story: listen for it
We’re all telling the same story – aren’t we?
Isn’t it the only one that matters?
The story of ourselves, sure.
The particulars might belong to us.
The shading and the scent, the hue and the timing.
But it’s never been just our story.
It is all of history’s story – all of humanity.
The ones before.
The ones right now.
The ones after.
It’s the same story that happened to me more than ten years ago in the mountains of North Carolina in a week long writing class.
I was relatively new at my mothering gig – four kids, three under the age of four. My first time leaving those babies for any length of time, let alone an entire week to learn how to write my own story.
Our class goal that week was to write from our own stories. To develop into better writers using our own life story. To take bits and pieces and turn them into stories with scope and depth and insight.
The class was a hodge podge of people. A mother actively grieving her adult son’s recent suicide. A woman who talked incessantly about her cats back home. Several men who barely opened their mouths all week. 95 year old Sally shared my cabin with me that week and she was a writing wonder – and just the most fascinating woman. (Also, her skin was so remarkably smooth that all of us were asking for beauty tips from her. Moisturize religiously, she preached.)
Sidenote: That week was also the first time I had ever been offered marijuana. I know, seems unusual that I made it through high school and college without being offered this, especially considering the county in which I grew up. Regardless. This is the truth. I declined, in case you’re curious.
My teacher that week was a woman much older than me, never had children, a college professor, a lesbian, a Floridian. She told us all of this within three minutes of the class beginning.
I’m a former farm kid, thirty-something, taking a short retreat from a life knee deep in diapers and time out chairs, embarrassingly anxious about the kids I had left behind.
What on earth could we have in common? Our lives seemed so different.
And yet.
She was the kind of writing teacher who worked with us. When she assigned us a writing prompt, she sat beside us and completed the same prompt.
And then, when she called on us to read our work out loud, something I had not realized we would be doing, she went first. She read her story.
It was a personal story, as all we wrote that week was. And it was about an experience she had in a gay bar. About loss and heartbreak. About shame and loneliness and fear.
I felt it.
Because I had lived it too.
No, I have never had my heart broken in a bar and frankly, I’d been having babies and wiping bums for a long time it felt like, so the entire scene felt other worldly to me.
But I felt what she wrote. I sat in the class and cried as she read her own words about her own story in a city I’d never been to, about a life I’d never lead.
Because I have felt alone. I have felt left out.
Different.
Looked over and like a moon when everyone else was the sun, a number when everyone around me looked like a letter.
I understood loneliness. Fear. Desperation.
And hope. Which is where her story landed at its end.
When I heard her story, I heard mine.
When I heard her tale, I heard my own life’s song.
This is how it works.
This is how it should work.
This is how it can work.
Story brings understanding. Honest sharing leads to empathy. Vulnerability invites vulnerability.
There are more ways to bring us together than ways to tear us apart but good grief, we’re hungry for blood and lately (and especially online) we are more like enemies than anything else it seems. More like antagonists than members of the same community.
We’re all trying to tell the same story, in one way or another.
And, if we listen – even just half heartedly – I think what we’ll find is a glimpse and a glimmer of our own story. A place we’ve been. A thought we’ve shared. A feeling we understand. A fear so familiar to us we could have experienced it alongside them.
If we listen …….
___________________________________
