We Tell Stories to Find the Truth

In January, I started a writing group. The goal was to write a book in a year. I set the group limit at 15. There are 30 people in the group. A couple have fallen away, but I still keep them on the list because if I know anything, I know that writing a book is a process. I know that any day they might come back, and I want to be here to meet them. 

They are journeying. You don’t always come home after a journey, but as Joseph Campbell talked about, the hero comes home because the point of going away is to come back with a boon for your people. 

The treasure of what you learned by finding the courage to leave and then finding the courage to come back.

Both can feel like death. 

I have learned in the past few years that some of the best things feel like death: leaving home, having a baby, getting married, getting divorced, getting a new job, quitting your job, living out damaging behaviors, stopping damaging behaviors, making love, writing a story that has a middle, beginning, and end. 

When I was a child, I begged my mother to let me stop dance classes after one session. We were down in the basement. She was doing laundry and I was an eight year old fighting for my life. Dance class was new. I didn’t understand the rules. I didn’t know what to do when we were shuffling in the sand trays. I felt like I would die if I had to go back, but these weren’t words I used with my mother because in my head, I saw that if I went back to dance class, I would disappear, and this felt terrifying, but, again, this wasn’t something I felt I could say to my mother because what could she say to that, “But you won’t disappear”? I would have shown her the deepest terrors in my brain and she would have deserted me. Better to use a different kind of logic. Better to talk about how much I hated dance.

She let me quit.

This scenario happened over and over again. Sometimes it was my mother I had to convince, sometimes friends, but mostly it was myself. I’d start something new and feel the terror and quit. In junior high when I tried out for the basketball team, I couldn’t breathe during the running exercises. This also happened to me in swim class so I was put in the remedial level with the kids who couldn’t put their heads under water. But I could run long distances. I could swim! 

Fear took away my breath. I was afraid of these new situations, of trying out for a basketball team, of swimming from one end of the pool to another in front of people who were judging me. This happens to me so consistently I think it is who I am. I quit before I know I was trying. 

I can lose my breath standing in front of a vegetable. I don’t know how you are supposed to be eaten! Raw or cooked? If cooked, how do I cook you? The panic button in my brain goes off and I walk away, heading for kale, something safe. Something I know. I have eaten so much kale I have become allergic to it. 

I don’t recognize the panic button as a panic button. I see it as NO. My brain tells me I am dealing with simple refusal, not fear. My brain tells me I am making a choice.

Gentle reader, I am much more often acting out of fear than I am conscious choice. 

But I am starting to recognize this in myself, and when I see fear for what it is I can become my own advocate. Team Anne. Me and frightened me. I can be the mother I tell my deepest fears to and that mother stays, walks with me through the terror to the other side that most often ends in delight. 

I believe in my job as a writing coach because I believe many people benefit from having a companion on their journey who understands both the threat and the purpose of the threat: the threat is often a doorway to your truest self. How do you tell the difference between an actually dangerous threat and a threat that’s really just fear from expanding into your true nature? You look at your target.

What’s your target?

What if, when I was a kid, my parents and I had sat down and played with crayons and pens and we’d all drawn targets, the places we’d like the arrows of ourselves to go in our lives. A kid’s target and an adult’s target are probably going to be different, but they both bring in the idea of purpose and intention and agency. 

We have the power to have a vision. We can be our own steering wheel. We can drive the car of our life even as an eight year old!

I understand about handing your life over to a higher power and actually taking your hand off the wheel, but you have to have your hand on the wheel before you can take it off. It helps to believe you have control of your life before you come to the realization that something bigger is actually in control and that you are alright, better than alright: stellar.

It still comes down to the fact that you are an arrow headed for a target (death). It can be more fun if you don’t label the target “death” and instead use words that represent who you want to be and what you want to do with this one life. 

This means, if I have put “athlete” on my target, I’m going to be more willing to push myself to go to dance class even though the newness of it scares me. I begin to be willing to put myself on the line to get where I want to go.

For example, I was terrified to commit to staying at Spirit Hill Farm. I felt I was going to lose my freedom, but even more than that, I had no idea how to do much of what was being asked of me. Maintain a large property? Host guests? Plant a garden? What if I did these things wrong? What if I failed? 

I felt like I was going to die. 

This time, I recognized that the fear of death was opportunity for growth and change, and I stayed, and after a few months of struggle, I walked through the doorway of joy. I saw that I did not have to be perfect. I could trim all the olive trees in such a way that there are few olives left hanging. I could forget the hose was on and drain the water tank. A chicken could die on my watch. 

I could be human. 

As a child, I did not know this. I was so afraid of being seen for who I really was, someone who was unacceptable, unlovable, wrong. But these weren’t things I even knew I was feeling, so I could not have articulated them. It was more an uneasiness in my gut and brain, discomfort that made me moody, made me want sugar for the relief of both the high and the crash, made me lie, steal, want to hide from people when the world felt too much. 

These were not things I could have talked about because I would have thought that using words to talk about these core feelings would kill me. If I named myself, I would die because in the naming, all the wrong would come to light and I would just fizzle away. 

If you want to experience this, if you have any self-doubt or self-loathing in you, set out to write your story and watch what happens. For thirty years I had teachers tell me I wrote well but that I stayed on the surface. I had no idea what they were talking about. How did you get under the surface? I was living on the surface and I did not even know it! 

It wasn’t until I sat down to write You Don’t Look Adopted and really stuck with the story that I figured out many of the things I thought were unsayable or even unthinkable were the things that made my story my story, made me me. 

To actually write down things I thought and did without hiding or changing the facts felt first as if it could kill me and then as if I could fly. 

I did not know I could be myself.

I did not know I could make so many mistakes and still be okay.

I did not know it was okay to be dirty.

I did not know it was okay to live in paradox, to hate and love at the same time.

But I’m learning, and more than anything I love to work with writers who are learning this along with me. I love to watch them sprout wings and fly out of the muck they were afraid might be their destiny. 

 A persistent bright hope that was in fact their essence had told them all their lives stuck was story and not fact. 

We tell stories to find the truth. 

Or we don’t: we live out our lies and we die and it’s all over. 

We lived a lie. 

What a waste of an arrow.