising anti-semitism and the conflict in the Middle East. I can’t separate me from it or it from me.

Yes, I also enjoy writing about nature, women’s cyclical life and wellbeing, and I will continue to do so, but they aren’t truly urgent. They aren’t sitting with me at the edge of the cliff. And no, I’m not sitting there thinking about jumping off it, rather I’m sitting there wondering how to build the bridge that will enable me to cross over to the other side. For us all to cross over to the other side.

However, not everyone wants to perch on that cliff with me. I know that what is truly urgent for me doesn’t appeal to everyone’s taste buds; for many it can actually feel like a bad taste. So much so that a reader can unsubscribe for it. A reader that previously liked my writing. The irony in this is that it’s the reason why it’s the only thing I wish to write about — because there is so much bad taste around the subject.

Writing what’s truly urgent for me, doesn’t mean I’m not human. It doesn’t mean I don’t feel those unsubscribes and departures from my life. It doesn’t mean they don’t trigger or hurt me.

A friend said to me that I shouldn’t worry about it as she’s unfollowed other writers when she doesn’t agree with their political stances on the war/conflict. However the difference here is that this isn’t a political stance for me; it’s me I’m writing about, it’s my people I’m writing about, it’s my future I’m writing about. I’m not forming an opinion, I’m expressing my current experience of life and what it means to live as a Jewish woman. So sometimes that doesn’t feel like a rejection of a stance or an opinion, it feels like a rejection of me. And even when my intellect tells me that it’s on the other, not me, it doesn’t mean there isn’t some emotion around it to feel and be with.

As a result, for the past month I took a break from Substack, so that I could sit in this space; not always comfortably. I guess I was meeting another edge, up on another cliff top. Contemplating writing for me rather than my audience, yet coming to the conclusion that they are actually one of the same. So much of today’s marketing talks about tailoring for your audience, but actually how do you even know who your audience is until they find you. And how does your audience even know what they want to hear until they hear it. The only way that you can find one another is if you write about things that mean something to you.

That means I’m back. With mixed feelings, but staring at Lee’s quote and knowing it embodies the truth of a sound writer.

We’re in the process of transitioning into a new astrological cycle. Pluto, the planet of transformation has been in Capricorn for the last 16 years and is about to enter Aquarius, where it will remain for the next 40 years.

This energy will force us to focus on what’s most important to us, or more apt, truly urgent.

My rising sign is also in Aquarius, so I know I’m going to feel this even more. We tend to be pioneers, often inventing, seeing or sniffing out things before their time. I have a lot of instincts, many I’ve never trusted, because they weren’t popular or the norm. That distrust is gone now.

Today I’m bringing forth two questions. They apply to my own situation and experience, but actually can be translated to many others. I’m learning that writing about what’s truly important to me can still bring up key principles that apply across the board. You may not be interested in Middle East conflict or my anti-semitism struggle but the ideas I raise are universal. Which as a by-product actually makes the issue I’m writing about universal.

The first question: what does it mean to distinguish between someone’s opinion on life and someone’s experience of life?

The second question: what does it mean to have a story of life versus a story on life?

This post addresses the first question. Next week’s post will cover the second.

The war in the Middle East isn’t just something I watch on a screen or read about in an article or meme. I feel it within me. I feel it around me. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I can’t choose a side because I am a side. It is my experience, not my opinion.

My cousin’s brother-in-law fell in Lebanon last week. A father of eight children, a rabbi, a mystic, a teacher; many have called him a special nashama, which translates to a beautiful soul. He didn’t want to be in the trenches of war, he wanted to be home with his wife, his kids, his students, his community. Yet he was there because he knew he had to defend his country and his people.  The same cousin lived around the corner from the Goldberg-Polin family, their kids at school together, neighbours and friends. Hersh, who was executed in Gaza, was someone they knew and loved.

A friend who lives in my town lost five of her family members on 7 October in the most horrific and barbaric of ways. And many many others around me lost friends, multiple friends all in one day. I’ve sat in rooms with Nova Music Festival survivors, I’ve heard them speak, I’ve witnessed their trauma.

The war in the Middle East isn’t just over there for me, it’s here, it’s all around the world. It comes under the banner of anti-semitism, which once again, someone’s experience of and someone’s opinion of is far different. You can quibble all you wish over the definition of anti-semitism, but the fact is until you experience it you have no right to define it.

On a regular basis, I pass hate signs in my beautiful coastal town. Slogans that don’t fit in with the lush natural land they are scribbled on. Last week two toilet walls were painted with Nazi/Israel hate symbolism, one going as far as to say: ‘Kill All Jews’.

I’ve been doxxed for being a Jew, my name listed on Internet Jewish hit lists. I’ve sat in gatherings where people were inciting violence against me as a Jew, so much so that I was shaking for weeks after. And there are people I know who have been threatened, attacked, boycotted and their businesses and lives collapsing all because they are Jewish.

A woman I admired as a singer and artist in my youth and who I now have had the privilege of getting to know wrote a piece for The Australian newspaper this weekend. Deborah Conway’s story is so many of our stories. I invite you to read this piece and reflect on much of what she’s said, starting with ‘truth being the first casualty of war’.

This absence of truth and what constitutes it, or more accurately what has replaced it, is evident in what happened on Friday in Amsterdam and how it’s been reported on since. The casualty of this war is that for over a year now lies and propaganda have hijacked the media (mainstream and social) and therefore no one knows what to believe. And no it’s not the Jews controlling the media, because I can promise you if we were, the stories would be a hell of a lot different. The overriding majority are far far from in our favour.

On Friday in Amsterdam, the very same town Anne Frank hid in, and then was deported from in the 1940s, Jewish and Israeli soccer fans were hunted down in a modern day pogrom after leaving a football stadium. Beaten, stabbed, run over, humiliated, robbed, thrown in the river. Asked to see their passports, to check if they were Jews! People screaming ‘I’m not Jewish, please’ in order to save their lives. Where have we seen this before?

It was a co-ordinated pre-meditated attack on Jews. And yes there are video recordings and Telegram messages of them stating that they are going on “ A Jew hunt”. Nothing of this magnitude has occurred in Europe since the 1930s and WWII. Actually this weekend we honour 86 years since Kristallnacht (translated to night of broken glass), the most horrific pogrom of European Jews, an omen of what was to come with the impending Holocaust.

Yet you won’t see much of this in the media. Instead you’ll see things like The NY Times calling it violence associated to soccer game or news outlets blaming it on some Israeli football hooligans tearing down Palestinian flags before the games and taxi drivers ‘fighting back’. Seriously?! since when does the action of tearing down a flag entitle you to hunt down every Jew in a city? How about all the American, Australian, and Israeli and other flags these protestors have burnt over the past year? How about the year long weekly protests, often with chants that incite violence, that have disrupted our streets every weekend. Does anyone hunt them down after that? NO.

Now watch this (up to 3 minute mark) to see how a truth-seeking journalist actually reports on it.

What happened in Amsterdam is just a taster. It’s becoming more and more the norm. And when no one gets detained or charged for these incidents, they’ll just keep occurring. And if we don’t all wake up to it, as I’ve written many times over and over again, Trump is child’s play compared to a conquering Islamic regime. Women just need to have a look at Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan and many of the other fundamentalist countries to see what the worse possible scenario for women truly is. And to see what happened to Israeli women on 7 October and still happening to Israeli women on Day 400 of captivity in Gaza. And while you’re looking there, look also at democratic Israel and see the rights and freedom women have there, Jewish, Arab, Christian, Druze, hetro, homo or transexual.

So many of the people you see reporting on this conflict in the media and on social media, writing posts of solidarity with the so-called ‘Pro-Palestine’ movement, are doing it usually connected to the rise of identity politics and the woke culture. They do it as part of an ideology, based on opinions of people they follow or lectures at university by the far left progressive academia. Or because they are part of the very large and growing Islamic Fundamentalist movement, growing albeit apparent accusations of ‘genocide’ of the very same movement. This is indoctrination at its best, yet as they like to do, they invert it and say that Jewish people are the indoctrinators. Just have one look at democratic Israeli society and fundamentalist Islamic society and critical thinking should essentially break that up for you.

It’s time we learnt, with all things, not just this subject, to know the difference. To listen to people who have REAL experience and tone down the listening to those who are just forming an opinion on these experiences.

So that’s why I write. Because it’s in my blood and in it’s in me. It’s as true as I can get.

I’ve also become more realistic this past year, I’ve seen how the polarities of life truly operate, for love to break through, hate needs to be exposed; for something new to be born, something old must die. You can’t just ask for peace without first identifying why it’s not there in the first place. You can’t look at a screen, be shocked and saddened by all the death and destruction and just call for a ceasefire because it is traumatising to watch. Of course it is, but our desperate desire to avoid the true nature of life and existence isn’t going to end a war. Looking it in the face and shining the headlights on it more likely will.

Circling back to Lee’s quote, as writers we are here to share about our unique experiences of life, our dreams for life and/or a well-balanced researched view of life. So right now I have no choice but to share what is truly urgent and real about my life.

As always, inviting in considered thoughts and reflections on this subject.

With love

Sharon