The Power To Tell Your Own Story
It is so easy for me to dismiss the phrase “the power of being able to tell your own story” as one of those maxims that are obvious and easy. Surely we are all telling our own story all the time, because if we’re not, whose story are we telling? I think the key is in the word “power.” I am always telling my own story, but the power is in recognizing that it is my story, and not just the story. There is a lot of vulnerability in telling your own story to yourself–in fact, as I write I find myself unconsciously slipping into “we” language, as opposed to “me” language. Because it is safer. If I am presenting a story as “just the truth,” then I am hiding behind a facade–I don’t need to do any work on something that just “is,” whereas admitting that a story is just my story involves digging, reflection, ownership, accountability. Even the quotes and italics in this writing are a way to create a kind of distance. Distance from myself. This isn’t me telling who I am, I’m telling it like it is.
I want to think about the ways my life experiences still show up in my life, how my perspectives and reactions today are echoes of what I’ve experienced in the past. And I want to start at the beginning.
Much of my early story doesn’t actually feel like my story, because it exists before memory. To make matters more complicated, the memories I am not able to recall are replaced by artifacts depicting someone else’s story: Namely, the countless faded photographs my father took of me and my family when I was between 0 and 3 years old. The photographs are bright and sunny (we lived in southern California), uniformly colored in a hue somewhere between orange and brown–a color I associate with the late 70’s and my early childhood. There are pictures of my brother riding his bike, of me in a swimming pool buoyed by neon floaties (whose swimming pool was it?), our silhouetted heads against a backdrop of fourth of July fireworks, white driveways and perfectly edged lawns that are so green. I am examining a bug at a park. I am cuddled into a leather recliner amidst a sea of Sesame Street stuffies. I am on my father’s shoulders, blinking in the brilliance of summer sunshine. These photographs tell the story of a White, nuclear American family, and we are doing great.
I wonder: What is going on behind the camera?
Several years later I have my first memory. I might’ve been 4 years old, and we’ve left the sunshine of California and the ‘70’s to move to Ridgefield, Washington, in the deep shadows of the Pacific Northwest rainforest. I’m sitting on a tangerine countertop, resting my head and legs against dark wooden cabinets, staring intently at a framed poster advertising a street fair at Seattle’s Pike Place Market (two fish and a cornucopia with veggies pouring out). I’m fidgeting with a half dozen vitamin bottles, each with orange caps, arranged according to height. My mom and dad are having an argument. They’re yelling. At some point I’m asked to leave the room. It’s winter, so I can’t go outside. I move to a different part of the house. The yelling is muted, sometimes whispered, sometimes hushed. I’m alone with my thoughts. Which of course I can’t recall.
A flood of memories–real memories–follow. I am playing and exploring with my dog Mugsy in the immense forest that surrounded our property (so free! so important!), desperately wishing to spend the night with my brother and his friends in the tent they’d set up in the backyard (why am I excluded from everything?), riding my rocking horse, sprinting up and down bark chip piles, plastic sheets hung in doorways during winter to keep the heat in (it costs money to stay warm?). My brother is central to my memories. My mother less so. My father almost not at all. I would come to find out later that when we all moved up from California, he had immediately moved out. My parents were divorced, and to this day I’m not sure why. This information was always kept from me–either because I didn’t ask, or because they didn’t want me to know. And I can’t even fall back on photographs–no one takes pictures of a divorce.
There are gaps in my story, and therefore, I’m not always sure why I am the way I am, why I interpret my experiences the way I do, why I act how I act. This is sometimes because I haven’t mined deep enough. Sometimes it’s because the sources are beyond grasp, buried in my subconscious. Buried in my bones. So I am compelled to fill the gaps with a story that seems likely, sounds right, or (danger!) I hope is right. I separate.
When Chimamanda Adichie talks about the danger of the single story, she is talking about our relationship to others: If you only have one story of a person, you generalize it to others, which leads to stereotype and judgment. But I’m thinking about how this applies to myself as well. These gaps in my story compel me to fill them with fantasy and ideal–things that are less hard. And then I believe them. And I believe them for others as well.
I understand now that there is an alternative to filling the gaps with false narrative. For me, this involves inviting discomfort into the process of connecting past to present. There is always a connection, and that connection is sometimes knowable and sometimes not. But I can always ask the questions: Why am I avoiding talking to this person? Where does this feeling come from when I hear raised voices? Why do I want to run away? How do I respond when I am feeling left out? Seeking connection between my present emotional state and my experiences is the antidote to a fractured version of myself. It is the path to a kind of wholeness.
If I don’t doggedly pursue the hidden aspects of my own story–the ones that are hard–then I can’t begin to understand how challenges have affected others.
The power to tell your own story becomes a power imbued with responsibility. It is hard, honest work, but it is a power nonetheless.