Creating the Webbd Wheel: True Stories
In which we understand it's not all about us ...
Tell me a true story. Tell me one true thing about the shape of your soul. Tell me what makes you cry. Tell me what makes you laugh. Tell me your deepest shame. Tell me your foulest fear.
Tell me something real about you.
Let me know you. Allow yourself to be seen, just for a moment.
Share yourself with me.
Let me share myself with you.
The simple need to connect with others is one of our most powerful drives as humans. Why is it so impossibly difficult?
Perhaps we don’t recognize what’s true about our own stories. Perhaps we refuse to reveal it. Maybe we don’t trust enough to reveal ourselves, or our vulnerability is not reciprocated, or we’ve learned it’s never safe to be honest.
Maybe the people with whom we want to share ourselves are not interested in knowing us or being known.
Some people tell all kinds of entertaining, shiny stories about themselves, but they’re not real. They’re not true. Others can only tell a page or two of their story, dark pages about being a victim or devastating wounds.
True connection is so often refused. We reach out a hand and no one grasps it. Some people spit on it.
Part of what makes me a writer is the pleasure of creating characters and telling their stories; connecting those stories to make bigger ones. When I write my fiction, I can tell the whole story. Nothing is hidden.
Traditionally, family systems were glued together with stories about roots, ancestors, and ethnic and cultural history. The stories were passed down to each generation in turn.
In today’s world, families take a variety of shapes; the old familiar family structure has expanded and changed. Many people don’t have a family elder in their lives, a keeper and teller of stories. Some family systems rewrite and sanitize their stories out of shame or guilt.
The truth is obscured, lost, or discarded. Sometimes we simply refuse to believe the truth. Our family stories lose their wisdom and power. No real understanding of those who came before us and what they learned, the mistakes they made, their dreams, hopes, and fears, is possible.
We can’t connect with our roots.
Morfran’s grandfather connects him to his biological parents and his parents’ parents with true stories about real, fallible people with strengths and weaknesses. He allows Morfran to view his parents as complicated individuals in their own right, with stories about more than his birth.
He both connects and sets Morfran free with the truth, and Morfran is able to grasp what every healthy adult must grasp: our parents and children are not one-dimensional paper dolls for us to play with. They’re complex individuals with thoughts, feelings, memories, scars, and wounds, just as we are. They are much more than just mother, father, son or daughter. We are or were no more than characters in the story of their lives, as they are characters in the stories of our lives. Our stories are not all about them.
Their stories are not all about us.
(This essay was published with post #21 of The Hanged Man.)