"These Were Stories I Was Really Scared To Share"

Sarah Polley on breaking silence, healing the creative process, and why "listen to your body" can be very bad advice

One of the most electric books I've read recently is Sarah Polley's memoir Run Towards the Danger. A kid-actor-turned-adult-polymath, Polley skirted flaming logs as a child in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, made a zillion TV shows and films, and wrote and directed (and won an Oscar for!) Women Talking, based on the horrific true story of Mennonite women who were assaulted by the men in their community.

illustration by Maria Mendoza

In one astounding essay, Polley dissects her decision to stay silent during the trial of Jian Ghomeshi. Ghomeshi was a popular Canadian radio host who, in 2014—three years before #MeToo exploded— was accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen women and one man. He had also assaulted Polley, when she was 16 and he was 28. She considered coming forward, but lawyers she consulted warned her a trial would destroy her family, and that many people come close to suicide by the end of the process. She kept quiet. Ultimately, only three women went to trial, and only one was publicly named— actor and Canadian Air Force Major Lucy DeCoutere. During the trial, DeCoutere was eviscerated. Ghomeshi went free. *

Years later, Polley ran into DeCoutere and came face-to-face with her decision to remain silent. Here's our conversation.

Jessica Nordell: I want to talk about your encounter with Lucy DeCoutere. You run into her years after the trial. It’s clear she knows what happened— that you had also been assaulted but had not gone public. You’re fearful. You explain what you’d been warned about. She says, “I didn’t get any of that advice. And that is exactly what did happen. I'm only happy for the women who didn't come forward. I know there are lots of them. If you need to hear from me, I'm cool with that, I am.” And: “I'm so sorry that happened to you. You were so young.”

When you share this encounter with a friend, the friend says, "Lucy is an emotional giant."

Sarah, I had never heard those two words put together before.

Sarah Polley: That was my friend Andrea Addario, who is herself an emotional giant. It is an amazing term, which I had never heard before either.

Isn't this the goal, to get better at this kind of thing—how expansive we can be, how much room we have for others, how much we can see through another's perspective to have empathy in the hardest moments? That moment must have been really rattling for Lucy. But she put the focus on the person in front of her. She saw my vulnerability instead of only her own.

A very legitimate response to knowing that I had not come forward when she was going through this horrible court experience would be anger. It's what I would've expected, and it's the reason I was so fearful. For her to walk across ten bridges in one step and go, "I know, and it's okay, and I'm so sorry that happened to you"-- that's what I want to shoot for in life, the ability to do what she did in that moment.

It made me think of all the ways we do use the word "giant”— "giant of industry", "intellectual giant." We use the word "giant" all the time. I've never heard it used to describe emotion. To be honest, it clarified for me some of what I'm trying to do in my own work—elevate that quality.

It's something that we're not habitually valuing in our society.

How did you care for yourself while you were writing about the assault and your decision not to come forward?

I wrote it over a long period of time—I would go to write and then stop myself over and over. As painful as it was to wait on telling the story—and as many sacrifices as it involved, not just of me but of other people—I think that was really important. I needed my kids to be a bit older. I needed to feel like I was in a strong place.

In terms of caring for myself, I reached out to all my female friends and said, "Look, in the two months after this comes out, I'm going to need you to be really present. Please just keep checking in with me." It felt needy and vulnerable, but I thought, I am going to need the supportive voices around me to be louder than the voices that are about to come at me.

My worst fears did not come true. My fears were built during the time before #Metoo, when the Ghomeshi trial was happening. That verdict felt like it was written in the 1950s.

In Women Talking, the character Ona says, as she's leaving the community, "Maybe one day I can forgive the men and maybe even love them." Were you thinking about Ghomeshi when you made that film?

I didn't specifically think about my experience with him, but I've had lots of experiences in that vein, unfortunately, that are not in the book. That one was important for me to write about because it was also an expression of solidarity with those other women.

Ona is saying, "We need to leave because we need to be safe, so that forgiveness may one day be possible." Forgiveness without safety can be very dangerous. Your first obligation is to get yourself, your children, the people you love, safe. Then, by all means— if it's helpful—you work on forgiveness.

It made me think about the South African psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, who worked on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The perpetrators of these horrific apartheid crimes were offered amnesty in exchange for fully disclosing everything they did. The incentive was for them to be truthful about their actions. Gobodo-Madikizela says this allowed at least some of them to feel guilt and remorse. When the perpetrator feels remorse, she says, they see their own deep brokenness and exile from humanity.

She says this transformation can even— sometimes— inspire a feeling of care, in the victim, for the perpetrator. She calls it "empathic repair," this reconnection of perpetrator and victim.

Fascinating.

But our legal system creates no opportunity for any of that. There's no incentive to even acknowledge one's actions, much less feel anything about them. The only incentive is to deny.

In my experience with the #MeToo movement, the most valuable part was so quiet—I did know a few men who privately had this huge reckoning with themselves. I saw it happen to people I know, a lot of sleepless nights. I thought, What we really need right now are men’s voices—what were the lines they knew they were crossing? What were the lines they didn't know they were crossing? What did "no" mean to them?

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It was one of the more important interactions I've had in my life—reaching across that divide and having someone reach back.

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I had this amazing conversation with one man who said men are raised to just say "no" if you don't want to do something. And it's easy for them to say “no.” Women may give off 30 signals of "no," but we have not been conditioned to be able to say a flat, confrontational "no"—especially when someone's bigger and stronger.

If he was waiting for "no" and didn't get it, he assumed it was "yes.” It didn't justify anything he had done. But there was an interesting, like, exchange of dictionaries.

That's so interesting.

I do know a few women who got out-of-the-blue apologies from people in their past. It was happening very quietly, and it never hit the mainstream of the movement, because, as you said, there's no incentive for people to tell those stories about themselves. It's a missing piece. What we need most is an evolution around these dynamics.

Yes. And to understand what is going on inside men that allows them to do these things. Did anyone reach out to you privately?

I got some private apologies from people who felt they hadn't done more to protect me. I did instigate two or three conversations with people who had caused me harm when I was younger. One was incredibly fruitful and rewarding and came with an invitation from the person to continue the conversation as long as I wanted to. I felt we both learned an enormous amount in the process. That's the dream—not just accountability, but real curiosity from both ends about the personal and societal forces that had allowed this to happen.

None of those conversations was a disaster. And one was one of the more important interactions I've ever had in my life—reaching across that divide and having someone reach back.

It's a miracle when that happens. It takes courage to confront someone who has harmed us.

It was hard to do. And these things that happen to us—a lot of these people are still in our lives. Those are the scariest conversations to have.

You were a child actor in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which was a terrifying experience, totally devoid of safety. You found that if you drank coffee, you could make yourself do things your body knew it didn't want to do. It made me think about the ways we learn to ignore our body's signals.

That's been a constant. We live with impossible schedules. We've sort of trained ourselves to not be human animals that listen to our own signals. I certainly learned that at a very young age. You feel like there's something wrong with you if your body is begging for more care. I wasn't even off for the number of hours of sleep that I needed.

Like you, I had a concussion that took a long time to heal. It was while I was writing my book, so the publication date kept getting pushed. It was this internal battle—do I listen to my body saying "Stop," or do I listen to the industry saying, "We need this now"? I remember my therapist said, "If you have to choose between the book and yourself, choose yourself." It was hard to do.

I find "listening to your body" so complicated. We don't do it enough, and there are people who push themselves so hard that they don't listen to their body until they break.

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"Listening to my body" was actually just not believing in myself.

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But it can also be a sinkhole for me. It can be, “This looks too hard” or “This makes me anxious.” “Maybe I'll just go to bed for the day.” It can be a real trap, especially for young people who have anxiety—perverted into a kind of learned helplessness. "Listen to your body" has made me sit out a lot of great experiences that I think I was just too anxious to go into.

There have been times in my life where I ignored my body and it cut me off at the knees. Other times, I totally had the might to push myself a little harder. But I didn't believe in myself. And "listening to my body" was actually just not believing in myself.

I just got goosebumps. It's like fear—sometimes a feeling of fear is protective, but sometimes fear is a sign that you're doing the right thing.

"Listen to your body" can't become a way of saying, "I don't want to do anything that makes me uncomfortable or gives me butterflies." Those might be just symptoms of doing something exciting or new.

The concussion recovery really shifted this for me. To get better, I was told I had to "run towards the danger." I had been listening to my body— I'd been lying in bed all day in the dark. Everything bothered me, and my brain was getting sicker and sicker from doing that. You've got to ask, "Am I pushing myself too much or not enough?"

How do you know?

What I do is I pretend I have the concussion doctor with me—Dr. Michael Collins, who's basically a sports coach. Imagine you have this super positive sports coach by your side who's pushing you to be your best player but is actually on your side. A super positive person— who knows you can do more than you think you can. That's helpful to me.

I love that. What was so radical about his approach was that when you're feeling terrible, you shouldn't necessarily continue that activity, but you also shouldn't stop everything. You should go do something else.

Exactly. Instead of going to ground, just change your activity and then come back to the thing. This turns into great life advice beyond concussion—you don't have to shut down when something gets hard. Maybe shift, do something else, and come back.

Concussion recovery as life coaching!

Yes.

A lot of your pivotal experiences involve people using others as instruments for their own ends. Ghomeshi, obviously. The Munchausen director, Terry Gilliam, used actors as instruments for artistic goals.

This way of thinking seems so common—especially in creative pursuits, where the myth of the "creative genius" means that everything and everyone is expendable for "art" to be achieved.  How do we move away from that kind of instrumentalist thinking?

I think we change it by doing it. We have to catch ourselves anytime we find the tiniest whisper of that—whatever twinges in our gut make us feel deeply uncomfortable. And I think that kind of purity of intention breeds more of the same.

In an artistic environment, like a film set, if you're stating over and over-- and acting upon the idea-- that people's well-being is more important to you than what you're making, I think people give that back. Even if it's not the way people walk through the world, when people encounter it, they mirror it. And it's a tremendous relief to stop doing that.

Anytime we find ourselves moving people around like chess pieces, we're going to be fundamentally dissatisfied with ourselves, with how we feel in the world. I hear people all the time justifying small manipulations. They all add up to something. It doesn't feel good to manipulate people. It feels as bad as being manipulated.

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People do better work in environments where the end product isn't prioritized over the experience of doing it.

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You had a totally different experience working on a film with the Belgian director Jaco Van Dormael. He focused on creating a good experience for everyone working on the film. He said, "The film will affect a few people maybe, but making it will affect all of us forever."

I'd spent my whole life on film sets where all people cared about was the end result. And he cared a lot about the end result. But what he cared more about was that we walk away with the experience inside of us that had been good. That was the only real thing that was actually happening. That shifted everything for me.

People do better work in environments where the end product isn't prioritized over the experience of doing it. People care more deeply about making something that honors a good experience. I don't think it costs anything to do it. It may cost getting this shot or that shot. But ultimately, the only thing we have is the present, and our experience of each other and how we treat each other.

Totally. The idea that arts and ethics are opposing forces—that artists have to choose between an ethical goal and an aesthetic goal— is bogus. The truth is that there's no opposition.

The old idea of that creative, mad genius who doesn't care about anybody? Too much good work has been made by good people for that to get justified anymore. There are enough good people who can make movies without being horrible to people that there's no reason to tolerate it.

So there’s a role for caring within creativity, but you also talk about the role of creativity within caregiving. You describe the caregiving your aunt received when she was ill as "full of insight, creativity, calm and intelligence. It was virtuoso caregiving." I'd never heard caregiving described in that way.

It really was watching people at the top of their field, and their field was caring for people they loved.

There was attention to detail in terms of comfort, in terms of keeping consistent the idea of beauty in a life that was limited. Attention to humor and keeping that alive. We often don't think that people need to be cared for on multiple levels when they're ill. I'd been [cared for by] them when I was very young, and I've never experienced anything like it before or since.

That kind of caregiving work—I'm thinking of home health aides, for example—is considered "low skill." What you're describing is the opposite of that.

The thing I would most like to feel I got good at in this lifetime would be being a caregiver like that-- having the patience and attunement of a great kindergarten teacher. These professions for some reason are not exalted. Bizarre, because they're the hardest skills to master.

And the skills that keep us functioning as a collective, and moving forward in any kind of cohesive way instead of just splintering in a million directions.

And grow us as a species.

I'd love to talk about memoir. You pose the question, "Why do we want to tell our stories?" I'm writing a memoir right now, and I keep asking myself this same question! Why did you want to write this book?

You know, half the essays were already half done, written over many years. I started to notice this connective tissue between them—how the past was impacting the present, and then also how the present was impacting my relationship to my past. I had two or three more stories I'd always wanted to write. What would it look like if I put all these stories together? What story would it ultimately tell? This was just after my concussion recovery where I'd been given this instruction to "run towards the danger." And all these were stories I was really scared to share and to mine.

The interesting thing about writing a memoir that deals with trauma is you put it down and you go, "Okay, I wrote about it. It's over and done now. I survived, and I'm in the happy ending." And then life keeps coming at you and you're like, "What the holy hell is this? I already wrote the book. It's done. This is the happy ending part." <Laughs.>

It revealed to me the illusion I live with all the time, that I'm going to arrive somewhere, and the bad stories will be done. That the good stories are the only thing in my future. I actually said that in therapy recently. "I wrote the book! The bad stuff is over. Why is new stuff still happening?" And my therapist said, "Yeah, it was just your first book though." <Laughs.> Jesus Christ!

Maybe one of the reasons we want to tell our stories is to share some facet of reality that we have access to. The full truth is this million-faceted gem, and we have access to just the one little facet we're entrusted with. We want to contribute that.

I don't know what else we have to leave behind us. And hopefully it resonates with someone somewhere. We go to great pains to disguise ourselves and our own experiences when we're writing or speaking. I have come to terms with the idea that the most useful things I'm ever going to contribute are the ones I have some kind of direct experience of. My work becomes increasingly personal and close to the bone. That's what I have to contribute.

*Polley does not use the word “assault” in the book or in interviews. In the book, she informs the reader she will use the word “alleged” in front of the word “assault,” for legal reasons. She writes, “I personally do not believe the word ‘alleged’ when I write it. But the verdict in the trial is a legal truth that I must include when writing this piece.”

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