Stories shape us

An invitation to another storytelling gathering

Photo by Erin Randle on Unsplash

Look, I don’t know much, but I know these things uncontrovertibly and inarguably:
One: stories matter waaaaay more than we know.
Two: all stories are, in some form, prayers.
Three: love is the story and the prayer that matters the most.

—Brian Doyle The Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart (credit to Camilla Sanderson for introducing me to the quote)

The stories that I have been telling myself lately center on the theme of embracing difficulty. Last month I wrote about making friends with death, and I want to tell a few more stories on this theme. But first, I want to invite you to our next monthly storytelling gathering.

You are invited! Sunday March 2, 2025 12 PST / 3 EST / 8 GMT RSVP Here

Telling our stories in community, in real time with real people, is a powerful. Writing is powerful too, of course, but this season I am leaning into gathering. So, the lovely Anni Ponder and I are hosting our second virtual Finding Mama God session. We hope to capture the spirit of the circles we create in our living rooms, around our dining room tables, and during retreats. Each month, we listen to a main storyteller share some of their journey, centered around the theme of discovering the feminine aspect of God. Afterward, we will circle up (in a Zoom breakout room) and unpack our stories together.

This week, I will be sharing a bit of my story. I’ve written about it, but it will be the first time I have shared with a group. I am nervous and excited! You are welcome to join and listen without sharing. And we’ll record my story if you want to listen on your own time. In the meantime, here are a few more thoughts on the theme of embracing difficulty.

I stumbled upon Gideon Heugh’s interpretation of a seldom-told Bible story about the origin of Jacob’s limp. His retelling gave meaning to a weird and pervasive aspect of my life: I have walked with a limp my entire adult life and experience pain daily. Gideon says,

Only after this wrestling match and hip-wrenching does Jacob move into his destiny as patriarch of an entire people. It is as though the wrestling was a kind of initiation rite—something he needed to do before he could become who he needed to be.

I experienced a sort of hip-wrenching when I was 19. It left me with a massive scar in the shape of a cross stitched into my side. The scar matches a smaller cross, tattooed on the same hip when I was in high school. The tattoo was the result of a night of partying with someone who learned the art in prison. I started to walk with a limp around the same time that I was transitioning from the wild excesses of substances into the constrained life of a Christian convert. These coincidences led me to the story of Jacob’s hip-wrenching and subsequent limp with curiosity and affinity. Gideon goes on to say,

Initiation rites are almost universal in indigenous cultures. There is something, seemingly, essential about them. They are almost always something uncomfortable, a death followed by a rebirth—the idea being that without going through a sort of struggle, you cannot progress beyond the naivety of adolescence.

His words connected with my experience plunging into the cenote, ritualizing the concept of death followed by a rebirth. He also connected it to storytelling, the need for “conflict, obstacles, deaths for the protagonist to be reborn out of.” As I worked on the novel last fall, I recognized a hesitancy in writing the protagonist toward her own kind of death. I took a break from working on the novel for almost two months, feeling as though I wasn’t ready to write the ending. Something in me hadn’t formed yet. After the cenote experience, I felt released. “Let’s do this,” I said to the darkness. Since then, I have been walking the protagonist toward her own experience of struggle, of hip-wrenching, of death and rebirth. I can’t help but immerse myself in her emotional experience as I write.

The other story is about fasting, which I hesitate to share without a disclaimer, since many people struggle with eating disorders. For some people, the story you need to hear is just that hunger is a function of our bodies that we should honor by caring for ourselves through eating. If that is you, this next story may not be beneficial.

I recently listened to some wellness folks talk about the science of fasting and the way it unleashes built-in modes of self-repair. I started fasting as an experiment to see if I would experience the benefits touted. Since then, I have been hungry more than usual. Rather than immediately addressing it, I wait until it is time to eat, which could be hours away. Through this practice, I began to see parallels between my soul’s hunger for affirmation and my physical hunger. I reach for approval in the same ways that I reach for a snack. I check my views, likes, emails and text messages for the fulfillment my soul craves. Yet unlike a snack, reaching for an app often has the opposite effect — it makes me feel less fulfilled. I want the comfort food of esteem, but the message I receive is often that I am overlooked. My soul's hunger becomes a source of pain.

Learning how to undo this tendency is a life’s work. Undoing it allows us to nurture our creative inspiration. It is deeply fulfilling to see the ways our creative inspiration flows to our community in meaningful ways. The soul sighs with contentment when we belong to a tribe that recognizes our gifts as significant contributions. Yet, it is when I stop seeking approval that I experience fulfillment. Rather than clamoring after it, I want to learn to let it flow according to its own cycles. There will be seasons of total deprivation, followed by a rush of unexpected affirmation that buoys my soul. I cannot control this flow, and pursuing it during periods of deprivation only heightens the longing and ache. The goal is to be content in both drought and flood.

With fasting, the story I tell myself is that the discomfort of hunger is actually a good thing because benefits are accruing behind the scenes. Physically, I am imagining ketone production and autophagy. There are spiritual benefits as well, though I don’t have scientific terms to describe the process. There are parallels with my soul’s hunger. If I stay in the discomfort of feeling lonely or insignificant, like I am an odd bird or a nobody, I imagine something good is happening behind the scenes. The first time I made the connection, the rush of affirmation came relatively soon after I began “fasting” from the apps that I look to for this gratification. I sat with my feelings of insignificance for an evening, and the next morning I had a flood of positive messages waiting for me. I savored the feeling of connection as an unexpected delight.

Fasting from social approval is a way of holding my creative inspiration in a vessel that does not leak. This is important to me because the story I tell myself about creative inspiration, about writing this novel, is that it is something sacred that was given to me from above. I want it to have all the potency of its original source, not diluted by my attempts to seek approval. I have no idea if this novel will receive any recognition. At times I read a section and I am in awe. Other times it seems as though a child wrote it. In some mysterious way, it is both. The real joy has been stewarding the gift and trying my best to give it life. The gift of creative inspiration is enough, and if Mama Spirit continues to bless me with it, I know I will be unexpectedly fulfilled someday. May it be so!