My Life In Pieces • by Peggyanne Mansfield • 2

A Memoir: My Life In Pieces by Peggyanne Mansfield (1945-2020) FOREWORD by Daniel Coleman I smiled. We were into the thick of what I hoped the class would discuss and debate from the first five minutes! I loved teaching in the Discovery Program. The program offers a free class for people who had faced barriers to post-secondary education. In 2011, we had run the class on Saturdays at the Public Library downtown, and in 2012, we moved to Volunteer Hamilton just a few blocks east because it was on ground level and wheelchairs could roll in right off the King Street sidewalk. The university president’s office footed the bills for my teaching time as professor, for a Coordinator who would be in charge of recruiting students and then making sure they had the supports they needed to complete the course—from daycare to bus tickets to sign language translation and textbooks. McMaster’s Arts and Science Program contributed four teaching assistants who we called the student support team. These university student assistants helped the Discovery Program students work on and complete their independent projects. A wonderful volunteer crew made lunch for the group every Saturday. The idea was that we would read works of history, art, and literature about the city we live in, and that these works would stimulate students to create their own projects about life in Hamilton. Over the course of the semester, they produced self-made poetry books, paintings, photovoice essays, films, cultural history maps. You name it. The main objective was to build a community of learners by giving them a way to develop their own creativity and confidence. There were many different reasons why class members had not been able to pursue higher education, from physical or mental health challenges to poverty or forced migration and displacement. “I was tortured by the people I was raised by,” Peggyanne told me that very first day. It was one of those moments when, as a teacher, you aren’t sure how to respond to such a revelation. She went on: “I endured everything you can imagine and more—sexual and physical abuse, being abandoned, living on the streets, being locked up in a psych ward, becoming addicted to the psychotropic drugs I was given, being re-traumatized by therapists and the mental health system that was supposed to help me. That’s why I’m terrified to take a class like this. I have a terrible time believing that this will be a safe place, that I can trust you or the others who are organizing this class. “But,” she added, “It really helps that you opened the class by asking for our views and opinions. We’re so used to being told by people in authority what to think and how to react. It’s refreshing to be treated like people with minds of our own, experiences worth sharing.” That was my introduction to a woman who would go on to profoundly influence my life. Peggyanne was courageous, intelligent, a warrior for gentleness and justice. Having been silenced by the crippling co-dependency of hiding the secrets of domestic abuse since she was four years old, she had learned the hard way to speak freely, even too freely, about what had happened to her. By voicing her dark experiences, she freed herself from the trap of keeping other people’s secrets, and she hoped that telling her own story would liberate others from the shame that often kept them from stepping out onto their own paths, their own lives. Her email address was “[email protected],” and she was determined that, after suffering in self-doubt and trauma-induced amnesia for so many years, she would speak her truth and the truth would set her—and the people around her—free.    [  >>>>>   FORWARD ]     + [Distillate © HA&L + Peggyanne Mansfield (1945-2020) I Daniel Coleman {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]