Spinning this Shit Into Gold

Through Stories

“I’d take this shit I’d been handed, and I’d spin it into gold.” ~Glennon Doyle

Amen. That’s my goal.

Glennon Doyle’s book, Untamed, was released at the start of the pandemic and became a NY Times Best Seller. The famous line: “we can do hard things.”

But I bring her up because, like Anne Lamott and her candid narratives about her struggles with faith and alcoholism, I appreciate Glennon Doyle’s stories for her rawness, realness, her brutal honesty about how hard life (she calls it brutiful —a combination of brutal and beautiful) can be, using her own stories in life, before and after getting sober.

These are two writers whose voices and life experiences speak to me, maybe you have others. I hope you do.

But, I bring them up because I really want to emphasize here that:

For those of us who are struggling, suffering, and desperately grasping for a life line, hope, stories can help. Because we can know that others have experienced similar, or worse, things. But they have made it through; they have lived to tell the tale.

This is why after Jeremie’s death, I went frantically looking for others stories, from those who had made it through this—experiences of being in an immediate family where there were two suicides that had taken place. (I did the same after my mom died, devouring the Dead Mom’s Club and Wild. It’s how I cope.)

And I found none. (I’m not saying that they don’t exist, but I couldn’t find them—not a book, a movie, a podcast, a tv show.)

And then I realized something…this glaring, pressing call that has became increasingly more difficult to ignore. I didn’t want to and I’ve resisted for a long time, but I kept hearing this nagging voice that wouldn’t go away.

It told me: you’re going to need to write your stories.

I know that others address their grief and navigate through these hard experiences in life through other means, which is all well and good, but for me, someone who is a lover of literature and a believer in the power and potential of stories, that is what I need. That is what comforts me. They give me hope.

And I don’t think I am alone here.

Please understand that by stories, I don’t mean books. Or just books. Sure, stories can be written down. But stories can also be through movies or tv shows. They could be podcasts or TED talks or youtube clips. They could be stories shared at an AA or an NA meeting. They could be a relative or a friend sharing stories of their experiences and how they made it through a hard time in life. The stories could be shown through a poem or a song. And other ways.

Whichever way is your preference, stories are so powerful.

I also started to feel quite foolish, because I spend so much time emphasizing this to my students in my Cultural Rhetorics…that stories are theories, that they are powerful and life-changing and indigenous people have long recognized their power and potential. And I really believe this, to the core of my being.

The following are a few of my favorite quotes regarding the power of stories:

“The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” ~Thomas King, Cherokee writer

“Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.” ~Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigerian writer

Adiche also writes:

“I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.”

So, I believe that stories are so much more powerful than we realize and can even articulate in words. They can be magic and life-changing. They can help us transcend and grow and are the closest thing we can get to really glimpsing another’s reality.

Though I have faith and conviction, belief in the teachings and life of Christ. But stories may very well be my religion.

All of that to say, I felt foolish because I realized that I needed to heed my own advice.

I need to silence the ugly inner monologue that Elizabeth Gilbert writes about in Big Magic: A Guide to Creative Living…the same voice that Anne Lamott writes of in Bird by Bird, this voice of the oppressor, the perfectionist one, that shuts down my voice and the worth of my story before I even to craft it, to share it.

So, I guess starting this blog is my first step to embracing and living out my own philosophy to stories, to stop being hypocritical, to own my story. To share it, because it matters. Because everyone’s story matters.

I know it matters to me. Writing all this shit down in various forms has been healing and therapeutic for me. It’s helped me to make sense of how I feel about my experiences.

My story has to be honest and brutal, probably to share and to read.

But if I am living by my own religion, then I’ve got no choice. I have to move forward with my hardcore, unapologetic belief that my lived, embodied experiences, my story, matters.

And in writing it and sharing it, it is my goal and deepest desire to spin this shit into gold.

And maybe some fucking good can come from the pain and tragedy of my family’s mental illnesses, trauma, depression, anxiety, and suicides.

Amen.