The Story
Looking over her shoulder was the wasteland of her past and yet, she knew, with absolute certainty that no future would exist without it.
An opening line can make or break a story. I was thinking about this as I read a series of essays recently that talked about how authors think about the creative process when it comes to their writing. In a completely different context, the acclaimed Belgian-American Psychotherapist Esther Perel often talks about how our lives are driven by stories. The stories we tell ourselves, the ones we believe in, how we relate to each other, our preconceptions about the roles we take in our lives.
She caught a glimpse of the old woman through the trees, and before she could blink, she was gone. Like she was never there.
I’ve also been thinking about my work as a creative. About how the things we buy tell us a story about who we are as individuals. And, by extension, who we are as a society. Sustainable products, for example, are a story about valuing the earth. Products free of animal testing tell a story about how we value other living things. Analogue products may tell many different stories including the need to disconnect or the need to slow down. Holding back on consumption also tells a story about a more intentional perspective, about waste or simply about inflation. We are surrounded by stories. Steeped in them. The story is a bridge—where our rich inner world meets our outer world.
Like you, throughout my life I have told myself, and been told many stories. The hardest stories, I think, are the ones you've been told are true that turn out to be fables. And by the time you learn this, you're so deep inside them, or perhaps they are so deep inside you, you can't tell the difference between story and fable until time or circumstance forces some perspective.
This is the story about being good, this is the story about being respectful, this is the story about being successful. It doesn't matter who you are, you have a story—multiple stories—that have made their home within you. Some are lightly touching you as we speak. This is not to say that stories are manipulative; they are inert. Stories are nothing in themselves. They exist when someone breathes life into them. They have the ability to open the door to possibility, imagination, and a life that may be different from the one you are sitting quite comfortably in right now.
She felt as the plane descended into a bitterly cold city, that the glimmering lights called to her in a new beginning.
It was here. Then it was gone. Such is the way life unfolds.
I grew up in a place rich with stories in many languages. As a child I was lovingly told stories about bears in woods, a slightly depressed donkey, and monsters. There were lessons of character in stories about unity, truth, courage and mettle. My childhood, and I imagine yours too, were filled with stories about how to live a good successful life.
For some time, when I was very young, I attended Catholic School. First, I will say, the Nuns who taught us were very determined. I went in with illegible spindly handwriting and came out with perfectly form cursive. All within ages seven to nine. Very efficient. This makes it sound like a typically Nun-run Catholic school but it was actually a really interesting education. We did start some mornings with Vespers but we also learnt Classical Dance, had choir and Activity classes with all sorts of crafts. I have a distinct memory of creating a disco ball with a series of things that did not start out looking like said disco ball. But the class that really stuck with me was called “Character Building” and its lesson was that the foundational characteristics you choose to fortify yourself with are akin to the foundation of a building. These qualities were often things like honesty, integrity, respect. The seriousness of building yourself brick by brick upon a strong foundation was impressed upon us many times. And the idea that if you didn’t, your building (you) would fall down without fail.
An opening appeared that allowed her to take a tentative step into the pause of possibility.
The only way out was through.
Growing up amongst a slew of male cousins, the story was: it is much more fun to be a boy. So, I climbed trees, roughhoused, played sports and cut my hair very short when I was 11. I was a tomboy. Once, someone in a park mistook me for a boy and it was the highlight of my little eleven-year-old day. Even then I enjoyed slipping in and out of concrete spaces. Then, as I inched towards fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—no pun intended—I grew taller by literal inches. I felt a little bit like a giraffe—very gangly, limbs in all directions.
Don’t get involved with boys was the story as I was growing up. As a teenager, I seemed to be a magnet, for the kind of trouble that is and isn't trouble. Quiet valentines, clandestine meetings, fumbling hand-holding at the back of a bus, tempestuous fights. It was a decided stumble through early dating that left me feeling all sorts of pointed feelings when very little was actually happening.
As she forced herself to fit into small places, she found pieces broke off to live their own secret lives elsewhere, in the cracks, in the dark and in the light.
There are stories about being good and responsible. Good has clear instructions; it was a straight and narrow line. But on either side of the very rickety Bridge of Goodness—a bridge whose builder was of unknown origin—is the chasm of bad reputation and a life of waste. Stories of how easy it was to fall from the bridge permeated every aspect of being. Responsibility is the wanted ending to the story. It is the reward of being good.
There are stories of excellence, mettle and hard work. A steadily ascending ladder with predictable outcomes (spoiler alert, there are no predictable outcomes) that began with a certain kind of education, a certain kind of career path and a certain kind of marriage. And I should add—a certain kind of privilege.
My favourite stories though, even as a child, are the ones that allow for dreaming. Stories that explore worlds powered by realities or imagination that, when I was young, I didn’t quite understand. That I sometimes still don’t understand but feel like an inkling of a different life. You know those stories. Filled with wonder, some dread and the kinds of rewards that don't start or end on rickety bridges of goodness.
I have always had a rich inner life. I consider it a survival mechanism and I have always been this way. Nourishing the ability to dream, to think analytically, intentionally and to create relationships that foster the world I would like to see is core to who I am as a person. Dreaming is a match that was lit inside me when I was very young. It illuminates the possibilities of ways of being that may be very different from my own. That light burns inside me insistently still. This kind of dreaming is not an optimism that discounts the realities of life or turns away from hard things. It orients me to the important things. Hope is an intentional orientation. Krista Tipett, the theologian and host of the much-loved podcast and show "On Being" has spoken about this in a way that I return to often:
“Hope is distinct, in my mind, from optimism or idealism. It has nothing to do with wishing. It references reality at every turn and reveres truth. It lives open-eyed and wholehearted with the darkness that is woven inescapably into the light of life and sometimes seems to overcome it. Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a practice that becomes spiritual muscle memory. It’s a renewable resource for moving through life as it is, not as we wish it to be.”
The space between how things are and how they could be—those are the stories I am interested in. The lives we want to lead are in that space between. I believe before we are able to see things become real, we have to have an inkling, a tiny lit match of what it could be. By engaging with stories of other people, other places and other ways of being, even imagined, we create a map of possibility that is not anchored in fear, but is a considered orientation of hope.
There is no end to the stories we are told throughout our lives, no end to what we can absorb. Stories of marriage, partnerships, financial boundaries, risk, reward and how to live a life. They range a gamut of themes and emotions—of love, guilt, religious constructs, fear, delight, joy. I believe listening to all these stories is one way we dismantle unfixable structures, to take down scaffolding for ideas that don't serve us or make us smaller. By breathing life into stories together, we no longer traverse a rickety bridge to perceived goodness on our own. We sail across an ocean to possibilities together.