Dear Student | On Nurturing Spaces
When I first signed up for a 12-week writing workshop led and facilitated by Delhi-based poet and author Aditi Rao in 2012, I had yet to encounter the term safe space. At the end of our first session, Aditi invited us to brainstorm to form the first agreements and practices that we collectively came up with to observe and adhere to in the 11 weeks that were to follow. Ten participants, some practically strangers to each other, got together to create a framework that challenged my years of conditioning and confronted habits that had always made me look for “improvements” (Nah, perfection) in my and others’ work.
We all agreed on respect, confidentiality, honesty, and amnesty by trusting each other’s intentions, and we also decided to take risks and have fun. It didn’t stop at that. Facilitated by Aditi, we would go on to detail how we would practice what we had consented to, how to turn the abstract “respect” and other agreements into concrete actions, and here is what we came up with—listening, not giving feedback on someone’s writing unless asked, seeking to understand, and not getting upset by cross-questioning (remember amnesty!).
Over three months, the gift of attention we gave each other made us feel heard ( I also thought I had not really listened to what others had to say before then). Someone’s story need not be “coherent” to reflect (if asked to ) the evocative colour of the couch or the description of deceptively delicate-looking sturdy hands. I also recall how halfway into the workshop, we had to watch Brene Brown’s TED Talk — The Power of Vulnerability, which I completely misinterpreted as a prompt to ‘write something that I hadn’t written or attempted before.’ I am still embarrassed about that. Yet, no one stopped or tried to correct me that Sunday evening when I read my share. Not even one person said, ‘But this is not how…’ or the seemingly benign question version, ‘Wasn’t it supposed to be…?’
There were no judgements, and that meant something for my process. A few months later, when I watched the talk again, I realised what a fool I had made of myself. I also felt a simultaneous sense of relief. ‘If there was a group of people in the world I was okay looking like a fool in front of, I would choose this group over any other,’ I remember thinking.
I also realised that feeling safe was directly proportional to how responsible one felt for making others feel safe. But safety was not an end in itself. Not some fluffy, undefined notion to provide comfort or imply laxity. The safety was intended to build courage, to make us brave enough to write and read raw first drafts aloud in the sharing circle. Courage also told you that you could pass and not let the fear of sharing hurt the act of writing. Safety also meant you would be nudged just a tiny bit if you sought to pass two weeks in a row. I don’t recall Aditi using the term safe space even once during the 12–weeks, but she held space in a way that demonstrated safety.
Dear Student, as I write this post, it is almost twelve years since that workshop. Some of us would go beyond those 12 weeks to lay the foundations of what would transmute us into a community of people who, while caring for the stories and characters they were attempting to create, also began to care for each other. Whether creative or otherwise, the feedback process is as much about restraint as it is about expression. And it is in exercising this restraint that we create our collective courage to build a nurturing space.
