Tomorrow night, I will tell one of my stories in front of a live audience. Many of my friends and family (indeed, many of you) will be in attendance.  I am overwhelmed by the sheer number of people who jumped to support me in this endeavor. While I am only mildly apprehensive at the moment, I know my nerves will proliferate as the hour of my performance approaches. I am excited to have reached the culmination of my storytelling class, and I am surprised by the lessons it taught me. As with any commitment, the weekly task of writing my own stories and work-shopping others’ led me to some conclusions – some deeply embedded truths about myself I didn’t necessarily expect to learn.

The first story I wrote for this class, I wrote because I had to, and I mean that in the most basic sense. I was stuck – utterly incapable of writing a single word of a different narrative until I conceptualized this one, poured it out on the page, packaged it, tied it up with a bow, and spun it into the air and out into the universe with my signature positive twist. It was the story of my summer romance – immortalized in this blog, and later referenced in an article published in Verily. It is a story I had told in parts – to my friends, to my family, to my readers – and I needed to tell it to myself in order to make sense of it. I did exactly that. I learned what it meant to me, what it did for me, and what it would continue to be for me – how it had taught me to say yes to possibility. Then I tucked it away.

Following the emotional exertion of writing that first story, I wrote my second one “just for fun.” It’s one of those childhood stories that I’ve told and retold in different iterations over the years – adding and subtracting details, emphasizing one moment over another depending on my audience. I thoroughly enjoyed writing it, bringing my childhood spark to life on the page. I shared it with my fellow storytellers, took in their feedback, and also tucked that one away before turning my attention to the story really wanted to write.

This third story was my pièce de résistance. Also from my childhood, it is the story of the first boy to ever ask me out. It is also the story of how I turned him down. For twenty-two years, I’ve carried that story buried inside of me – a mild irritant that would occasionally surface only to be pushed back down out of conscious reach. Over time, it became a grain of sand in an oyster shell chaffing almost imperceptibly at my emotional underbelly until I learned to protect myself from my own callous narrative.

While it is childish and naïve, a part of me always believed that story held the key to my entire history with men – that all my relationship and dating woes could be traced to that single moment when I said “no” to another twelve-year-old who wanted to hold my hand and call me his girlfriend.  In a nearly equal feat of naiveté, I believed this story had become a pearl – a stunning piece of myself that held some key to who I was, who I had become, and who I would be. I felt deeply that if I could write it and tell it that to share it with an audience in such an audacious and public way would be to rid myself of it. I could wear that pearl proudly – turn a sore spot into a thing of beauty.

In a way, I was right. I crafted the story of my lovelorn, pubescent self with unprecedented care. I weighed and measured each word before I committed it to paper – judging each syllable’s ability to convey not just the exquisite torture of my childhood experience, but also the gravity I had afforded it over time. The result was a beautiful, poignant, and relatable story. As I wrote my way into the final paragraphs, however, I was struck with the kind of “aha!” moment you happen upon only by writing your own painful truth.

I had misjudged my story and, by extension, myself. For years, I believed I said “no” to that young man out of cowardice, weakness, or inferiority. As I wrote, though, I realized I had said “no,” because I didn’t want to say yes. I didn’t want to go out with him, and that was just fine. In fact, it was more than fine. It was right and good. This wasn’t a story of messing up – of taking a turn in the woods that would lead me away from a lifetime of romantic bliss. It was simply a story of a little girl following her gut, speaking her truth, and living her life of yes by saying “no.” Writing my story did release its grip on me – just not in the way I expected.

Somewhere between the hours of 7 and 9pm tomorrow, I will be sharing the second story I wrote for class. It’s fun, and funny, and up until yesterday, I didn’t know it was the one I would share. Over the last week, as I sat with myself, steeped in my stories and deciding which I would tell, I suddenly knew it would be the second one.

Why? Because I realized that my other two stories were about me – but they were about me in relation to men (or one man and a twelve-year-old boy). As I explained to our instructor in a survey reviewing our experience of the course, “because I write so often and in such detail about my dating life, the enduring narrative of my existence has been dominated by who I am attached to, or not, and how I grapple with the daily ins and outs of that reality.  While writing and sharing those parts of myself are very important to me, I realized…I really really want to share a story that has nothing to do with a boy and whether I said yes or no to him.  I want to tell a story about saying yes to myself.” And that’s exactly the story I’m going to tell.

 

Can’t wait to see so many of you there. Until next time…