When the story ought to be told

A few years back I had a fight on social media - I mean, what else is social media for? I had made the mistake of posting a Maya Angelou quote, and a guy I know, was so pissed off at it he decided to point out I was a jerk.

(Don’t worry, I was fine. The guy is a bit of a belligerent, self-hating, kind of bloke who self-soothes by pointing out his own and other people’s faults. And also I am perfectly comfortable in the knowledge I am periodically a jerk.)

The offending quote was this:

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Maya Angelou

This guy pointed out that having your legs blown off, or being diagnosed with some incurable disease was undoubtedly a lot more painful. To which I replied, that though those things were undeniably awful, not being able to talk or tell anybody about it, or for nobody to know or care, undoubtedly makes any situation a bit more painful.

I considered arguing my point by throwing in a bit of Seneca or quoting Rumi or something, but everyone knows that if you have to quote a philosopher or throw in a bit of poetry to win an argument, you are a complete jerk. So, in the end, we just agreed to disagree.

And I reckon that was the best outcome for both of us. He undoubtedly felt some temporary relief at being able to point out why I was wrong. Whereas, I figured that as he continually seemed to be miserable, rather than just open his mouth and gain some relief by explaining why he felt so miserable, kind of proved my initial point.

The telling of story is important.

I was really really young when I first worked that out. My mum would go crazy if anybody put a new pair of shoes on top of the dining table. She literary yelled. But it wasn’t until she told me the story that in the old days, when someone died, they would be laid out on top of the dining table for the wake. And they would be dressed in their best clothes and their best shoes. It was considered very bad luck to put new shoes on the table, because it implied that those would be the ones you would die in. Once she told me that. I understood her. That one little story there made all the difference between the perception of lunacy or sanity.

I don’t know that I particularly agreed with the superstition, but I still don’t put new shoes on the dining table, and after I told them why, nobody in this house does either.

As soon as I could read, storybooks became my thing. If ever I was sent to tidy my room, I’d rearrange the books in my wee white Formica bookcase - picturing myself in some great hall of the British Library - while the rest of my bedroom looked like a dumpster had exploded.

I used to organize and re-organize books on my bookshelf. I don't know why I did, because a whole load of the stories I read at the time were kind of the same. (What is it about fairy stories where females have to be either innocent young pretty creatures whose problems would be entirely solved if they found a husband, or old wicked bitches who kill everybody? Honestly, it's like the Republican party manifesto.)

In pretty much all of the stories I read the structure was similar: Someone did something. The outcome was different from how they expected. So they did something else to try and resolve the initial problem. Then that send them on an adventure during which they learned a lesson about life. The end. It didn’t really matter if the leading character was a spaceman or a mouse.

Maybe because they were so similar, I started to see structure: Something happened and something was learned. And yes, that is a basic skeleton structure for pretty much all stories:

What I worked out around the same time though was tha- book stories and people telling their stories weren't at all the same. Because the stories coming from people very rarely started at the beginning. They usually started in the middle or at the end. Sometimes they’d only tell you part of a story and you’d be left to make up all the other parts yourself. And most people devalued their stories so much they’d never consider telling anybody about them, let alone go to the bother of putting them in an actual book.

When I was around 10, there was some news item about Bible John on the radio. For any of you who didn’t live in Scotland in the 1970s, (where were you?) Bible John was a Scottish serial killer who committed murders in Glasgow in the late 1960s. He was never caught and his identity still remains a mystery.

Anyhow, there was something about him on the radio, and I remember my Mum commenting, completely off-hand, while doing the ironing, that she thought he might have worked beside him. I was, as you might have expected, interested to hear more. So I asked her what she meant.

She said she used to work beside this guy called John who was a bit of a Bible thumper. He looked a little like the Bible John photo-fit, and he was a wee bit gingery and he was definitely a bit ‘off’. She said she never really thought about it, but it was only after he’d moved to Australia and the murders suddenly stopped, that she wondered if it might have been him.

I asked her if she’d ever told anyone and she told me not to be daft. Of course she’d never told anyone, because what if she was wrong, and in real life people don't work beside murderers.

Truthfully, she didn’t carry the “agony of bearing an untold story” about it. But she did spend the rest of her life periodically wondering. As have I. I wish I’d been old enough to ask what made him a bit ‘off”. I wish I’d been smart enough to ask her what it felt like to be a young woman in Glasgow at that time.

The untold story is not just an issue for the would-be teller, you see, but for the would-be hearers too. The problem with the untold story is that it’s not forgotten. It just stays unresolved.

My Great Aunt was on a boat that was torpedoed during the Second World War. She survived but her young daughter was lost at sea and never found. It was an awful story very rarely talked about within the family.

One night, I'd been drinking a wee spot of sherry with her and opened the subject. She was getting on in years and found it easier to talk. She said that when the war ended and her husband was liberated from a prison camp, she’d met him at the train station and they hugged right there on the platform. The last time she had seen him, their daughter had been alive, so I asked her how what did they say. She said they just never talked about it. Ever. So much was left unsaid. The untold story indeed.

I started teaching people how to tell stories, sort of by mistake, a few years ago. I was telling stories with The Moth and my fantastic friend, Meg, who's a director there, suggested I had a knack for teaching, and helped me construct my first class syllabus.

Encouraged by the loveliest man called, Sal Romeo, I set up a class in a theatre here in LA, and people (many of whom I'd never met before) would come into class with maybe a bit of a story. Occasionally this story had a beginning, but more often they had just a general middle, or maybe only the absolute end.

I’d teach four, three-hour sessions, and then on the fifth week, every student would tell a 10-minute story about themselves, without notes or a cheat sheet, to a usually packed-out theatre.

I don’t think I’ve ever done anything, work-wise, that felt so much like I was meant to be doing it, and I learned so much about… well everything really. I learned why you might find yourself constructing neon lights, or how you might stand guard outside Guantanamo. I know that real people actually do work and sometimes live next to murderers. Mostly, I learned though that as much as I think I know about people, I will never fail to be surprised by the real stories from people’s lives. And that there are more stories walking inside human form than there will ever be in paper form in the largest libraries on earth.

And I knew that even when I stopped teaching class - because every chapter eventually has to end - I’d still work with people on their stories in one way or another. And I do.

This week I went to the first screening of a client of mine, who has just done a TEDx in Fargo. She told her own unique story, without notes or cheat sheets, in front of a couple of thousand people. And she was brilliant!

I won't bother telling you the plot, as it's much better you hear it from her herself, (I will post a link to it in the comments as soon as it goes live).

She told it perfectly. The viewers were wrapt, even here in cynical old LA. Even just watching her on a large screen. The audience were silent. Enthralled. There were even a couple of hearty laughs or two.

What she said matters. Her own individual story resonated with so many people who haven’t had her specific experience at all. We all have a burden we carry. When someone tells the truth of what they know, it helps to lift the weight of our own. Sometimes the clearest way to really see the world is through someone else’s eyes.

You know, I tend not to have fights on social media now because well… I’m a bit longer in the tooth, and also it feels too much like some subplot from the movie Gladiator: Some spineless, Tin Pot Emperor who never gets his hands dirty sets up a social media arena where he can enjoy the entertainment of watching human beings, tear the shit off one another in the hope it might bring them safety.

Instead when someone writes something ridiculous and blatantly inflammatory, I consider the Maya Angelou quote, and I think to myself, “Shit, the untold story that ignorant douchebag is bearing, certainly has to be a doozy.”

And then I shrug, and move on.

xo

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