What's Your Story?

I was thinking about a friend, and feeling sad about what I thought had happened to our friendship. Suddenly, I thought, “Don’t make that the story.”

Years ago I met a guy we’ll call “Sam.” Whenever I ran into him, I would hear about the latest bad turn of events: car trouble, trouble on the job, maybe a breakup. It got so I was tempted to cross the street when I saw him.

“Not again,” I’d think.

Now, I knew better.

It sounds corny, but I love people. I love Sam. And I love listening to people’s stories—whatever the story. And I had been dropped by someone once, a friend who was also a therapist, because after dealing with clients all day long he just wanted light conversation, nothing too deep. And I have enough light conversation in my life; when I talk with friends, we tend to go deep. Not that we can’t watch a ball game or go to a concert; we do that, too. Sometimes you just want to shoot the breeze. But making that a rule? That felt artificial, to me. It's what he wanted, though, and we went our separate ways.

Anyway, one day I ran into Sam. I braced myself.

“Here it comes,” I thought, and said, “Hey, Sam. How are you?”

“Great!”

“Excuse me?”

“Great!" he said again. "Things are going really well.”

Now, you have to understand that by now I had known Sam for years. He had never said anything remotely like this.

I chided myself afterward for the way I had been thinking about Sam, how I had judged him. Later I mentioned the situation to another friend (who didn't know Sam).

“Oh,” he said, “so he changed his story.”

Once, on a long bus ride, I was in conversation with the woman in the next seat and the subject turned to cooking.

“I will only live in a house with an electric stove,” she said.

I asked why.

She told me that when she was first married, she went to light the gas burner and had forgotten to turn it on. So she turned it on, the knob was turned too high and presto! The flames singed her eyebrows. And she swore off gas stoves. (If she’s like my crowd, she probably swore, too.)

My friend John is a lawyer. When I’m telling him about a situation I’m dealing with, John often listens politely and then says, “I don’t grant your conclusion.”

Would you grant the woman on the bus that conclusion about gas stoves? Or would you suggest she just watch the knob? Whatever you or I might do, that was her story, and she was sticking to it.

So what’s your story?

Are you “not a technical person”? Do you have “two left feet”? Are you sure you’re not good with money, can’t cook, carry a tune, or learn a foreign language, or that you’ll never achieve success in your field or find true love?

In Monty Python’s Search for the Holy Grail, the pilgrims wind up in a terrible situation. They are trapped, and the bad guys are closing in.

“And then,” says the narrator, “the animator suffered a fatal heart attack.” And they escape.

I love animators, but I advise giving your internal one—the one that says, “It always turns out this way”—a heart attack on a regular basis.

Stories are wonderful: They make life rich—when you read them, when you sing along with them, when you watch them unfold at the movies. Who doesn't love a great story?

Just don’t live in one. Don’t pledge allegiance to one.

When my father died, someone asked me how I was doing. I said, “I’m grieving, but I am more than my grief.”

Let yourself be more than your story.

©2011, 2012 Laynie Tzena.