Hey all!
Before we dive into the newsletter, I want to share an announcement. Matt Arnold and I will be hosting a storytelling webinar on March 24 at noon US central time. We’ll talk story myths, truths, and takeaways. And of course, we’ll make it interactive and fun.
The event is free, but space is limited and registration is required. Sign up here! And if you know someone you think would be interested, feel free to forward this email along, too.
One of the myths we’ll touch on in the webinar is that storytelling is the answer to everything, all the time. Storytelling can improve most communications and is often a great tool for leaders looking to inspire their teams. But it’s not a magic marketing pill that can solve every problem. Sometimes, I see organizations with strategy- or product-level issues that need to be resolved before they can tell the right story.
For more about that and the other myths Matt and I will discuss, sign up for the webinar! :)
Now, on that note––that stories aren’t always the answer––I want to talk about the time stories stopped working for me.
One Year In
This weekend marks a year since the pandemic unofficially “began” in the western hemisphere. Like many people, I can remember very well what I was doing March 13, 2020. I drove to a nearby city that Friday and, though I ruled out going to a concert due to uncertainty about how this whole Covid thing was going to unfurl, I did go to a packed bar and order a flight of five different IPAs. (The white IPA was the best, in case anyone is wondering. Excellent citrusy notes.) Across the bar, I spotted a Croatian guy I knew, who happened to be in southern Chile for some research at a nearby university. It was super loud and we could barely understand each other in English or Spanish, but we managed to catch up a bit, clink our glasses, and take a selfie to send to a mutual friend. Stuff like that still happened then.
The next day, I drove back to town and went to a friend’s wedding. There were jokes about hand sanitizer during the ceremony. A few extended family members who planned to come in from Europe or Santiago had made the call to stay home, but for the most part, things went off without a hitch. We danced until four in the morning. I rode home in a van full of happy people with sore feet.
It’s easy to look back and say we all knew it was the end of something. But I’m not sure that’s true. Maybe that’s the story we tell ourselves now, layering our present-day knowledge over those memories. What seems nostalgic or foreboding or charged with meaning was really just a normal day in a normal life before things stopped being normal.
Did we know how weird these photos would look later on? Did we know it was the last time we’d dance like that, all together in one place, for the foreseeable future? Did I know it was the last time I’d put on high heels, ummm…maybe ever?
Six Months Without Stories
Sometimes when I go back over the past year in my mind, I feel like a toddler trying to shove the triangle block into the square-shaped space. Nothing fits. Sometimes, even stories don’t fit.
For the first few months of the pandemic, stories helped. I read the Legends of Korra comics that pick up where the show left off. I analyzed chapter books like Ivy & Bean and The Princess in Black for a project I was working on with a colleague. I read some great new YA novels like You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson and Girl, Serpent, Thorn by Melissa Bashardoust. I devoured Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth and am still upset there is not yet a release date for book two.
Netflix, meanwhile, was basically my BFF. I binge-watched Bojack Horseman and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. I watched The Babysitter’s Club twice and am still trying to figure out how to steal Claudia Kishi’s aesthetic. I rewatched New Girl; some of it holds up, some of it was funnier in 2014. I watched Brooklyn Nine-Nine and was put in the uncomfortable position of trying to convince all the friends I made during the social protests in Chile why they should watch a charming and hilarious show about police officers. I watched Schitt’s Creek and somehow it *did* meet my ridiculously high expectations, and I will never forget the moment in the final episode when Moira Rose made me laugh and cry and feel about 56 different emotions all at once, and my jaded Covid heart felt like the Grinch's when it grew three sizes.
In their TinyLetter titled “Swamp of Sadness,” author Claire Rudy Foster wrote about using stories for solace during some of the pandemic’s hardest days:
“When the world stretches out around me in unpredictable formations, I know that I can let myself drift safely within a story. Books have always been my happy place, and I'm grateful that they've been there for me this year. All struggles have a beginning, a middle, and an end. When this year seems interminable, I seek the sense of closure elsewhere.”
And for the first few months of the pandemic, that’s how I felt.
But then, somehow, it stopped.
From August until about a month ago, I couldn’t consume fiction. At first I thought I just needed a break. I graduated from my MFA program in July, and after two years of a pretty heavy reading load, maybe I was ready for some rest. So I listened to podcasts and nonfiction titles on audiobook and didn’t think too much of it.
But the months dragged on. I bounced off novels by writers I usually love. I bounced off re-reads of books I knew I loved. Even TV didn’t work. I couldn’t get through The Mandalorian; learning about a new planet felt exhausting, and baby Yoda made me anxious with the constantly-being-in-peril thing. Bridgerton left me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. And Call My Agent seemed promising, but halfway into an episode I’d realize I was scrolling through my phone and, given that I can’t understand French, I’d missed a whole scene and a half because I hadn’t read the subtitles.
Meanwhile, I was writing a newsletter, giving talks, and running a business all about storytelling. I was revising a novel of my own and tweeting exciting news about friends’ and mentors’ fiction debuts. Stories were my work, my hobby, and my life. Yet I couldn’t even get through a chapter book or a 23-minute TV episode without feeling like my brain was broken.
I talk a lot about Lisa Cron’s work on storytelling, how she uses neuroscience to explain stories’ deeply human appeal. She writes about how stories helped us pass along information about threats and learn from each others’ experiences. Don’t go to those plains at dusk; it’s where the lions hunt. Remember what happened to Cousin Fred when he tried that last year…?
And I still agree that stories are deeply powerful. But maybe only after you’ve already escaped the lion. At a certain point in the pandemic, my brain (and anecdotally, many people’s brains!) went into running-from-the-lion mode. We didn’t need stories right then. We just needed to survive.
I guess my brain eventually realized there’s no lion pacing in the background. Because in the past month, my ability to process stories has slowly returned. In fact, two days ago, I finished an almost-800-page fantasy novel about sexy fae battling immortal creatures and getting up to no good in an anthropomorphic house.
So, we’re back in business, baby.
The Rough Edges
This is the part where I’m tempted to wrap this all up with a bow. I want to tell you (and tell myself) a neatly-packaged story about the six months where I couldn’t read or watch stories. Ideally, I’d like to tell a neatly-packaged story about this entire past year and what it has meant and what it will mean. Many people are saying we need ritual now. Maybe we should burn something this weekend, maybe we should eat a special meal or call the relatives we miss or write in a journal.
Personally, I don’t really feel like it. Maybe I’ll light a candle or go for a walk. Maybe I won’t. Mostly I want to commemorate the beginning of the pandemic by exempting myself from the expectation of making this *mean* anything. We don’t have to know how we’ll look back on all this, how we’ll have changed, how we’ll hold this year in our minds. We don’t have to know what’s next. What will be different. What will be the same.
During the months where I couldn’t get through any novels or TV series, I ended up reading a lot of memoirs. And to be fair, these are stories, too, really. Memoir authors often use dramatic structure to retell the events of their lives, cleaning things up with a nice narrative arc. They’ll fast-forward through the years that don’t quite fit with the rest of their story. They’ll dramatize the scenes that are the right kind of true and leave the others out. It’s easy to understand why it was compelling to see these authors make meaning from difficult times in their lives, as a reader sitting here in Covid, twiddling my sanitized thumbs.
But I don’t think it was just the meaning-making that was compelling. Because even with the narrative arcs, or the convenient way time turned these authors’ experiences into metaphors and their struggles into character growth, the rough edges of their lives weren’t quite sanded off.
Life is weird. Stuff doesn’t always make sense. Plot threads dangle. Time plods on, and you don’t always get the answers or the closure or the enlightenment you hoped for.
Some elements of Glennon Doyle’s third memoir, Untamed, didn’t quite work for me on a craft level. But I did like the mantra she shares: “We can do hard things.”
Not “we can grow from hard things.” Not “hard things make us stronger.” Just, we can do hard things.
So I guess this is all to say, if stories don’t feel like the answer right now, that’s okay. If lighting a candle doesn’t feel like the answer right now, that’s okay. If the concept of there being an answer doesn’t feel like the answer right now, that’s okay, too.
We can do hard things. One year in, the triangle blocks still don’t fit anywhere. But I guess I’ll just keep carrying them.
Thanks for reading, all.
–Erin
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Erin Becker (she/her)
Writer | Communications Consultant | Storytelling Expert
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