Why we tell our stories

and why I've stopped running away

Hanging from the corner of an old brick building there’s a string of lights surrounded by darkness in the distance, and while I stare at those lights from my table at this coffee shop, chewing bites of freshly baked spinach feta bread and sipping mint tea, a heaviness settles on my chest and I think about why it isn’t enough to write. I think about how words can’t possibly convey the enormity of a feeling, how nothing I could ever write would help this life make sense.

Then I think of a poem by Sean Thomas Dougherty that says:

“Why Bother? Because right now, there is someone out there with a wound in the exact shape of your words.” 

I think about all of the books and poems and vulnerable instagram captions that saved me. All of the words that couldn’t solve anything other than to make me less alone, which it turns out was the only thing I needed at all.

You see, I’ve been writing a memoir. It’s terribly disorganized and all broken into sort-of chapters without any order. And it’s difficult to sit and write in it too often solely because it gets so heavy. But I’m pushing through the heavy because it’s not lost on me that oftentimes the most needed things are heavy, and ignoring that will only make life even heavier somehow. 

Just like my once broken wrist aches whenever a storm is on the way, my soul has been stirring lately, an internal omen of an inevitable need to put my stories into the world. But my inner wall of resistance is so strong when I try to write my stories, and it’s not lost on me that my natural trauma-based reaction is to avoid that wall, to run away from it, to turn my back and pretend it’s not there. That’s what I do. That’s what I’ve always done.

It’s what I did in the ninth grade when I picked up the downstairs landline telephone to call a friend and instead heard my dad’s voice on the line from upstairs whispering about love with a woman who wasn’t my mom. After sobbing silently from the cold black tiles of our bathroom floor, I put on a mask of pretending all was well and wore it while my dad drove me to my math tutoring that night, the next morning after telling my mom what I’d heard and then running out the door to the bus stop for school, weeks later when I outwardly accepted an apology that inwardly I didn’t want to accept at all.

As though pretending I could still be a normal carefree teenager would keep my family from falling apart.

It’s what I did at twenty-two when I had my first unrequited love, a dramatic and passionate love that clouded the windows with lies and echoed the halls with hollow promises until one night, after years of loving this unstable boy, I decided it was time to love myself more. With tear stained cheeks I stood on a metal bridge in the middle of the night and, with only the stars as my witness, exasperatedly threw my phone into the rushing waters of the river below me. 

As though never seeing his name in my phone again would suddenly restore my broken heart.

It was what I did seven years ago, in the wake of utter devastation following the unexpected death of my twenty-six year old brother. I stumbled about life through a thick cloud of lonely depression beneath another layer I had added to the mask I already wore well, and when my closest friends didn’t know what to do with my pit of grief I began having nightmares of screaming at them and begging them for help. But instead of telling them, I used my pain as a match and my anger as gasoline and I lit fire to the bridges between us without offering any explanation.

As though breaking ties with my friends would make it easier to survive this new world I lived in without my brother in it.

It was what I did one year ago while standing in a stuffy hospital room watching my Dad take his last breath. When the grim sight of his frail yellow-skinned body gasping for air and fighting to stay here with us became unbearable I suddenly let go of his hand and ran to the door.

As though turning my back would stop this from being real.

While looking for old pictures of my Dad to give to the funeral director for the video that would play in the background while we stood hollow and empty and listening to “I’m so sorry for your loss” over and over again, I stumbled on a life sketch that my great grandmother had written about her life. I sat on the floor of my bedroom that night completely captivated as page after page she described in great detail her memories of her own mother who she had lost suddenly and tragically when she was only a teenager.

While I consumed her words, this raw story of her life, I realized that this was a woman whom I had never known in this world and yet suddenly, there she was. After well over a hundred years of being gone it was as though by reading her story I had brought her back to life, and more than that, as though I had known her all along.

That’s when I knew - She is me.

I am her, because one day I will be her.

One day I will be running through the veins of my posterity. Will I give them a chance to bring me back to life? Will my stories be read and seen and known, even loved?

And so, I have been an avoider. I throw phones in rivers and I ignore black hole problems and I physically run from broken homes and hospital rooms.

But not this time.

Not my memoir.

Here, I write freely. Here, I will share my stories because someone might have that wound in the very shape of my words.

Welcome to my new space.

And truly, thank you for being here.