A Storyteller

I Want to Be a Storyteller

I think I always wanted to be a storyteller in some way.

For a long time, though, I think that part of me got stomped out.

“You talk too much.”

“You’ve got too much time on your hands.”

Things people would say after I had put my heart and soul into telling them about something that interested me.

I took those words harder than I probably should have. Criticism devastated a sensitive soul back then.

Hell, sometimes it still does.

I’m working on that.

But lately I’ve started looking at those memories differently.

Maybe I wasn’t a bad storyteller.

Maybe I just had the wrong audience.

Over the past few months, and especially after doing a lot of digging around inside myself, I keep coming back to the same feeling:

I want to tell stories.

My stories, obviously. But also stories about places and people and things I’ve seen. Stories about how I experience this strange little existence we all find ourselves living.

And I think I’m finally realizing that it’s okay for me to do that.

The problem is that if I’m going to tell my story truthfully, some of it is going to be dark.

There’s no way around that.

For most of my life, I thought darkness was something you were supposed to hide.

I grew up learning that darkness was bad. Darkness was evil. Darkness was of the Devil. Good people lived in the light.

So I tried very hard to live there.

Or at least appear to.

What nobody ever taught me was that human beings aren't entirely light.

We have wounds. Shame. Anger. Fear. Desire. Jealousy. Regret. Things we've done. Things that have been done to us. Things we don't understand about ourselves.

And hiding those things doesn't make them disappear.

It just makes them harder to see.

I've spent the past several months becoming something like an archaeologist of my own soul, excavating things that have been buried for a very long time.

Some of what I've found I don't particularly like.

Some of it has broken my heart.

And some of it has made me understand myself in ways I never could before.

The short version of the story is this:

My life fell apart.

Then I burned what was left of it to the ground.

I'll tell that story eventually.

But this isn't really about what happened.

It's about what I found afterward.

I remember being afraid of the dark when I was little.

One night I had been playing with the kids who lived next door to my grandparents. Their house was incredibly close. Maybe twenty or thirty yards from back door to back door.

Eventually their parents said it was time for me to go home.

I don't remember being afraid until the other kids started teasing me about walking through the dark.

They were probably just being kids. I don't think they were trying to traumatize me or anything.

But it worked.

Suddenly that tiny stretch of yard between their house and my grandparents' house became terrifying.

Something was out there.

Something in the darkness was going to get me.

So I ran.

I ran as fast as my little legs could carry me while the other kids stood safely near their house laughing.

I can still remember the fear.

It's strange thinking about that memory now.

They didn't have to cross the darkness.

I did.

They could stand somewhere safe and laugh because whatever I believed was waiting in that yard wasn't real to them.

But it was real to me.

So I ran through it and found my way home.

I don't think I understood until recently how many times I would repeat some version of that journey.

Years later, I would cross through the darkness again trying to find safety.

Only this time something had changed.

I wasn't afraid of the dark anymore.

I was afraid of the light.

I was a kid escaping a world that had become unbearable to me, moving under the cover of night and terrified of headlights.

Every set of headlights meant somebody might see me.

Who will find me first?

Who will turn me in?

Who will send me back?

Is it you?

The darkness that terrified that little boy running between two houses had become the thing protecting me.

Darkness meant nobody could see me.

And for a long time afterward, I think some part of me remembered that lesson.

Being hidden was safe.

Being seen was dangerous.

So I became pretty good at hiding.

Not necessarily physically.

Inside myself.

There were things I didn't want anyone to see. Eventually there were things I didn't even want me to see.

Pain got buried under other things.

So I became pretty good at hiding.

Not necessarily physically.

Inside myself.

There were things I didn't want anyone to see. Eventually there were things I didn't even want me to see.

Pain got buried under other things.

For me, mostly alcohol and women.

Cigarettes too, for most of my adult life.

Different escapes with different consequences but often serving some version of the same purpose. Something to change how I felt. Something to occupy the empty spaces. Something to chase. Something that might quiet whatever was happening inside me for a little while.

There are countless ways people do this. Drugs. Pills. Gambling. Work. Sex. Food. Attention. Whatever provides the escape.

Mine just happened to take certain forms more than others.

And looking back, I don't think I was always chasing pleasure as much as I thought I was.

Sometimes I think I was chasing relief.

Just let me feel okay.

Let me feel normal.

Let me not hurt for a little while.

That's one thing I've begun to understand about my darkness.

Some of it wasn't trying to destroy me.

Some of it was trying to protect something.

It just didn't always know how to protect me without hurting me in some other way.

For years I've thought about the Nietzsche quote:

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster, and if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.”

I've spent a lot of my life afraid of the monster.

Lately I've started asking a different question.

What if the monster I'm fighting isn't a monster at all?

What if it's a child?

What if it's me?

A wounded child.

With a shadow standing guard.

What if some of the darkness existed because there were things that little boy didn't know how to carry?

Things he couldn't understand.

Things he couldn't show anybody.

So he hid them.

Because that's what darkness does.

It hides things.

And maybe there was a time when hiding them kept him alive.

But there is a difference between hiding somewhere and living there.

Eventually you have to come out.

That's what I think happened to me.

The darkness didn't betray me.

I simply outgrew its usefulness.

Because if you stay somewhere dark long enough, eventually you can't see where you're going.

And I couldn't anymore.

There is one belief underneath almost everything I've uncovered.

It is difficult for me to write.

I'm not afraid of the Devil anymore.

I'm not even afraid of God.

I'm most afraid of myself.

Because somewhere deep inside me exists this fear that eventually everyone will find out the truth.

That at my core...

I am bad.

But I know now that isn't the man writing this.

That's the little boy.

The one who learned to believe his existence was somehow a mistake.

The one who cried alone at night.

The one who waved from a second-story window at hope as it drove away.

The one who sat on his knees being interrogated by the people who were supposed to protect him.

The one who admitted guilt for things he hadn't done because sometimes admitting guilt was easier than continuing to fight.

The whipping boy.

The scapegoat.

The one who planned his escape.

The one who finally left under the cover of darkness, my old friend.

The one who decided:

I will not end this way.

That boy survived.

But surviving something and understanding it are two completely different things.

I spent years doing the first.

Now I'm trying to do the second.

Understanding myself doesn't mean excusing myself.

That's important.

I've made mistakes.

I've hurt people.

I've made choices I deeply regret.

Understanding why a person learned to hide in darkness doesn't absolve him of everything he did while he was there.

We still have to answer for our actions.

But I've also learned that condemnation doesn't necessarily create change.

Understanding can.

If I can look at something I've done and say, Why did I do that? What was I looking for? What was I afraid of? What was I trying desperately not to feel? then maybe I can finally stop doing it.

That's different from saying it was okay.

Sometimes it wasn't okay.

That's the fucking gray area.

And I'm becoming increasingly comfortable living there.

Because I've had a hard time dividing human beings neatly into good people and bad people ever since I began looking honestly at myself.

I know I'm capable of kindness.

I know I'm capable of selfishness.

I know I'm capable of courage.

I know I'm capable of cowardice.

I have been the person who helped.

I've been the person who hurt.

I've been light.

I've been dark.

Mostly I've been human.

Maybe that's what I've been trying to understand this entire time.

I still choose the light.

I want to make that clear.

Not because I believe I can somehow become entirely light.

I don't think that's possible anymore.

I choose it because I want hope to determine the direction I'm walking.

That's probably why I've always been drawn to music that acknowledges suffering but refuses to surrender to it.

Killswitch Engage has a song called I Believe that says there is hope for better days and tells the listener to let the light guide the way.

I've listened to that song plenty of times.

But those words mean something different to me now.

The light doesn't have to eliminate the darkness.

It just has to show me where I'm going.

And maybe courage is simply continuing to walk toward it when you can't see very far ahead.

I'm not always strong.

Sometimes I'm fucking exhausted.

Sometimes I'm ashamed.

Sometimes I'm confused.

Sometimes I look backward.

But I'm still walking.

And for now, that's enough.

Which brings me back to storytelling.

Maybe this is why I want to tell stories now.

For years I thought being seen was dangerous.

I thought if people saw enough of me, eventually they would discover something terrible underneath.

So I hid parts of myself.

I tried to control what people saw.

I tried to stand in the light while pretending I had never known darkness.

I don't want to do that anymore.

I also don't want to drag anyone into the darkness with me.

I think I just want to stand somewhere between the two and tell you what I saw.

The places I've been.

The people I've loved.

The people I've lost.

The things I've done right.

The things I've fucked up.

The beautiful places.

The ugly ones.

Maybe storytelling doesn't require me to have everything figured out.

Maybe I don't need to tell you what darkness means.

I can just tell you what mine looked like.

I can tell you about the little boy running terrified through twenty yards of darkness toward his grandmother's house.

I can tell you about another boy years later moving through the darkness and praying the headlights wouldn't find him.

I can tell you about the man who eventually realized that neither hiding in darkness nor pretending to be made entirely of light was much of a life.

And I can tell you about who he is becoming now.

Not a saint.

Not a monster.

Just a man.

Still learning.

Still traveling.

Still fucking up occasionally.

Still hopeful.

And finally willing to be seen.

Maybe I wasn't a bad storyteller after all.

Maybe I just had the wrong audience.

So I'm going to tell the stories anyway.

And whoever wants to listen can come along.