Skip to main content

It always comes back to the frame tale...

By

Maybe the question shouldn’t be “what kind of story are we in?” but rather “how many different kinds of stories are we in?”

My story includes a bookworm, a bullied nerd, an angry goth chick, a rape survivor, a trophy wife, entitlement and privilege, multiple marriages and divorces, adultery, poverty and food stamps, and an unforeseen redemption arc in the third act. They’re all very different stories, from very different parts of my life, but all of these characters make-up one whole (mostly) person that is me. And that’s only my side of this.

How many stories am I a part of where I’m not the main character? How many stories where I’m the mean girl, the villain, the slut of the piece? Probably more than a few. Those are the easier roles to admit to. No matter how self-absorbed most of us may be, we mostly always know when we’ve hurt someone, or betrayed them, or affected their life in a terrible way. We may not like to cast ourselves as the antagonist, but we know when it’s true.

Why is it so much harder to allow ourselves to see when we have been a hero? The last ten years of my life have been one of healing, for myself and the people in my life. I was given a second chance, many times, and I’ve used all of those chances to try to make life better for the people around me. What I’ll never really know though, on a grander scale, is how many people may have their lives affected, in a positive way, because I helped someone, for no other reason than that they needed help. 

So how many stories have benefited from your actions, from what you’ve done, or that kind word that you said at just that right moment when someone was on a ledge and needed to hear it? 

We are all products of our own stories, but we are also products of the stories of everyone around us. The narrative binds us all together, every single day, and the technologies that we have, like blogs, only increase that interconnectedness. Dunne tells us that there are “stories within stories” so maybe it’s simply that we are all living, breathing frame tales in the end. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"You don't look like your dad!" Tales of Legal Adoption

By Anonymous
"You don't look like your dad. You must be the spitting image of your mother!" or "Your brothers look just like your dad! I bet you take after your momma." I heard these statements a lot growing up. And it's true. I don't look like my dad. And for a while, I didn't really look like my mom. I do now, but that isn't the point. You see, my dad adopted me when I was around six or seven years old. He had been a part of my life, for, well, all of it. When my mother and biological father (sometimes I refer to him as my sperm donor, because I think it's funny, but his name is Chris), got divorced, my dad, Kenny, married my mom resulting in a blended family of me, who was biologically my mom's, and my two brothers, who were biologically his. Suddenly I went from being the only child to being the middle child in a family dynamic that takes a lot of explaining to do. They say divorce and the things I supposedly went through in my early childhood...
Post a Comment
Read more

I'm adopted and I have trust issues. Here's why:

By
I grew up knowing that I was adopted. I’m a fair-skinned freckled brunette who never grew past 4’10” so I fit in photographs just fine with my brunette mother and blonde father who adopted me at birth. When I was little, they told me stories about how God had sent me to their arms, how they had chosen me, how special I was because I was adopted. The story of Moses was especially prominent, as was Tarzan. I grew up in middle America where everybody still goes to church on Sundays and Wednesdays like clockwork and trusts Disney to raise their children during TV time. My mother was (and still is with my daughter now) a firm believer in keeping children innocent as long as possible. She adores small children and works with them exclusively at the church where she directs the children’s choir and runs the after-school program. My father always had a nonchalant attitude towards these things. He wouldn’t go out of his way to introduce us to things that might be a tad inappropriate, but he...
Post a Comment
Read more

No Calling, No Problem

By
I have no calling in a world where we all wonder what we're meant to do, who we're supposed to be. My mom called me the other day to tell me one of my childhood friends would be moving to my hometown soon because her husband had accepted a job with the Baptist church next door to her Methodist church. I don’t know why she thinks I give a shit about small town gossip or any news that concerns the church seeing as how she’s very aware of how I feel about organized religion. Nevertheless, she has nothing else to tell me because her world is much smaller than mine. “He used to be an airplane pilot,” she says. “Then why is he going to be a youth minister? How will they survive? Where will the money come from?” I ask, appalled. I know from my instagram that his wife is a stay-at-home mom of three. “It doesn’t matter, they’ll figure it out,” she brushes it off. “He has a calling to work for the Lord.” A calling. A goddamn calling. Half of my life, I waited for some fucking ca...
Post a Comment
Read more