Your Story Matters: Finding, Writing, and Living the Truth of Your Life

INTRODUCTION

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

MAYA ANGELOU

I AM STANDING in front of a hundred women in a conference room in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, and I am not in good shape. I am jet-lagged after thirty-some hours of traveling. My brain is full of wool stuffing. My eyes are squinting, trying to peer through it. I am wearing black suede loafers, black slacks, and a burgundy blouse, but my clothes are not lending me any confidence today. I have taught in other countries through translators before, but I’ve never taught a writing seminar through a translator. And I know that everything I will say to these women will be utterly new; this is an oral culture, not a literary culture. Here, they believe that only important people write stories and books. I am nervous.

The women sit at desks with notebooks in front of them. I’ve met a few of them already at another seminar the night before: Oodmaa, Badmaa, Becca, Battsetseg, Erka. They range in age from nineteen to seventy-five, all with silken black hair, dark eyes, and busy, difficult lives. Some have driven in from the countryside, hours away. Some have come on early-morning buses. Some have braved the city traffic, a snarl of vehicles so dense that you’re only allowed to drive certain days.

These women are sheepherders, pastors’ wives, doctors, university students, mothers, tour guides, accountants. One woman is a professional driver for the government; some of them were once nomads and just moved to the city. A few of their husbands once lived in the underground sewers, alcoholics trying to survive the Mongolian winters next to the warm water pipes under the city. And some of these women are pastors. One of them has started two churches, one in a yurt outside the city, where I would go to preach that Sunday.

They’re enrolled in a two-year school of ministry. And today, they are here for a full day of instruction in writing and sharing their own stories.

Because I am so tired, I am in overdrive. I speak with passion, I raise my hands in the air, halting every sentence or two for Chinzurig, the translator, to speak. I hold my position and my expression while my words are translated. I’ve come all this way, and I have so much to give them! The women sit with heads bent, taking detailed notes. I hardly see their faces.

Suddenly the director of the school of ministry, who is sitting against the wall, jumps to her feet and interrupts me mid-sentence: Leslie! Could you stop a minute?

I startle. I’ve been interrupted before, even heckled (in Hollywood, while receiving an obscure award and giving thanks to God!), but not like this. I look at her askance, mentally putting my hands on my hips but trying to look unfazed, professional.

Janice smiles sweetly at me. I’m sensing that the women here don’t feel worthy to tell their stories. They don’t feel like their stories matter. What can you say about that?

I already spoke to this. Didn’t Janice hear me? I turn impatiently and watch the women as Chinzurig speaks her words in Mongolian. They are looking at me with wide eyes, as if someone has just spilled their deepest secret and they wonder what I will do with it. I see it then. I see the doubt. I see the glaze over their eyes and their hands resting now from too many notes, too much information. I see them watching me as a white American woman, thinking of me as someone famous from a rich country far away, someone not at all like them.

My chest falls. Of course. They don’t know who I am. I put down my notes, come out from behind the music stand that was my podium. I stand there before them with my arms hanging down. How do I tell them about this girl in the woods, one of six kids, who had nothing anyone wanted? I wore faded, homemade, hand-me-down dresses. I had four pairs of holey underwear to my name. Our food was doled out to our plates, and there was never any more. I had stringy hair because we washed our hair with soap—we couldn’t afford shampoo. My classmates often made fun of my clothes and appearance. I’ve spent fifteen years of my life changing diapers. Every summer I live on a wilderness island in Alaska without flushing toilets or a shower. I am not rich, fancy, or important.

How much of this do I say?

I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I ended like this: I was a nobody searching for God, for something real and true. And God found me. He left the ninety-nine sheep and came out into the woods, climbed that mountain, and found me and carried me home. I am the hundredth sheep. And you are the hundredth sheep as well. We were all of us lost, wandering, and God found us.

Tell me about that, I say to these women, who are now seeing me more clearly. Tell me that story.

Every one of them—Oodmaa, Badmaa, Becca, Battsetseg, Erka, the grandma in the front row, the doctor in the back row, the Japanese pastor—their eyes are bright and wet, and in minutes their heads are bent and they are writing furiously. They do not stop, even when I ask them to.

I watch, breathing deeply, the wool in my head slowly dissolving. How did I forget? How did I forget in a class about writing stories to tell my own story? No matter what country we live in, no matter our neighborhood, our politics, our religion, our age, no matter even our shared pursuit of God, we risk passing like strange ships in the long night. Time, busyness, the speed of life will keep us apart unless we braid word around word from our own passage, then toss it out, coiled, shimmering, toward the hands on the other deck open, waiting to catch, to coil and secure the two ships together, hull to hull. Don’t we all sail the same turbulent waters? Aren’t we longing to stop for a while, to not be alone on the high seas?

I’ve been laying down one word after another now for most of my life. And have been teaching others to do the same for three decades. The process we’ll enter in this book isn’t about becoming a writer, though some of you will become writers through it. It’s not about writing a bestseller, though that is also possible. No—this act of turning around to write into our lives is about recovering what’s been lost and discovering all that’s new. We know some of the truth of our story, but not all of it. Under our skin, a whirring, beating engine of a heart purrs and pumps us through our days, our years. And often we whirl so fast, our eyes are closed against the speed of it, the how of it, and especially the why of it. Every day we are different; the world awakens new, and the memories of what was and what we’ve been, and the discovery of who we are now, could all be lost. But we have this chance now to stop. We’re stopping to ask the questions we did not know to ask. We’re stopping to find the difficult and beautiful truths of our lives. And what a gift it will be, to send this awakening, these crafted and compelling words on to others, that they—and we—may not pilgrim alone.

That is what we’ll do in the pages ahead. I’ll lead you step-by-step in discovering and telling your own unique story—or someone else’s. And by the end of this first step in your writing journey, you will see what I have seen: that there is no part of human experience not worthy of attention, illumination, and restoration.

I’ll take you as well through the story of Story in my life and the unexpected ways writing into my life has changed my life. I was reminded that day in Ulaanbaatar that this process works best when we do it together. So as I invite your stories, I’ll share some of mine as well. Some of them are brand-new stories that I’ve just discovered and recovered in the writing of this book. They’re mostly happy stories, but there are a few crashes along the way, some hilarities, a few absurdities, and even a bit of tragedy and cautionary tale thrown in the mix. I want you to know I’m on this path of discovery with you.

What will happen as you work your way through these pages? I can tell you what I’ve seen again and again, in prisons, churches, living rooms, classrooms, conferences, around the US, in Mongolia, Canada, South Africa, Slovakia, France. Everyday people like you and me have discovered that writing the truest words we can find from our lives can order our chaotic present, help us make sense of a jumbled past, move us from grief to hope. Writing can bring healing to wounds; it can even open the door for reconciliation and forgiveness. Learning to tell a truer story will help us live a better story.

I know this sounds like overspeak. I know some of you are skeptics. After all, we live in an Age of Story, and the stories that saturate our culture are not always benign. Since the rise of postmodernism, many have traded belief in knowable objective Truths with belief in our own personal stories and truths. Your truth and my truth and my story can be assertions of our own unquestioned perceptions. More recently, Story has even been co-opted as a sales strategy. Every business, product, and entity—from the political candidate running for office, to the tire shop down the street, to the box of oatmeal on your breakfast table—regales you with their story using story branding. So caution makes sense. But we can believe in the importance and power of personal stories without disavowing grander truths.

In fact, this is the greatest power of Story: to illuminate and reveal larger spiritual truths in ways that mere facts can’t quite do. Even in decades past, when our culture subscribed to facts and the knowability of truth, God’s Word still spoke mostly through story. This Age of Story is an opportunity, then, not a crisis. Few people are interested in theological arguments. Even fewer will listen to religious clichés. But they’ll still listen to a good story well told. As a friend recently said, Most of my children and my grandchildren have walked away from the church. They won’t listen to a sermon. But maybe they’ll hear my story. Yes, I say to him, to you, to myself. Tell them a true story. Tell them a better story than they’ve heard.

Some of you are ready! Some of you are waiting impatiently to dive into the rhythm and rhyme of this process. You’ve adopted two special-needs children from Russia. You’re a mother, alone, raising your daughter in a wheelchair. You’re capturing your childhood on the Kansan prairie. You’re walking with your son out of addiction. You’re recovering your father’s stories from Vietnam. Whatever your story is, you know it’s waiting to find its shape and voice on the page.

Some of you have lived awhile, and your children and grandchildren don’t know half of your life. They don’t know what you came from. They don’t know what you endured, or the ways God showed up. Or the ways you think he didn’t. (My father had only one story to tell of his time serving in the infantry in World War II. He was riding a tank in Germany. They stopped for a break. He perched on the outside of the tank while the others took shelter in a barn. Suddenly he had the distinct urge to get off the tank. As soon as he approached the barn, a shell exploded right where he had been sitting. Don’t you think maybe that was God who nudged you off the tank and saved you? I asked my agnostic father. He shrugged. Maybe.)

You want them to know because some of these events have touched them, too, though they don’t know it. They haven’t been ready to listen, or you haven’t been able to say the words out loud. But you can write these words on the page. Or perhaps you are writing someone else’s story. My friend Joy is writing her mother-in-law’s story of living in France through World War II. Whether it’s your own story or someone else’s, you want to learn to craft a narrative that can belong to your whole family.

Maybe you have no idea what your story is, and you aren’t sure you want to take the time to find out. I get it. I was almost forty when I began to write about my life, and I was barely able to describe the hundred coexistent pieces, let alone imagine a single story from their frayed ends. That summer, I wandered the vales of my Alaskan island, muttering to myself, "What is my story?" And you know, I found it. Or it found me. Those words turned an isolated island into home. They turned a victim into a survivor. Those words carved and shaped an identity and belonging I didn’t know was mine to claim. My story was both harder and better than I knew. Yours will be the same.

Some of you are agnostics. You’re not sure you believe in words, and maybe not in God, the so-called maker of words. So you find this whole endeavor suspect. Of course, and bless you. The world—and Christian culture—provides way too many reasons to be skeptical. But I’m going to ask for a little willing suspension of disbelief, as Samuel Coleridge advised,[1] which is to say, I’m asking you to ditch your doubt for just a few chapters and give it a whirl. I’m not here to prescribe content; I’m here to walk beside you, to equip you to write your stories, whatever they are, whether they’re full of faith, doubt, anger, or disbelief.

If you are reading this book alone, I hope these pages will feel like your own personal classroom. Writing can be exhilarating and yet also lonely at times. We’re more than enough, you and I and the others whose stories and experiences I have included in these pages. You can indeed work through this book and write stunning stories on your own. But I have to tell you, even more is possible. Over the decades, I’ve been astonished at what happens when people gather to write and tell their stories together. Writing in community, with a tangible, empathetic audience, often sparks stories that are rich in details, emotions, and insights. More than this, I’ve seen lifelong friendships form around this shared endeavor. Before you begin, as you think about whether to move through this book solo, with a few friends, or with a class, glance ahead to chapter 4: Your Stories Together. It will give you a glimpse of how to gather people together and what can happen when people share their voices and their work.

No matter how or why you’ve come to this book, or what stories you’re hoping to unearth, or whether you come to these pages alone or in a class, we’re going to learn together how to discover and communicate the truth of our lives with beauty and clarity. In some ways, it will be simple. I’ll lay it out straight and easy, no matter if you’re a first-time writer or you’re fifty years in. At the end of every chapter, I’ll walk you through writing prompts and assignments, with practical steps for discovering and writing your story. We’ll also be joined by writers like you, mostly from my classes, bravely sharing their life stories to inspire our own.

But in other ways, this journey won’t be simple. Because the reality that opens up before us, in the midst of the details and memories of our lives, is always full of mystery and wonder. So I must warn you: This work is utterly addictive. Once you start, such clarity, discovery, and consolations will come to you that you will not want to stop. You’ll realize that pursuing your story is also a pursuit of meaning in this wearisome life. Which means it’s also a search for magic, for divine surprise, perhaps even a glimpse of God.

Why does this practice of unearthing the truth of our stories matter so much? Why am I spending so much of my life investing in others’ words? I’ve seen what happens when we bury our past, when we refuse to look behind, at either the tragedies or the joys or any of the million little moments that make up our lives. I’ve seen in my own family all that’s lost—to all of us. And I’ve seen what happens when we dare to overcome the silence. The morning I am writing this, I got an unexpected email. It was from Carrie, a quiet, unassuming woman who came to a workshop four years ago and insisted she could not write; she had nothing to tell. She sent a story, the first I’d read from her. It was about her brother, his near-fatal plunge over a waterfall, how her mother abandoned her and her siblings when she was thirteen and she had to become the mother. How later she joined her brother on his long-distance trucking routes before his dementia set in, damage from the fall. How she came to understand and reconcile with her mother decades later. Her story was so full of pain, love, and breathtaking details, it made me cry. Carrie wrote, I think I have many more stories I must tell.

Your story matters. Let me help you find and tell the truth of your story. A compelling story. A crafted story. A healing story. A bigger story. And in the finding and telling of this story, I promise you’ll live it too.

[1] Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 6.

CHAPTER ONE

YOUR BIGGER STORY

Witnessing

In this one book are the two most interesting personalities in the whole world—God and yourself. The Bible is the story of God and man, a love story in which you and I must write our own ending, our unfinished autobiography of the creature and the Creator.

FULTON OURSLER,

IN THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF BOOKS

WHEN I ENTERED ninth grade, my sister and I were bused from our village school to Belmont High, a regional high school two towns away. This was the year I leapt the fence. I was tired of being the good girl, virtually the only one in my class who paid attention, who sympathized with the teachers, who tried to help hold chaos at bay. The first-through-eighth-grade elementary school we attended in this New Hampshire village was a war zone, where second graders threw ice balls at the teachers and hit them. Where my classmates ridiculed the teachers to their faces. Where the