Image from Wikimedia. A selection of books by Bessie Marchant (1862-1941).
Telling a Story Differently
The card on my desk features an image of a blue-grey feathered quill pen in an ink pot, tempting me to write my story differently.
Rewriting my story differently: Is that a possibility? How would I tell it after all these years?
Do we really want to hear a story differently than the one lived by a real person in a real place and time?
Aren’t we tired of the narratives which strategically erase some events while elevating and enhancing others? Aren’t we bored with stories that scour selectively through the scraps of history to justify or rationalize egregious actions as exemplary—as noble and worthy of emulation? I know I am.
In our exercise of telling the story differently aren’t we fooling ourselves into justifying that our present is warranted despite the sins of the past.
My genuine concern is this: Is telling the story differently an exercise in truth-telling or merely a ruse to present myself worthy, to you and to me? What is it that causes us to turn away from the story told honestly? Why do we run and hide from who we are?
Nearly 25 years ago I read Renée Bondi’s book My Story: The Last Dance but Not the Last Song. Bondi, a high school teacher, suffered a bizarre accident at age 29, that left her a quadriplegic.
Hiding from Ourselves
The timing was perfect for me. My 43-year-old sister—profoundly disabled with cerebral palsy from birth—had recently been given a 60-day warning that she would be expelled (I really can’t find a better term than that!) from her home in Holdredge – a duplex where she and another disabled female had lived together for several years. In less than two months both women would be homeless.
Their story sounds heartless, doesn’t it? It is! But the agency told the story differently than how these women experienced it. The story shared by the agency is as old as time.
Woe are we! We’re doing our best, but alas, we’re losing our financial footing on all sides. Weep for us! Feel our pain! Surely you see our predicament and sympathize with us, right? There is nothing left to do but prioritize profit over people.
Looking for a Home
After weeks of interviewing and visiting locations around Nebraska we faced the hard reality that few places were equipped, let alone desired, to be a safe place she could call home.
We bought a house, built ramps, reconfigured a bathroom, moved her into our home and turned the dining room into a bedroom fit for a wheelchair-bound woman. Our new neighbors praised us for being so generous. Ah, shucks! It’s really nothing, we told them! After all, we’re Christians!
Bondi’s biography arrived at exactly the time I needed it. I curled up on my couch and bawled my eyes out! The gut-wrenching kind of bawling when you realize your own life and dreams are lying on the floor – shattered to smithereens.
She wrote about a moment that has never left me. One of her students, training to be a nurse, wanted to be her caretaker. Bondi reluctantly agree and allowed her to fill this role on one condition: she would need to place a paper sack over Bondi’s head while tending to her necessary hygiene care. Even in the telling of her own story, so honest and raw, Renée Bondi could only endure the humiliation and shame of her now vulnerable, physical body if she could hide herself from it!
In telling my sister’s story I left plenty of gaps, holes in my own story. Were these intentional or not? I’m not sure yet. But I realize now like Bondi, I find it easier to face life with a paper sack over my head so I don’t have to face the shame of my own story: the sister of a disabled sister.
The deepest, darkest thoughts and feelings I keep tucked out of sight from the text on the page when telling my story. Why? Is it to present myself as the patient, pious me? Dare I betray the broken, disgruntled heart, the angry heart of childhood that begrudging filled a role enforced upon me to care for another –one not freely chosen on my part.
My Naked Self
Even while I hid behind your weeping for her, I strove to be seen — see me, not the other!
The need to be seen is so strong—that if I can only be seen by telling another’s painful story, as heartbreaking as hers is—it’s worth the risk. For at some point in the telling, surely someone might see me, my story apart from hers—even though both are inextricably bound.
Is my attempt to untie the cords which constrain my psyche, my being to another, is it in reality a death to myself—a suicide of sorts to my lived identity. To wipe her out of my story, is to present me—made by the story—invisible.
So yes, sadly, I admit, the past is inextricably bound to my present! If not, there is no me to know.
I can conceal the past—an act which hides me from you.
I can reimagine the past—an act which hides the shear ridiculousness of my past that hides me from myself, from my own reality.
Or I can bare my soul, removing layer by layer – stripping down to my birthday suit, my naked self.
And only then you may see me—naked and unashamed—yet you may still choose not to know me, even though my interior and exterior self is made bare.
And herein lies the danger of telling my story, any story—which is why I think we’d all rather tell our stories differently from reality.
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