Lifelong Learning with Reema Zaman
Lifelong Learning with Reema Zaman
What one author is teaching others about igniting your voice, metabolizing trauma, and becoming the best versions of ourselves through writing
Readers, thanks for bearing with me through what’s been a zany August. It’s been a month of abrupt transitions, one in which I’ve felt whiplashed by real life, especially after a long, very quiet, serene month in the woods. More on that (and how to nurture creativity when obligations are leeching your time) in a future post.
Today is about growth mindset.
As a classroom teacher, I loved integrating growth mindset into my instruction. On my wall above the whiteboard were framed reminders - “I can’t do this yet,” “Mistakes help me learn,” - mottos not so dissimilar from the ones I give myself each day.
What excites me about growth mindset and neuroplasticity (the ability of the brain to establish new neuropathways) is that these concepts apply as much to children as they do to adults. All people - no matter their age - possess the capacity for change.
What an empowering reminder. Not to mention, one supported by science.
I’m delighted by the idea that we get to wake up each morning and reinvent ourselves, if we choose. Second chances, third chances, millionth chances… it doesn't matter. The opportunity to grow and change is my favorite part of being human, and it’s why I started this Substack.
Change, however, is easier said than done.
Embodying a growth mindset often requires regular infusions of inspiration. Maybe it’s that third-grade teacher talking excitedly about how to form new hobbies. Or a book that breaks down the anatomy of the brain. Or a compelling story about someone who changed the conditions of their life.
All I know is that many of us (including me) require an occasional kick in the butt to remember that, YES, tomorrow can be different. And so can we.
That’s why I’m eager to bring new voices to this space. Beyond the Classroom is about the pursuit of lifelong learning. Whether you’re a fellow writer, an educator, a stay-at-home parent, or an accountant, we can all learn to push ourselves in new directions. And, often, people’s stories make for the best motivation.
So without further ado, please meet Reema Zaman. Memoirist. Writer. Activist. Speaker. Extraordinary vegan chef. And my very dear friend of nearly six years. We met through each other’s art (which is a highly advisable way to get a good read on someone’s soul) when our memoirs were published within a month of one another. We’ve been avid penpals, confidantes, and muses ever since.
Reema’s memoir, I Am Yours, is one of the most moving pieces of writing I’ve read. It’s a master class in structure and form, but it’s also a call to action - a wake-up to the urgent calling of one’s own life. It’s about learning to show up for yourself.
This month I invite you to let Reema be that voice for you: the one demanding growth. The one who wants to know what else you might be made of, and what gifts are still waiting to be explored. The one who knows you’re not done yet.
Are you listening?
I just dove deep into your memoir, I Am Yours, again. And it took me back to the first time I read it when I was just so blown away by your self-knowledge. You expect a memoirist to be self-knowledgeable, of course, but you write like a poet observing nature, applying that lens of poetry to your soul. How do you manage the task of describing your memoir to others?
I describe it as the story of a coming-of-age memoir. The story of a woman losing and then reclaiming her voice through various traumas, anorexia, abuse, and assault. That's the little logline. And then I sometimes say, from Bangladesh to Hawaii to Thailand to America, the story of one woman losing and then reclaiming her voice through writing. Actually, that's the logline I wish my publishers had used to market the book. Instead, they just kind of made up this feminist manifesto that was supposed to be in my voice and used that as the promotional material. Which says nothing, by the way. I'm digressing.
No, I mean, I don't think it says nothing. I actually think both framings are true in their own way. What I was struck by when I was reading again was just how many traumas you've endured. Because while they're such a huge part of your life experience and your journey, those individual events are actually not the things that stuck with me. Instead, it was how you narrated your passage through them. There is a sentence on the first page that encapsulates everything that excites me about this idea of post-traumatic growth. The line is, “I sit somewhere between formed and forming.”
I point to that sentence whenever I teach memoir. In any genre of any book, you have to give an opening image of where your protagonist is before their story is interrupted by the inciting incident or catalyst. And so I always point to that sentence. When we’re first introduced to Reema, she is tugging her anger from room to room, and she says she is sitting somewhere between formed and forming. And so we know that's where our protagonist is. And then we are also given a suggestion as to what the rest of the journey of the book is going to be. She's going to try to get someplace that is more formed than this gooey, amoeba-like state of being in pain.
But every day we are at the beginning of another story. The clock resets itself every day. The lasting imprint or aftertaste of the book isn't the laundry list of traumas that befell this young girl. It's more about her reaction and her decisions of how to live a life despite those traumas, by metabolizing those things for their resilience and wisdom and then letting go of the toxins. I always think about trauma as, “Let's metabolize it, keep what's valuable, and discard what's toxic.”
I wanted the book to be about how we go through all these things in life while still holding onto dignity and resilience and integrity. So that becomes the logline: how do you live a life of integrity and dignity and resilience in spite of all of these terrible, hard things that can happen?
You're somebody who lives in the pursuit of wisdom. That is one through line from your birth till today. Right?
Yes, and I love the focus of your Substack, which is about that quest for lifelong learning, and how we maintain that thirst for our whole lives. It’s actually one of the reasons I chose to become a writer. I spent my twenties as an actress, and that's what I went to college for. I have a double degree in theater as well as women's studies. And I thought I could change the world by being an actress in feminist movies and plays and making a positive impact on society and culture that way. And then I learned very quickly the moment I got into the auditioning world that I was never going to be offered even an audition for those powerhouse female roles because of the color of my skin. I was about 20 to 30 years too early. And even now, we have yet to see a movie with a leading lady who is South Asian without the movie being about her being South Asian. And whenever I would be sent for the supporting actor role auditions, I wouldn't book those either, because I'm not made for supporting role roles.
Main character energy. There's a term for this.
It was just a really interesting thing to realize and really humbling. And I was like, well, okay. So I pivoted to writing. I had started writing during my mid-twenties when I was in an abusive relationship. And the moment I realized, “Oh, I have a tiny morsel of talent in this area that I could possibly develop into a whole career,” it gave me complete permission and liberation to leave acting behind.
Writing is also a more humanizing activity than acting because in acting and auditioning, you're placing your entire self-esteem in the hands of others to decide your value on that given day. Whereas writing, the act of writing, is completely private, and you are your own self-validation. There's something so empowering in that. It was my first ever taste of authentic self-esteem because I realized previously all of my confidence was derived from an outside audience applauding me, validating me, thinking I was charming or pretty or funny.
So when I discovered writing, I was hooked. I was completely hooked. I still had a few more years left in New York, where I was auditioning while also quietly developing my voice without sharing any of my writing. Then I moved from New York to Portland, which is where most of my family lives. And then I paused for a moment. It was that debate that, you know, the 15 beats of a hero's journey. I had the debate where I was like, “Do I really want to pursue a career as an author? Do I think I have it in me? There were all these different options, and I chose to completely gamble my life again and try to become a professional writer. And the main reason is because within this vocation, I get to develop and be my best self. Because this vocation, especially being a memoirist, requires a profound volume of empathy every single day. That's what we are developing and practicing. More so than any other career that I can really think of.
By being a writer, I get to be my most authentic and best version of myself over and over again. And I’m also surrounded by other people who are on this quest for empathy and knowledge. I'm not surrounded by people who say petty things or live in dark, pessimistic areas of the world. We are all light bearers and light wielders. And then you get to bring in other, younger writers who want to learn from you. So you're in that soup, and it fosters your lifelong learning and your lifelong pursuit of empathy.
What's so profound about that is as a writer you are continually learning and changing, while also giving that gift of learning to others. The learning begets learning. In your case, you’ve been able to share I Am Yours with a few audiences that have not had the experience of sitting with such a vulnerable piece of writing before or even knowing that writing can look like or feel like this. Can you talk about what that experience was like?
Two audiences I've been given the privilege to serve are high schoolers and incarcerated women. Right out of the gate in 2019 (following the book’s publication), it was adopted into the curriculum of four high schools in Portland through a collaborative grant awarded by the Oregon Board of Education. And the grant enabled a group of high school English teachers, as well as myself, to create a syllabus using I Am Yours to teach creative writing as a tool for resilience, grit, healing. All the beautiful things. So we sat in a room for a couple of weeks, this cohort of high school English teachers, as well as myself, and we came up with all of these different writing prompts and lesson plans. And then I got to visit all four of those high schools and work in tandem with those English teachers to teach the syllabus. It was really remarkable to see the wingspan of this book and how it was so loved and welcomed and thoroughly adopted into these kids’ lives and how the writing that came out from those lesson plans, the writing that came from those students, as well as the connections they forged amongst each other was because they were given the invitation to sit in this depth of vulnerability. To be taught the tools for how to do that on your own was very empowering for them and certainly very gratifying to witness, too.
And then in 2022, I met my friend Nikki Weaver, the founder of the nonprofit On the Inside, which provides creative writing classes to women in prisons. And she immediately wanted to bring I Am Yours into these prisons. So we were able to raise money and buy a couple of hundred copies and take them into these different prisons, and it was incredible because these women had read and devoured the book, and they had seen themselves reflected in the pages. To hear their stories was one of the most humbling experiences of my life. And to be in the same room as these women who have been incarcerated for everything from drug possession to homicide, to hear how a handful of choices in their lives changed the entire trajectory of their lives, and consider how we all began in such similar circumstances, similar backgrounds, and ended up at a fork in the road, in which I chose this and she chose that - that’s the nature of memoir. There are hardly any words for it, but I think the biggest takeaway was that it really challenged my preconceived limits around forgiveness. As in, who deserves forgiveness? Any human being. There's always a story behind why people do the things they do. And you and I have made it our obsession to live in this area. That's what we do. We're always teasing apart the story beneath the story. And especially when you're confronted by a group of women who are incarcerated because of the choices they made, you’re challenged on the things you’ve claimed to stand for. Like, do I really stand for this?
It's such an interesting contrast, those groups that you're describing. As a teenager, you are in the process of a certain conditioning that is going to inform what you do when you get to that fork in the road. As an incarcerated person, you have made that choice about which direction to take. Yet there is this incredible opportunity through writing, through reading somebody else's story, to learn something different, to undo something, or to rewire your brain. So those groups don't seem so dissimilar in many ways.
It's like two bookends. Whenever I have the privilege to speak to younger people, I feel an incredible responsibility because I am interrupting their path at a specific age. Like, maybe a handful of girls in this room are already anorexic, and if I can just interrupt their line of thought and interrupt their trajectory, maybe I can say something now that'll help them not have to battle that illness for the next ten years. Maybe it can stop today. And I'm very acutely aware of that responsibility. Whenever someone says, “Oh, you know, I've had your book on my bookshelf for three years, and I just haven't been able to read it. And I picked it up yesterday, and it's the perfect timing,” I'm always like, that's not a coincidence. Because a book interrupts your path in some way, it'll interrupt your train of thought in some way, whatever the book is. And then the author gets to impact you in the way you're meant to be impacted in that moment.
So it's always like, where's that point of interruption landing? For the teenagers, it's happening at the beginning of their story. And for the women who have been incarcerated for the choices they ended up making, I'm getting to interrupt their narrative of self-loathing, self-hate, self-shame. This book that my 30-year-old self wrote contains enough layers that can act as an interrupter, a soothing agent of, “No, here's some grace. Here's some self-love. Here's some forgiveness.” And different people based on where they are in their journeys and their age, have used it in different ways.
Different acts of life. And it's funny because your book is structured by acts. I have the privilege of knowing you as the person who wrote this book, a book that changed me, and now I have the privilege of knowing you beyond this book, in your current act. Can you talk about what this act is? What are you learning right now?
Right now (and it's partly inspired by the work I was able to do with the women in prisons), I'm working on a new novel called Merge, and it's dedicated to Fia, my Chihuahua daughter, as well as all the women who are wrongfully incarcerated.
One of the main takeaways I learned while meeting these women in prisons is the majority of women in prison are there because of a man. Because they took the fallout, they took the blame for a man's crime. Their boyfriend wanted to do something, or their husband wanted to do something, and they went along with the idea or the plan because they didn't want to lose the love of that man, or they acted in self-defense from an abusive intimate partner.
The novel I'm working on is set in 2042, when no-fault divorce laws have been repealed. The premise is that a once brilliant criminal justice lawyer, Helena, is hired by an anonymous benefactor to defend Grace, who is a woman accused of murdering her husband using merge technology, which is when the consciousness of one person is merged with the physical body of someone else. The opening line of this novel is, “It is nearly impossible for a woman to kill a man with her bare hands.”
And the connection this has to my own personal life, as well as I Am Yours is, that these are stories of sexual assault and abuse. Men don't have to think about their physical safety in the same way that women born into female bodies have to think about it. All of that inspired this book. You don't see much of my rage expressed in I Am Yours. And maybe it's because I was a younger woman when I wrote that book, but in my forties, I'm just that much more fed up with the world. And this book is born from rage, as well as love.
I have a hard question for you. You're looking at these societal structures that have existed for as long as our societies have existed and certainly all our lifetime. They’ve informed your life personally, as they have every woman. And I wonder, what has been the hardest thing to un-condition or un-learn for you?
For me, the hardest thing that I've yet to really master is equality in romantic relationships. My misogyny is so ingrained and it only comes out in one way: self-sabotage, whereby I become subservient and small if I am not careful. Historically, the longest relationships I've had have been with narcissistic men who have exploited my empathy. I saw a psychologist speak about how narcissists tend to be attracted to and attract people who have three qualities: highly empathic, highly agreeable, and highly forgiving. These are wonderful qualities that are an asset in healthy relationships, but they can become the very thing that helps perpetuate abusive relationships. I've yet to figure out how to have a healthy romantic relationship. It's been really, really hard for me to unlearn the toxic conditioning in that one arena. Everything else, I'm doing great. I battled with anorexia for a long time, but I've been in complete recovery for eleven years. That's not my struggle anymore. It’s this thing.
We all have something we’re learning toward. This is not a Substack for fully formed people. We are all in some sort of transition.
Everyone has some degree of self-sabotage. It just manifests in different ways. I don't have doubts about my writing. I don't suffer from self-loathing in that traditional sense, but it comes up in the way I make myself small and subservient in romantic relationships. It’s self-loathing working itself into a different manifestation.
Well, we're all here to teach each other something, right? I think this is part of our connection, the ways we've helped each other grow on these different paths we’re traveling. Last question, what has you excited right now?
I am loving writing the novel Merge and I'm loving applying the things I've learned as a book coach to this novel. And I love the work I'm doing with my clients. I've challenged myself to grow a lot as a book coach over these last couple of years, and I launched the Memoir Incubator. It's been so exciting and fulfilling to see its impact on so many other writers, and then to be able to employ the same teaching and coaching tactics to my own writing.
My conversation with Reema ended as it typically does: lots of adoration and praise for one another, followed by a long string of, I love yous, and, on this call, a check-in about how we’ll celebrate her birthday when we’re together in November (I’ll be in L.A. for a fantastic gathering of grief-focused authors).
Here’s the thing to know about Reema (and it’s a testament to her self-knowledge): she’s excellent at seeing other people. I’m frequently startled by her acute observations of my own habits, strengths, and growth edges. It’s what makes her a wonderful friend - the kind that induces lightbulb a-ha! moments in every conversation - and a skilled book coach.
Your homework this week is to rush out and read I Am Yours (and please report back!). And if you are a budding memoirist trying to figure out how best to tell your story, I hope you’ll also consider checking out Reema’s upcoming Memoir Incubator.
