How a Nun Inspired My Storytelling

… and other skills with people.

(originally posted January 2, 2025)

When I was in 7th grade, our English Lit teacher had us break up into teams and debate once a month. The topics weren’t about school lunches or favorite bands. They had to be about current state of affairs in our town, the country, or the world.

I went to Catholic school and half of our teacher were nuns. Most of the nuns were from countries like Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil, and Columbia. This particular nun, Sister Carmen, was from Cuba, and like the others, had stories of her struggles in that country as a child.

The Salesian Sisters supplied these nuns to our church, and most of these women came from territories with horrible political upheaval. They were, by no means, sheltered within quiet halls and mantras of “praying cures everything.” They knew first hand that without action, words meant very little. This is how we were raised in the 70’s and 80’s and why Sr. Carmen was who I needed the most at that time in my life.

My mother had died the previous year (December 17, 1984) from colon cancer. Sr. Carmen had come to the hospital with our principal, Sr. Martina, to be with me when my dad told me the news.

When we were assigned our first debate, I was part of the two teams assigned to discuss the hot topic of smoking in public. It was at this time in Louisiana history that laws were first discussed to ban smoking in public. I was assigned to this debate, and I was assigned to the side fighting against the ban.

Now, to a kid, cancer is cancer. At the time, no one equated colon cancer with smoking. It was seen as another cancer entirely. My mom died of colon cancer, but since cancer from smoking was such a huge issue in those days, my classmates naturally connected them.

I was never popular. My classmates loved my stories during our creative writing class every Friday, but outside of that, they really couldn’t care less about me. Most of them felt sorry for me when my mom died, but by the beginning of 7th grade, I was back to being a prime target for their bullying.

This assignment, however, had even the bullies questioning Sr. Carmen and the ethics of having a kid who just lost her mom to cancer on the side supporting cancer-causing devices.

The kids on my side of the debate as well as the kids on the opposing side didn’t feel comfortable about any of it and voiced their concerns to her. One boy even asked her how she could be so mean when she was with me at the hospital.

As nice as all of this compassion was and as happy it made me that even the worst bullies cared even this much, I was still very embarrassed by the whole thing.

To say I was shy at that time would be the understatement to end all understatements. I was very withdrawn when it came to attention. The only time I wasn’t bothered was reading my stories out loud in front of class because of how much they loved hearing them. At any other time, I preferred to remain invisible. Chalk it up to the only other option I had, which was being the forefront of bullying by my peers and bullying by my family, but that’s for another time.

At this moment, I just wanted to get through the debate and this day so people would ignore me again.

Sr. Carmen told the group that we must be able to overcome our emotions to deal with anything life gave us because rarely would we be prepared for the worst of it. She rested her hand on my shoulder and told me I was smart and creative and I could do this. She said to remove emotion and stick to the facts.

I really … and I mean REALLY … did not want to do this.

It wasn’t only about my mom’s death. She was a chain smoker, so I had a first hand seat – literally – to what second-hand smoke did to people. I had chronic bronchitis and lung issues because she smoked in the car with the windows up, one cigarette immediately after the other. I am now 51 and I still have problems with smoke and smells.

I had so much to offer for the other side, the side FOR the law, but I had to debate AGAINST it. It made no sense. It wasn’t logical. I couldn’t fail the assignment, though, because it would impact the whole group, so I just did my best.

We had a day or two to do what we needed, so I did as she instructed in that time. I collected the bare-bones facts for my contribution and never allowed my personal feelings to stop me from giving the best presentation I could achieve.

Day of the debate came and when our group was called, all eyes were on me. Everyone had talked about it over the last few days, and it became a topic of discussion in the junior high hallway between classes. I tried to ignore it, and when directly asked, I just shrugged and continued to my next class.

When I presented, I did so in the usually quiet voice I could manage during project presentations. I tried not to sound as infuriated as I felt giving that side my support.

I didn’t remember speaking as I read from my notes. The classmates on my team had read my report before we went up, and they praised me, surprised at how much work I had done and how good it sounded.

At the end of our debate, the other side won mostly because of compassion for me. How do I know this? They very literally told me. Vote after vote for that side was accompanied by, “I liked the anti-law presentation best but I can’t vote for cancer.” I got a look from everyone who made such a statement, as though they wanted me to know they supported the work I put into something so painful.

After the results came out, Sr. Carmen explained to me and the rest of the class why she put me into that group and on the side against the anti-smoking law.

She said that first, it wasn’t just to teach me a lesson. It was for our whole group and the entire class.

Yes, she knew I had unique perspectives that would have not only benefited the pro-law side but would have been compassionate for what I had recently gone through with my mom’s death from cancer. I was already dealing with those demons, though. My suffering had become my comfort zone.

She taught us that it was never good to be blind to other perspectives of any situation, and if I could overcome something so heartbreaking, I could learn to set aside emotion to see a situation for what was at the root.

For my group, both sides, it was to help them learn to work with someone directly affected by the thing they were debating for and against. In the future, she explained, we would have to work with people who would come from different backgrounds and would clash with people who didn’t agree and couldn’t be persuaded because of their own history with whatever topic came up.

We had to learn how to acclimate our emotions and calm our vanity, the need to be right, in order to understand where the other side was coming from. Only when we set aside our desire to win the argument could we have a better understanding of the whole picture before us.

There were things in the shadows of a painting of a forest that we could never see if we only looked at the colors we favored. Only when we look with an open mind at the parts we found unappealing would we see the whole story.

We didn’t have to like what was hidden, but if we didn’t acknowledge its existence, our arguments would have holes we wouldn’t know how to fill. We couldn’t be persuasive if we didn’t know what it was like for the other person.

When she was done with her explanation, she asked me if I would like to say anything about the topic that I couldn’t say during the presentation against the law. It was the first time anyone wanted to know how I felt about my mom’s death. They were all surprised to know about her smoking habits, which likely contributed to her colon cancer.

At the time, there was still a debate about the correlation of smoking and colon cancer, but we know now that it can be a direct cause. At that time, the doctors didn’t know what caused it.

Of course, these were the same doctors who told her for years that it was all in her head until she finally found a doctor who said, “If I had seen you a year ago, you would have a chance. You have six months.” And three of those were spent in hospice.

After this lesson, my stories improved. It seemed like a side-effect of that one lesson about understanding your enemy, but I learned it was a primary tool in writing a convincing story with convincing characters and character developments.

No longer were my stories from one perspective. All of my characters had a voice. They all had a point-of-view that let the reader into those shadows for the full picture. My villains could tell their stories in a way that the threat of them became more real to my classmates hearing me read.

I used to wait until Thursday night to write my stories for Creative Writing Friday. That changed to a week so I could research my characters and my settings. I became so obsessed with research that my grades in history and social studies rose from D’s to B’s and an occasional A.

I will forever be grateful for Sr. Carmen and her lesson that day. She opened a part of my brain that could have easily been ignored as we all do from time to time.

Learning about other perspectives doesn’t mean you have to agree. Understanding their viewpoint doesn’t mean you have to agree. It makes you informed, able to hold your own in a debate, and able to paint your vision with every color that exists, even those we cannot see. And it does, in fact, let us see the human on the other side with their own history and need to be heard.

PS: By the way, if you’re interested at all in the law about public smoking, Louisiana didn’t pass the Clean Air Act until 2007. The smoking companies targeted Louisiana in the 80’s and held firm for 20+ years.