“We are shaped by our stories. And these stories, or narratives, are running (and often ruining) our lives.”
James Bryan Smith
It was the kind of day that Bostonians live for. The emerald hues of freshly budded trees overthrowing the monotone shades that had dominated the landscape’s palette for months on end in an overnight transfer of power. I tilted my head back, savoring the sensation of the sun’s warmth upon my face, each ray dropping like an optimistic note in an ode to spring’s long-awaited victory over winter. At the intersection to my right, I noticed that the snowdrift that had accumulated into an icy monument to the previous season’s storms, had begun to transform into a stream running alongside the curb in pursuit of the nearby Charles River. Meanwhile, the upbeat tenor of foot traffic on the adjacent sidewalk seemed to suggest that many of the people in town had followed the water’s lead, allowing the warmth of the day to compel them to break out of their offices in droves in search of a place to bask in the day’s glory outdoors.
Everything was waking up, or so it seemed, the trees, the ice, the birds, even the people. And I felt myself awakening along with them. Or at the very least I was rolling over and rubbing my eyes in groggy recognition of a potential bout of unconsciousness that I had only just been made aware of. Though everything was still too blurry for me to make out where the line between illusion and reality really formed.
It was almost as if the rays of an external source of warmth had landed on things that I had once considered permanent, remnants of prior storms that had accumulated into frozen monuments around me, and that warmth had created this sense of movement, sloughing off the outer edges of those mounds, and prompting me to consider what I would do in response. Would I remain fixed and frozen where I was? Or would I follow those freshly melted bits that had begun to take on a different, and almost unrecognizable form as they flowed towards an unknown destination in the distance?
Cars roared into the opening of the tunnel beneath me as I hopped over another snow stream and climbed up onto the curb. As I stepped over the threshold of the bar where I worked, I played the conversation that I had just had with my professor over again in my head, wondering about the words she had used to describe me and my work. Was I really insightful? Was my writing really compelling? Did I really have potential? Or had she just mistaken me for someone else? Perhaps she just didn’t know me well enough to see the truth.
But I knew the truth. I knew the words that had been spoken over me ever since I was a little girl. Words that had been corroborated countless times by teachers, other adults, and my peers. I knew that I wasn’t one of the smart ones, I was a “sometimes” and a “somewhat” in a sea of “always” and “excellents.” A mix of B’s and C’s in a town full of straight A’s. Graduating by a nose while many of my classmates prepared to pursue Ivy League educations. And every time that I had tried to dip my toes in the waters of academic achievement, daring to believe that I had something important to say, I had either tripped on my own, or been taken out at the knees and reminded, as one so-called friend confided after my high school boyfriend left for Harvard, that I was just a pretty girl. And no one takes the pretty girls too seriously, at least not long term, and so it would probably best for everyone if I learned to live with lowered expectations, and just be the girl I really was.
To be fair, there had been other stories. Other words spoken over my life by my family, my friends, my coaches, and people in our church. But that’s the strange thing about stories, we never really notice when we begin sifting through the words that we are told, and deciding which are true and which are false, that we are actually forming the plotline of our existence. It’s just something that we all do. We are, as my professor James Bryan Smith would say, narrative creatures. We live out of and then into the stories that we believe, regardless of whether or not there is an ounce of truth in them at all. We do this with ourselves, with each other, and even with the stories that we believe about God. And those stories end up shaping us into the people we will then become. Be that frozen mounds of old storms or streams of living water.
On that spring afternoon I had been encased in my own little ice cap for years, and familiarity alone had me believing that it was nearest that I had come to reality and truth. But something deep, and almost inaccessible, within me had begun to resist it. In the silence of the university library, in the back row of lecture halls, in the still hours spent researching and writing papers. Another side of me had stood back up, brushed herself off, and she longed to be let out again. And somehow this professor seemed to have the capacity to see the person that I only allowed myself to be in the quiet, secluded corners of sheltered solitude, and the warmth of her words had melted the outer edges of that thick exterior where I hid that part of myself from the world.
Thoughts of melting and moving and waking still swirled in my head as I had made my way through the bar, beyond the large dining room that was scarcely populated by a few early diners, and then swung open the doors leading to the kitchen in the back. As I turned the corner, I caught the eye of my boss who had just spun around at the sound of the door. She squinted at me for a second, furrowing her brow in a look of confused disgust, and then followed with a swift question that was really more of a declaration, “what’s wrong with your face?”
The only thing wrong with my face that day was that I hadn’t put any make up on it. Because something about the carefully crafted exterior that I had learned to display before the world seemed to be in conflict with the person that I thought I might be beneath the surface. The thick black eye makeup, the bronzer, the foundation, concealer, and everything else, seemed to be hiding her somehow. And I wanted to come out from behind it all and try out another side of myself for a while. To see what it felt like to show up in the world as a young woman who believed that she was more than just a pretty girl. I wanted to test out those wobbly legs and figure out if I could walk my way into believing the words that professor had spoken over me. But I was swiftly met with the old lines of that other story.
“You look tired.” My boss had continued. “Do something about that before you start your shift.”
There was a certain narrowness about her in general. She was thin in both frame and feature, and even her tone had a way of delivering words and phrases that felt similarly confining. And as she spoke to me that day, I could feel how her message landed like ice to the professor’s warmth. She had no way of knowing it at the time, and I doubt that it was her intention to do this, but she was gathering up those freshly melted bits and contracting it back into a state of immobility again. Reshaping me into an old, and out of season monument in a world that had just revealed its capacity for movement.
To Be Continued….
Beautifully crafted words…no compromises! 💕