Anger in Personal Stories

I've been thinking of Alice's Restaurant lately, partly because of Thanksgiving. For a while now I've also been thinking about storytelling as a form of activism, kind of like folk music can be. Reading books about folk singers, pondering the messages I have to share and the ones the world needs to hear. And I've been thinking of how broken the world seems right now and wondering how I could possibly make a difference. It seems like your best chance of making a difference is by doing what you do. So I keep doing it.

I tell a lot of personal stories. The main challenge of personal stories is that if you haven't processed the story yourself, if you haven't come out the other side of it, you can't perform it. You can tell people about it, but it won't be a performance.

Stories about things that hurt are difficult. The good thing about performing them, though, is that making them into a performance helps you heal. It forces you to process the pain and see yourself as someone full of agency who has survived and can move on.

Alice's Restaurant has helped me with stories that make me angry. You can't perform a story purely from a place of anger. It sounds like a rant. You have to process. You have to come out the other side. You have to sing and find the humor. This way of dealing with stories that make me angry has helped me to create two of the stories I'm proudest of.

One is the story I call "John's LLM," about getting a certificate of good conduct before moving to England. I have to say that now I am not nearly as angry about everything I went through to get that certificate. With time, it has actually become funny. But I started creating the story as the situation was unfolding. It was clear at the time that it was completely absurd and I didn't want to lose any of the details. But I was angry. I was frustrated by the lack of information about how to undertake this process and about the incompetence and ignorance of multiple state employees I interacted with to get it done. It sounded like a rant when I first wrote it down. Until I remembered Alice's Restaurant. With a little humor and a song (the song is mostly for me because I've never performed it for anyone) it became a story.

The other is a work in progress: "The Ballad of the Birth Certificate." I am still angry that we were kicked out of the courthouse and threatened with physical violence while trying get Virginia's birth certificate, but I think it is an important story. It is important enough that I will find some way to be brave enough to perform it with all the musical components some day. (Performing music for people makes me much more nervous than speaking in front of people.) I don't think it's a good story without the music though. I don't think it's a good story without the fantastic and farcical suggestion that Virginia went on this adventure by herself. These things make it more than just an angry rant.

I think it is clear that the anger is still present in both stories. I'm not saying anger has to be edited out. It has to be processed, like pain. You have to come out the other side. For me, this is how I do it.

There are a lot of things that make me feel angry these days. And sad and afraid and, sometimes, like giving up on the whole human race and starting that Martian colony after all. But I think I'll stay here and sing and tell it all like it's a joke.

Spider Speculations

I've just finished reading Spider Speculations: A Physics and Biophysics of Storytelling by Jo Carson, loaned to me by a friend. I found myself whole heartedly accepting some of Jo's claims and viewing others with skepticism. But, regardless of my feelings on each topic all of it has been seeping into my subconscious and effecting me more than I had initially realized.

The theory I put forth in this blog, that the spoken word is closer to meaning, also has many connections to Jo's work.

First of all, she created plays for communities based on stories collected from members of those communities. Why even do this unless those stories need to be spoken aloud?

In her book, she talks about reframing, how the way you tell a story can change the way you think, and feel, about something that has happened. In one of her examples she tells the story of a woman who cares for her elderly stepmother who abused her when she was a child. The way Jo tells the story, it is not the woman who is stuck with her horrible stepmother, but the stepmother who is stuck entirely reliant on the woman she abused. How uncomfortable for her.

I have felt the power of reframing in my own life. I lay-led a service at Northwest UUC about telling your story. I talked about my own faith journey and about when I began to question Christianity. I talked about how I could have ended the story with feeling pushed away from Christianity by my friends. But instead I end the story with something one of my friend's fathers said to me about our lunchtime discussions. I was sure he thought I was a bad influence on his son, but he said, "No, I think you are good for him." I decided that if I was good for him, he was good for me. He and all my friends had done me a favor by making me think. (That's a better ending, and encourages a better attitude.)

That's reframing. It is powerful. And the reframe gains power every time you tell the story. Your brain starts associating that feeling with the events instead of what you might have felt at the time.

The other main thing I want to talk about is agency. Jo gave agency to the abused woman, mentioned above, by making it her choice to take care of the stepmother, not something she had to do.

I finally had a breakthrough with another personal reframe job (and a really difficult story to tell) by giving myself back some agency in a similar way. Instead of focusing on things that had been done to me in the story, I acknowledged that I made certain choices. Not always good choices. But because they were my choices, I could also choose something different for myself, which I eventually did.

Jo gives several other examples of agency, but what really struck me, from a sound and sense standpoint, was how pretending to have agency can make you actually have more agency. In one of her plays a more timid woman acted the part of a woman who had been very "brash." The actress began acting more like her character both on and off stage. In this case, acting, saying something, doing something can make it so. The sound becomes the sense.

For myself, as an introvert who could use a little more agency, this makes me consider doing more portrayals. Maybe of particularly agency-filled women. It occurs to me that the two women I already portray, Boudica and Mayhayley, do have a lot of agency. So far, I've chosen well.

And the final, kind of eery influence this book has had on me: I was filling out the google form for the Listen to Your Mother interview while tired and maybe slightly tipsy. When asked to tell a little more about myself I started with: "I think at my worst, I am difficult to work with, but at my best I can be an agent for positive change."

Then I stopped and looked at that sentence and thought, "Oh no! I'm a trickster!" Now I'm pondering the place in this world of a reluctant trickster. Or maybe I should drop the "reluctant" and keep trying for more agency.