hands off my story
A few weeks ago, I participated in an evening of storytelling sponsored by the Greenwich Historical Society, an opportunity to tell a story around a predetermined theme called Story Barn. The local event is the brain child of Bonnie Levison and based on the work that she has done with The Moth, a nonprofit based in New York City dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling. Due to COVID restrictions, we presented on Zoom and not in person. Still, I was nervous - but excited - to share a piece of my story. It was a powerful night. The theme was Community Together, which is a powerful theme, but it was really all about the telling and the listening to the fine details of each story, the details that give our lives meaning.
The experience reminded me that we each have a story, a narrative seen through our own lens and told in our own words, and we have the right to tell it; it doesn’t need to be in front of an audience or on a microphone, but to ourselves, to God, or to another human being. We own the memories and the details of our life, as we see it. And no one gets to steal our story.
And yet, we, not intentionally, take small swipes at each other’s stories all of the time.
I am blonde, or almost blonde (or, truthfully, I was once blonde and now I need a little help), but I have lived most of life more aligned with blondes than brunettes. Growing up, my sisters were brunette, so I have always been lighter than them and because of that, I was often the butt of many “blonde” jokes. You know the ones, “Three blondes walk into a building. You’d think at least one of them would’ve seen it.”
It’s all in fun and I have never taken it seriously, but these genre of jokes have also been used to pick on various nationalities and religions and ethnicities and are derogatory and based on stereotypes that are really mistaken ideas or beliefs about a group of people that share common traits. For some, these jokes can be hurtful, and they tell a part of a story that does not belong to them.
And not that dissimilar to stereotypes are the assumptions we make on a daily basis. When we meet someone, we size them up, and they most likely size us up too. We do it automatically. What does their accent tell us? What do their clothes tell us? The car they drive? Their age? Their address? The college they attended? Their job, the color of their skin, and even their hair color. Our brain kicks in, taking cues from our past experiences to make sense of this new acquaintance with any information we have. Our brain craves order and our new acquaintance gets fit into an existing structure. And while our brain tries to compute, we risk losing the real story that lies beyond the cues. Sometimes assumptions are helpful, but mostly they are not.
Artists use many techniques to create their work. While painting with a broad brush may be beneficial for larger surfaces, such as the sides of a house or an interior wall, the broad brush fails in the smaller, more intricate spaces. Likewise, when we use a broad stroke to describe or understand a group of people, we fail to consider the details. I would argue that we miss completely the distinguishing and meaningful features of an individual. And again, we deprive the individual of their story.
As the mother of a teenage girl, I am on a crazy mad witch hunt when it comes to gossip, as I am sure my daughter would concur. I loathe it. It’s usually mean-spirited and always says much more about those gossiping than those being gossiped about. But what I really hate is that gossip not only robs the individual’s claim to their own story, but replaces the story with myth and fairytale.
When I was in college, Sundays were library days. I would arrive with a book bag and a bottle of water after a late breakfast and plant myself with a few friends on the balcony that overlooked the front door. From our vantage point, we were able to view a person’s feet coming through the door before we were able to see their body and face. And just because it was silly and we were most likely procrastinating, we played a game where we tried to guess who would be attached to the feet (I attended a small college and knew most of the students). The game would eat up most of the afternoon, which I am sure would not have delighted my parents had they known, but we rarely got the right answer. The big athletic shoes, untied and worn-in, might in fact belong to a small freshman girl and not the star of the basketball team, and a pair of fluffy slippers might be attached to a frat boy. And I guess the takeaway is that we really can’t tell much about a person from their exterior (and certainty not from the shoes that they wore in college), and I will make the leap - you can’t judge a book by its cover, which is just one more way we try to pilfer someone’s story.
I have never been one for small talk; I don’t do it well. I would much prefer to talk with one or two people at a party than work the room. I think it’s because what intrigues me about people is not the superficial, but what’s underneath. It’s what makes programs like Story Barn and The Moth and even AA or Senior Voices in high school so popular. It’s about the often vulnerable truths that are shared that ultimately connect us.
If we throw out the stereotypes and the unhelpful assumptions and broad stroke generalizations, we can dive in to the amazing underneath. Because it’s that underneath, well below the color of our roots, that is magical and exceptional. And if we bypass the gossip and judgement based on someone’s exterior and we listen and ask, we might just discover that, at the heart of our stories, we share similar needs, desires, fears and feelings, and maybe, if we give people the dignity and respect to tell their story, they will listens to ours too.