Stories are why I'm here
They are why I am alive...
I often tell my students that stories are medicine, sacred, and survival. They are how many of us learn how to survive, how we push through in unimaginably difficult times, when we don’t think we can.
We listen to stories to learn how others did it. To believe that we too can make it.
But I don’t think that my students realize how serious I am when I say that stories can save us.
And how, truly, how much a matter of life and death they can be.
I am not saying this as a lover of stories and literature, as an English professor. Even though all of that is true. I love them.
I say that because stories saved my life.
After Jeremie died, a month after mom did, I went looking for stories on how other people survived. How they could survive and heal and go on, especially after surviving two suicides in one immediate family.
I gobbled up stories on how to heal even though you have trauma, a brain addled with PTSD and CPTSD, and you can’t sleep or calm the cortisol in your brain, where you jump out of your skin when someone greets you and you don’t see them or expect it. When you have long family lines of intergenerational trauma and mental illness on both sides of your family. When you have lost your entire nuclear family in less than five years. To kin and blood relatives, family members who have jumped into death and who neglected of their bodies, rushing their demise, different versions of it, but both at their own hands.
Where were these stories that mirrored my life?
Now, I did find many grief and trauma narratives.
But I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for.
Which I marvel at a bit.
Since I am a part of Luvvie Ajayi Jones’ Book Academy program, guiding us through the book writing process. One of the things that these experts say—to reassure us that we have a story to tell even though there may be others that tell one that is similar— is that there is [usually] nothing new in your content, but there is in your perspective that is unique.
Now—I don’t believe I am the only person in the history of the world, ever, who has experienced more than one suicide in the immediate family.
But there are many, many, many fewer of us writing about it than there are those with only one—just a parent, only a sibling, just a partner, only (if we can/should say that) of a child.
Whenever we’re at the breaking point—rock bottom from addiction or a terminal cancer diagnosis, or whatever your really hard thing is, even when/if it will result in inevitable death or perhaps your life is beyond repair, you still want to hear how someone else journeyed through it and how they coped.
This is why we people go to NA and AA and Al-Anon meetings, or to suicide support groups. This is why we listen to stories of Holocaust survivors. This is why there are grief groups and testimonies in churches and why we listen to accounts from those who served time in prison and in active combat, war zones.
We want to know how people made it, how they survived.
We do that by stories.
Perhaps, later, when dust has settled a bit and the shock worn off….and if we strive to be healthier, we may want to know how others got help, healed, and released trauma…Maybe you are desperate to understand how they carried their load, shouldered that emotional inheritance.
That was me because honestly—I thought—after Jeremie died
Oh. my. God. Fuck, Fuck, FUCK! What the fuck else can I do? I’m lost. I’m fucked.
I truly believe that stories have saved me.
I was saved because somewhere along my path, I learned from Cultural Rhetoricians and indigenous elders that stories are sacred, that they are medicine, that by sharing and listening to stories, we find healing. Stories are the only way we may find hope and solace, in another’s words that we won’t always feel this badly, so we don’t also wallow into passive suicide or pick up the gun, giving up on our life.
Stories are why we can believe in healing and growth and transformation and therapies that can help us.
I believe that stories are why I am here and Jeremie is not.
Stories are so important. All of them. Even the ones not told. Even the heavy and depressing as fuck ones. They all matter.
Stories are why I have survived.
Even more, stories are why I am healing and healthier, and much more whole than I ever was before, before all the stories.
<3
