A Life is Worth More than 1500 Words

I really hate it when I'm asked to tell "my story" in 1500 words or less. It's not enough to give them any more than the white trash melodrama--and I know *that* story always leads to stereotypes that are incredibly inaccurate and cruel.

Blogging about "my story," however, allows me to parse it out in digestible chunks. It doesn't have to be a 1500-word narrative written over a couple of days that ends up as encapsulated misery.

By blogging, I don't have to sound triumphant or have some sort of happy-ending resolution that makes me socially acceptable. I don't have to be some sort of paragon or role model.

I don't have to risk the judgments or projections of others. I don't have to risk anger at myself either.

Back in college, I enrolled in a writing class that was conducted by a wonderful woman who had written several memoirs about her southern upbringing. I really wanted to write for this woman, to get feedback from her on my writing, which I never understood to be of any particular literary value.

Our first assignment was to introduce ourselves to the class by writing about our lives.

I didn't know where to start. How do you start when the star of it all was pretty darned ugly?

After a couple of days trying to work on the assignment, I found myself getting so bloody angry (really, bloody--I see red sometimes) because I didn't want to tell anyone about myself all in one shot like that. I felt it was no one's business--not even the business of the esteemed memoirist whose approval I was seeking.

There are too many things in my white trash melodrama that are too bloody well embarrassing to tell in a single 1500 word essay to a group of politely smiling strangers. I feel it is an inappropriate thing to tell those gory details all in one fell swoop, to a group of people who I'd like to see me in a good light, who I do not want to project on to me the label of triumphant victim.

I feel this way because most people don't have the kind of horrid upbringing I had and that it kind of overwhelms them to hear me talk about it.

And, unfortunately, there's no way to side-step those things about me because they are what makes me who I am--but they certainly are not the only things that make me who I am.

Awhile back, I learned a lesson about writing about one's sex life. People love to read about other's sex lives. They love the erotica and the emotions. But they really don't like face to face meetings with the person who has written the sex life that has moved them so very much.

They're embarrassed because they're not supposed to know those intimate things about another person--but it's more than that. It's also about shattering an image of who they believe you are to them. The writer becomes a character and, in some instances a fantasy figure. When fantasy crosses over into reality, the one with the fantasy loses power over the imagining, and there is always disappointment.

And so, I find that to reveal too much of my white trash melodrama of a childhood in one sitting is not just to embarrass another person with TMI (Too Much Information) but it also sets a baseline for who I will be within their Personal Comfort Zone. They can create a particular box for me as a particular kind of Tragic Personage--they can make sense of me and alleviate the anxiety of their own embarrassment over my situation.

When I found myself throwing a book and wanting to snap a pencil over the college writing assignment, I knew not only the class, but the major was not for me.

That was the time I decided to declare a religion major. Religion gave me a vehicle to transcend any storytelling that bordered on the too personal. It rarely asked for the personal in a way that would compel me to reveal what I did not want to reveal. When it asked anything personal, it was in a way that, for me, amounted to descriptions of isolated life instances of the miraculous.

In the study of religion, I did not have to wallow in the filth of what happened to me as a kid. To think and write about religious material was more constructive, and I could be the person I always wanted to be--very smart, very compassionate, very much me in the moment, united with the higher ideals of human existence, and unencumbered by all that dysfunctional dross.

I could get beyond all of the mess to a place that felt like a small slice of nirvana.

Yet I come back to the "your story" stuff because I'm finding that people often are asking me about how I got Here, or what made me do the things I've done...and I simply do not want to give my Inspirational Story. I am not comfortable with the kind of box that ends up constructed from that 1500-word white trash melodrama. I feel that if I tell the world about it in fits and starts--as I do sometimes in blogging--with lots of other stories in between, I am giving a fuller picture of me and of my life. It is in all the different stories of my interactions with people, my thoughts about this or that, my reactions to things, that keep me from being defined by my tale of woe.

When people see the bigger picture, they are less likely to judge--and more likely, when they hear the garbage, to say "oh, that's just part and parcel of everything else that makes that person a human being."

When we read only the Inspiration, we put the person above us. When we read only the white trash melodrama, we put the person below us. It is only by reading different kinds of stories--the good, the bad, the tragic, the triumphant--that we know the person who tells these tales to be just like us.