Tell Me Your Story

To know where we are we must locate where we have been.

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Writing is a form of freedom more accessible than many and there are forces at work that would like to withhold it from those whose stories most threaten the regimes that govern this society. Fuck them. Write your life.

— Melissa Febos; Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

Writing our life is an art of discernment.

To tell the truth is to tell truths. All of them as they rise and fall and shape-shift across time and space.

When we write our life we write the stories that betrayed us. The stories we cling to until that miraculous moment when something beyond comprehension gently releases our death grip one finger at a time and our hands open and false narratives slip through our fingers as cremated remains meant to join the wind and the sea and the soil.

And we gasp in fear that the air we need to stay alive has also disappeared through our fingers and we will simply die. But the moment comes when we realize we are breathing with every cell in our body and we gasp in awe that this is what if feels like to be fully alive.

Because when I say Tell Me Your Story I am saying bear witness to what emerges when you unravel from the stories that convinced you that facts and not the art of fully inhabiting your life will set you free.

Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide. — D.W. Winnicott

For much of my life I would tell you the story that I was not creative.

I would point you to all the evidence. And just like that rabbit/duck optical illusion where your brain will only “see” one image until you are shown the other image and then you can’t unsee it, that evidence is now so laughably and clearly a duck as much as it is a rabbit.

I was not talking to you when I told you that story as much as I was daring you to be a mirror powerful enough for me to locate myself as a creative being. I needed that story that I was not creative to justify my secret-even-to-myself quest to prove it wrong. I was really good at excelling externally in institutions and fighting them every step of the way because I was nowhere to be found in them yet still looked to them to justify my existence.

I fought to be free in cages that didn’t exist. I was always a writer. I wrote in the isolated freedom of journals and in the public confines of academic institutions where I could hide all that I longed to create in plain sight.

It is all a creative act. Transformation is a creative practice.

Our work, or relationships, our family constellations, our learning, our community care is all a radically creative practice.

All of which has become institutionalized. Every cell in our body knows we cannot breathe in institutions. We survive. And we get used to not breathing.

There is no salvation in institutions, but oooooooh we have created story upon story to desperately try to convince ourselves otherwise because it is actually more terrifying to realize we are not in fact trapped in cages but are tied up in knots that we can unravel from when we are willing to come completely undone.

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave it neither power nor time. — Mary Oliver

I have a love/hate relationship with this quote. I love it for telling all the truths and I hate that it unwittingly teeters on admonition that I know is not intended. But if anyone can say this Mary Oliver can because she wrote her life through grasshoppers, awe, geese, sorrow, wind, and utter joy and it gave us all life.

Poets are our first captains on this wayfinding expedition of living our one wild and precious life. They are so wildly free from language as an arbiter of truth that they render it a compass always pointing us toward where we long to go.

When I say Tell Me Your Story I am saying remember in every cell in your body that indigenous Polynesian wayfinders navigate(d) the vast ocean by the stars, by the flight of birds, by ocean swells, by wind patterns, and through oral tradition and song.

They knew where they were because they came to know where they had been.

We find our way by locating ourselves. Again and again.

And in case this isn’t abundantly clear let me say this with abundant clarity. Yes, write. But most importantly, create. Whatever form your compass takes, create what points you to the ocean because we were never meant to stay on the shore.

I didn't have a choice anymore…I couldn't run from that desire to tell stories, that desire to tell stories about us, and about the people I loved. I couldn't run from it anymore. And it's not that I was confident that I could actually do it. You know, that didn't get me here! Confidence definitely did not get me here! More of like, desperation. And I thought, well, I can try. At the least I can try. And if I succeed, then I will have done something worthwhile with the time that I have been given.

—Jesmyn Ward; Writing Mississippi: Jesmyn Ward Salvages Stories of the Silenced