Your Story
Page 9
Explore how you experience grief, love, shame, desire, hope, fear, joy, loneliness, passion, pain, elation, regret. Get down deep into those gritty emotions. Imagine them as characters in your life. What is your relationship with them? No one feels them in the exact way you do. Because here’s the kicker: you can only take a reader as far as you have gone. So, how far have you really gone? Can you go further?
In later sections on Techniques, I’ll talk about “touch and being touched” and “telling the truth”—both essential components for finding your unique writing voice.
For now, it’s enough to know that you can begin your story by writing about:
things that make you happy (in an interesting way, because happiness is not that interesting all by itself);
what has brought you to your knees;
your deepest regrets;
the saddest you have ever been;
the worst stress you have ever experienced;
the deepest peace you have ever known;
a time when you couldn’t find a way to go on;
an emotion that dominates your life (fear, anxiety, loneliness, anger, hatred, joy, regret);
a time when you panicked;
a time when you were truly conflicted and how you resolved it;
a time in your life when things did not work out and fell apart around you;
jealousy;
anxiety;
any other emotion.
66
Shhh
The most interesting characters in fiction have secrets. A concealed vice. A hidden identity. An undisclosed addiction. A past trauma (or “backstory wound,” something from the past that will disrupt their desire or goal in the front story). Secrets emit energy, like static electricity, and run like an undercurrent through the narrative. They keep our reader twitching, turning the page, wondering, What’s really going on here? Until the moment of revelation, we haven’t really known the character at all. (This is good to remember in real life when we judge people based on a single impression without having walked a day in their moccasins.)
Fictional characters are no different from real people. We all have secrets. We’ve all sinned. Failed, both spectacularly and privately. We each have our trove of I wish I’d nevers and I’d rather forgets bottled up, buried, disowned, and stuffed in our internal closets. We all pray no one ever finds out about them. These are the orphans of consciousness, the unloved, unwanted bits of us we hope will disappear and never return to claim us as their rightful owners.
But in the poet Rilke’s words, “Where I am folded in upon myself, there I am a lie.” In this way, secrets turn us all into liars and pretenders. When we don’t embrace the fullness of our being—the broken as well as the brave, the fool as well as the philosopher, the loser as well as the lucky—not only are we living in half of ourselves, we’re inhabiting the most boring part of our identity.
Think about it. Invariably it’s someone’s most disgusting habit, deepest regret, most neurotic phobia, or cruelest remark that makes them fascinating. Stories are not made more interesting by emotionally and financially stable heroes. Those who’ve emerged from perfect childhoods and stride confidently into ideal adulthoods. Well-rounded, hang-up-free folk are not even vaguely intriguing. Soul-stirring stories swarm around the tormented, tortured, and damaged among us. We may not choose to co-parent with such individuals, but we can’t deny they make us giddy with adrenaline.
When we write our story, the biggest mistake we can make is to think we must present a flawless front. No one cares about our perfection, so we can drop that facade. Instead, we can become more human to our reader by exploring our hidden territories. Yep, those scary places we were hoping were long forgotten.
So where should we look? We all have our own version of a devastating shame, life-changing regret, or crippling guilt—for an infidelity, abortion, illicit liaison, act of violence, sexual encounter, hurtful thing we said or loving word we didn’t offer, trick we played that went wrong, recreational drug or Botox habit we can’t shake, love we lost, or child we gave up for adoption.
Secrets wield power, and the deeper we hide them, the more power we give them. In October 2004 “accidental artist” Frank Warren invited people to post him their secrets on homemade postcards when he began a community art project in the United States. He was overwhelmed by the response as hundreds of thousands of people all over the world sent in their secrets. Thus began PostSecret, which has become an international phenomenon, including a series of books and a blog. Here is a selection:
Sometimes I think that if I just got really sick, I’d find out who my true friends are.
My dog winks at me sometimes. I always wink back in case it’s some sort of code.
I have been in love with you since you bought those shoes in Zagreb—1,269 days ago.
I am a regular guy who’s hiding huge tits under his clothes.
When we’re on a business trip together, I secretly hope a random stranger will remark what a great couple we are and that will make you see we should be a couple.
Being anonymous, you might think, would take the fun out of the secrets, but strangely, not. Secrets are addictive because they reveal dimensions of human frailty. As we identify with the shame, regret, anxiety, sadness, or joy in them, we start to feel a space open inside us where we feel safe to be vulnerable. It’s the parts we’ve kept hidden that unite us as human beings and make us feel less alone with our secrets. PostSecret has created an anonymous community of acceptance, which has in turn helped many people accept themselves.
We can repress our secrets, or share them privately with friends, lovers, a group of other addicts, or anonymously on PostSecret, or slowly pry them off our souls like barnacles during years of therapy. Our secrets can become catalysts for life crises and personal growth. We can even recycle them into novels.
But airing our secrets is a prerequisite for healing. We cannot heal what we do not acknowledge. A secret can become a prison for the soul, a way of staying hidden from others and ourselves in what author and medical intuitive Caroline Myss has termed “woundology,” where we allow our wounds to control us. Confession in various religious forms acknowledges that the truth sets us free. As Frank Warren, the founder of PostSecret, is fond of saying, “Sometimes when we think we are keeping a secret, that secret is actually keeping us.”
Finally, secrets are wonderful intimacy currency. Trust in relationships accrues when our secrets are held with tenderness by others. When we are loved in all our naked imperfection, we learn that we are worth loving and we make it safe for others to share their secrets with us. As the poet Adrienne Rich says, when we tell the truth, we create the possibility for more truth around us.
But of course that depends on just how deeply we crave the truth. Sometimes we prefer the power of our secrets more than we desire the liberation of the truth.
With this in mind, you can write about:
the ways in which you know you are pretending or posturing;
the one thing you’re most afraid someone will find out about you;
your secret selves (the parts of yourself that others don’t know);
an incident in your past that still haunts you;
a habit or addiction you’ve unsuccessfully tried to give up;
something you deeply regret;
your deepest fears;
the truth you are blurring;
what you are afraid to simply say;
what you’re unwilling to face;
a time when you were obsessed with something or someone;
a time when you were out of control;
an unrequited love;
the worst lie you’ve ever told;
the worst lie you’ve ever told yourself;
your hidden talents, your untapped potential (who or what you would have liked to be);
a dream or goal that you didn’t achieve (what went wrong and how your failure changed you);
madness (either in yourself or
in the world);
an incident that could be used against you if you ever ran for political office;
10 minutes that still make you cringe; or
your worst vanity.
67
Entering the forest
Once we’re comfortable with the idea that we all have secrets (stowaways in our psyche we’re knowingly concealing)—we’re not far off from wondering what else might be lurking in the forests of our consciousness, that complex, layered internal space we often only touch on in therapy or deep meditation.
These are the parts of us that are in shadow. The shadow is known by many names: the dark side, the lower self, the other, the double, the dark twin, the disowned or repressed self, the id, meeting our demons, wrestling with the devil, the dark night of the soul, a descent to the underworld, or a midlife crisis.
I once wrote a poem called “Do not do no harm,” which begins:
Do not be
harmless
as the Buddhists teach.
There is no grit in goodness.
No pearl without sand.
No butterfly whose wings
have not been distressed.
Poet Robert Bly called the shadow “the long bag we drag behind us.” As we grow, whatever doesn’t fit our idealized sense of self or who we want to be becomes our shadow. It’s the unknown, dark side of our personality, often inhabited by primitive, socially unacceptable emotions and impulses such as lust, greed, rage, envy, selfishness. We’re taught that these are wrong, deplorable, and evil. As socialized, civilized human beings, we distance ourselves from them. We remove them from the deck. We play with a smaller hand. We flatten. We tuck the untidy bits away.
You must break promises
to yourself and others;
do the unforgiveable;
torture those you love;
hunt the fox
and then eat
its fear-stained flesh.
Jung reminded us that we can never elude the shadow. It is a “primordial part of our human inheritance.” Whenever these emotions surge through us, these gross, ghastly gremlins, we feel guilty and ashamed. We renew our efforts to suffocate them with more murderous intent.
So how does the shadow manifest if it’s so well hidden? A sure sign that the shadow is at work is when we project a trait onto others to avoid confronting it in ourselves.
“She’s so needy.”
“He’s such a loser.”
“Homosexuals are perverts.”
“I don’t like fat/Asian/Muslim/disabled people.”
Whenever we dislike a trait in someone else or are repelled by certain kinds of people, our shadow beckons. If our idealized self is obedient and responsible, we may find that we sometimes act out of character (a cue to investigate). Other clues are feelings of contempt, disgust, or reprehension towards others. As soon as we dehumanize or demonize other races, genders, religions, or people who are unlike us, we’re working in our own shade. This is how our shadow leaves a trail of bread crumbs. And if we are brave enough and willing to enter the forest, we may learn something about ourselves that will help solve the puzzle of our identities. Of course, this can be scary.
Robert Bly writes, “We spend our life until we’re 20 deciding what parts of ourselves to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.”
Writing is the act of leading ourselves into this forest. When we write, we touch and are touched by our shadows. All of us have edges, taboos, places that scare us. We cannot tell the truth or write from a place of self-knowledge without embracing this murky terrain and bringing responsible awareness to aspects of ourselves that we have kept in the dark.
Jung wrote, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” He paid special attention to the work of integrating the shadow and claimed it was an initiation to an awakened life, an essential awareness for our self-realization. Our job as writers is to bring a lantern into these unlit territories.
Writing is a way of healing the split between our conscious sense of self and who we might be. When we integrate the shadow, we create a unifying awareness, we balance the paradox, allow for ambiguity, and avoid being a cliché.
All this you must do
to learn that there is nowhere to go
no one to become unless you
turn your face
towards the threat inside you.
Not until you learn
where you are jagged
brutal
irredeemable
will you become
visible to yourself.
But remember—it’s our shadows that make each of us fascinating. Readers do not want to hear about our good behavior, our perfect marriages, our happy families. Yawn. Always remember: you are a character in a book and characters are only as captivating as their most disgusting habit, most shameful secret, or deepest fear. Your job is to be interesting.
Wherever we sense a warning—“Beware of the edge”—that’s where our shadow lives. Each of us has our own edge. Only we know where that edge is.
To find your edge, you may want to look at your internal taboos and delve into unexplained feelings such as:
“I hate my father.”
“‘I can’t remember anything about my childhood.”
“Gay people disgust me.”
“I hate my own child.”
“I get jealous when my husband shows affection to my daughter.”
“I find pornography degrading, but I’m also turned on by it.”
“I’m attracted to men who are abusive.”
Essential to this exploration is that we must suspend judgment of ourselves. We’re simply exploring an aspect of who we are out of curiosity in the service of understanding ourselves more fully.
Like the earth is torn
you are torn.
Like it is broken
so are you.
To do no harm
is to
shrink from shadow
as if it weren’t
in you,
from you,
like the outbreath
In writing your story, find your shadows. Write about what you don’t want to understand and what you’re afraid of understanding. Explore forbidden thoughts such as:
feeling you may have married the wrong person;
wanting to run away;
desiring sex with someone of the same sex as you if you identify as heterosexual or with someone of the opposite sex if your primary preference is same-sex;
wondering what it would feel like to kill someone;
wanting to have sex with someone half (or double) your age;
feeling your children would be better off without you;
fantasizing about killing yourself;
wanting to have sex with your best-friend’s spouse or partner;
having a favorite child; or
wondering whether you’re capable of murder.
Ask yourself the question you don’t want to know the answer to.
Write about the thing you think you CANNOT write. Enter that forest with curiosity and see if you too can develop a liking for shadows. They are rich territory for our writing.
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Tribe
There are a thousand trails inward. Any number of paths that lead to the overwhelming questions every human life must answer: Who am I? Where did I come from? And why am I here?
Another trigger for self-inquiry is the investigation of the kinship networks, extended families, histories, religions, ethnic groups, and cultures that have shaped us. As our individual identities begin to emerge, we often bash up against the norms and expectations of these powerful institutions that bear down on us like existential gravity. This sets up a fascinating and fruitful tension for us to explore our emerging consciousness. Who am I in relation to the group? Where does the family end and I begin? Who am I allowed to become? What am I allowed to believe?
History is our backstory. All of us are entangled in the collective stories of culture, family, and tradition that precede us. Our job is to disentangle ourselves and retell the story of who we are in relation to the past. Old photographs, documents, stories, and objects might pique our curiosity and trigger an exploration.
A writer I mentor became interested in writing her family’s story because of an engraved silver tea service she inherited. She began to investigate its significance and so found a way into her memoir.
In writing When Hungry, Eat, I began to wonder why my grandfather came to South Africa from Eastern Europe. I discovered ancestors on my mother’s side who originally came from Australia (and emigrated to South Africa) and are buried in Melbourne. Eight years later, I received an e-mail from a distant relative in Canada who, while doing a random Google search, chanced upon my book, in which I name them. Through writing my memoir, I discovered family that had been lost through emigration.
If a tribal, religious, national, or cultural identity feels strong to you—either positively or negatively—it’s worth investigating and looking for gaps, stories, missing links, and patterns that have made you who you are. How have these group identities impacted you, and how do they continue to influence who you are?
You can write about:
the stories that make up your religious, ethnic, family, or tribal histories;
what you need to make visible in your own history;
what you need to remember and what you need to forget;
how your gender, race, age, sexual orientation, or religion defines your identity;
how women are (or were) treated in your family, religion, or tribe;
how intermarriage or homosexuality are regarded in these groups;
traditional or religious messages that were handed down to you;
guilt that was passed on;
who wielded power in your family;