Transcript: Episode 21

Hey friend, and thank you for being here for today’s episode. I’m Mary, and I hope you’re doing well whenever and wherever you’re listening.

I often say on this podcast that I’m not really here to offer quick, one-size-fits-all wisdom about the creative life. Both because that’s not really how I think creativity works (or how anything works, really), and because it would be pretty misleading to set myself up as some kind of grand guru of creative living. While I do try to share whatever wisdom I have in this space, I’m definitely not the kind of wisdom-keeper who has everything all figured out and can dispense life-changing yet succinct insight in little candy-coated soundbites.

But even more so than usual, today’s pod is coming to you from the messy middle of something I’ve been mulling over for a long time – something that I don’t have a tagline or takeaway for yet, but that still feels worth sharing, in all its in-process, still-forming glory. And I want to give you a heads-up that part of what I’m going to be sharing is a personal example about an aspect of storytelling that comes out of my experience of having breast cancer about ten years ago. (Spoiler alert: didn’t die!)

If that’s not a topic that’s going to be healthy or helpful for you to spend time with today, then please do take care of yourself and skip this one, and I will see you next month.

It occurred to me after I’d decided to talk about this topic that the episode might have made more sense as the October episode, for breast cancer awareness month – but I didn’t really want to change up my plans, and I also don’t want to over-index on the cancer topic. But, it is the example from my own life that speaks most clearly to what I want to offer you today as food for your own creative thought – so that’s why I’m sharing it in this context.

 

I always have been and always will be a lover of stories, and if there’s anything I’m devoted to believing in, it’s the power and necessity of creative expression. But I’m going to be talking this month about the limitations of story – the ways that turning our life experiences into stories can maybe keep us from actually living what we experience.

One way to think about the role of storytelling in human cultures is that stories are maps – ways of navigating the stuff of life. And as maps, stories are crafted representations of something bigger and deeper than any single map can encompass. Or to borrow a commonly used phrase, the map is not the territory.

This feels pretty self-evident… until you realize how deeply story maps are engrained into the way you think about how your life is supposed to happen and what kind of meaning you’re supposed to make out of what happens.

As storytellers and creatives, I think we’ve got a fundamental responsibility and vocation to craft good maps… because a bad map can be worse than no map at all. Sometimes you realize that the map you’ve been navigating by – which is to say, the stories you’ve internalized – has utterly mislead you as to the reality of the territory.

As I was deciding what I was going to share this month, how I was going to come at exploring this, another podcast dropped an episode that happened to speak to a very similar topic, and that helped me clarify my own thoughts.

KnotWork Storytelling is a podcast about applying mythology and folklore to the modern world, through retelling old stories and examining why and how they still resonate. It’s hosted by writing coach and storyteller Marisa Goudy. And on a recent episode, Goudy talks about what she calls “getting un-storied,” or acknowledging that relying on the lens of story can sometimes occlude things instead of illuminating them.

Here’s a snippet from the episode that sums up her take. She says, quote, “Stories are necessary. Stories make us human – and, we may set limitations on our understanding of the more-than-human world when we impose story on everything we encounter.”

With that phrase “more-than-human,” Goudy is talking both about the natural world, and about the places where tangible human experience intersects with the ineffable. As she puts it, “The soul and the spiritual realm… are un-storied places.”

This paradox – that the maps we rely on can sometimes actually hide the true depth of the territory – it’s been surfacing for me lately in the form of one particular map. A map that I just keep finding cropping up in how I understand the world, no matter how self-aware I try to be about spotting it and evaluating its usefulness.

I’ve mentioned the Hero’s Journey in a couple prior episodes – particularly back in episode 3, when I talked about how we’re often encouraged to view our writing lives as a kind of Hero’s Journey, in ways that aren’t particularly helpful or even aligned with the reality of the creative process. And of course, the Hero’s Journey is also ubiquitous in resources about story structure and narrative craft – it’s been considered a cornerstone of the Western European storytelling tradition for a very long time.

Feminist and cross-cultural critiques of the Hero’s Journey model have also been around for a very long time, so I’m not going to offer my own here. But I’ve linked some starting points for research in the show notes if that’s a rabbit hole you’re drawn to today.

What I’ve found myself exploring lately is the way this model continues to subvert my attempts to root it out of the way I think about not just my creative work, but my life as a whole. Lately it seems like whenever I find myself running up against an emotional, intellectual, or creative wall, I realize that it’s because I’ve been trying to Hero’s Journey my way through a situation that doesn’t actually call for a hero.

As it turns out, not everything is about overcoming challenges to self-actualize into an awesomer version of yourself who can suddenly be smarter and cooler and earn more money and become a more reliable friend and family member and can always see the right thing to do in any crisis and can get published in increasingly impressive lit magazines. Which is something I’ve been aware of for an awful lot of time now… and yet that little fucking inner hero guy just will. Not. Die.

Every time I think I’ve ferreted out all the places he’s hiding, I am inevitably wrong. This is how it is with the story maps that have been ingrained most deeply into us by culture and tradition – we can learn how to see through them, but their invisible hand is still going to be all around us.

Sometimes this is merely annoying. But sometimes it has deep and life-altering implications. And as storytellers, people who immerse ourselves in story and play intimately with the power of narrative maps – we can be particularly susceptible to that power, even though we see how it works. After all, part of what makes us want to tell stories is our deep sensitivity to them – our fluent ability to enter into relationship with stories.

The power of stories is a foundational thread here on this podcast. And as I was reflecting on it again this month, I realized that I think the best way to follow that thread deeper is through a particular aspect of my experience with surviving breast cancer. What I’m sharing today is both very personal, and also honestly not really the most flattering angle on my inner life. And I know that cancer touches most people’s lives in some way, and that experiences with it are as varied as they are common.

All this is to say that nothing I share in this space today should be taken as me speaking for other survivors or attempting to dispense universal truth about the cancer experience. And I’d ask that this disclaimer be taken in good faith, and that if you find my experience to be triggering once I get going, please give yourself the grace of just turning the episode off – and give me the grace of speaking for myself, even if what I say doesn’t align with what you or a loved one might say.

Okay, so… here is a story about relationship with stories, through the lens of cancer and mental health. (Wo-hooo!)

Back in 2015, when I was 31, I went through about nine months of treatment for breast cancer. Which makes the napkin math easy for where I’m at now – I’m coming up on the ten year anniversary of my diagnosis at the end of February. (A date that is often given the shorthand of one’s “cancerversary.”)

Breast cancer in general has a high survivor rate, but young patients tend to have more aggressive types of tumors, and I had a particular type that’s considered the most aggressive. So my prognosis was very uncertain for most of my treatment process, until we could see how well the chemotherapy had ultimately worked. I got lucky, and at the end of treatment I was declared fully in remission.

Every six months since then, I get a scan to make sure there aren’t any new shenanigans going on at my cellular level. After one of my scans, about two years into remission, I got a call from my oncologist… which is really just one of the worst numbers to see on your phone screen, especially when you’re in the middle of a work shift and can’t call them back for several hours.

When I did talk to my doctor, she told me that my scan images showed a quote “suspicious area” the size of a grain of rice, so I needed to go back in for an MRI-guided biopsy. She reassured me that sometimes these kinds of tiny spots don’t even appear on the follow-up scan – they can be just imaging blips, or regular hormonal changes.

This is the general reality of being a cancer survivor: everything could be fine, or some minute part of you could be decidedly not fine, and you just won’t know until you know. It’s also the general reality of everybody alive, really, but one of the narrative aspects of having a major illness is that it reframes your relationship with uncertainty – the background white noise of it gets elevated into a major character.

After I got that call from my doctor about the scan results, I had to wait two days before I could have the follow-up. So I had a chance to practice the subtle and slippery art of acknowledging fear without actually freaking out. Chances were decent it was all nothing.

But I remember also looking ahead to how another round of cancer might feel. What would be the same, and what would be new? What decisions would I have to make? What would it be like to exist in the liminal space of illness for a second time?

When you get diagnosed with something like cancer, you find yourself the potential protagonist of a whole slew of cultural memes and narrative maps, everything from Livestrong hashtags to Christian religious awakenings. And one of the themes that comes up a lot on this podcast is the way narratives create constraints, both for better and for worse. They provide parameters for understanding experience – and those parameters fundamentally shape and even restrict the kind of meaning that gets crafted out of that experience.

Most of the popular cancer stories were actually fairly easy for me to shrug off, because I had the benefit of being 31 and having enough life experience to already know those stories wouldn’t fit me. But there was one story, though, that did worm its way firmly into my brain, so seamlessly I didn’t realize it was just as constructed and potentially restricting as all the others.

That first night after I got the initial diagnosis in 2015, I remember lying in bed looking at the ceiling – which I would assume is pretty normal when your hypothetical mortality suddenly becomes a calendar full of real chemotherapy appointments. Most of my thoughts were sort of like big lumbering fish I couldn’t quite get a grip on; there was for sure a bit of protective disassociation happening.

But one thought was completely clear: Whatever happened next, I was going to become a different person than I’d been before.

This idea didn’t cause any distress. It actually made me feel sort of galvanized. Or excited, even.

Here’s something that’s always been true about me (and here’s also where the mental health narrative comes in): I don’t particularly like myself. This isn’t to say I go around consistently and completely disliking myself. It’s more as if there are two parts of my mind in constant conversation with each other. One part understands I’m a perfectly acceptable human being. The other exists solely to spew self-directed toxic sludge at every conceivable opportunity.

For me, this is what anxiety and depression usually look like – a shitty version of my own persona continuously live-commentating the abject patheticness of my existence, not to mention the patheticness of my creative work. (I’m sure many of you listening can relate.) A lot of the time, I can turn the volume down on that part of my brain  using the kind of stalwartly neutral, drama-quashing supervision they teach you in therapy. (Thanks, CBT and DBT and several other T’s.)

But still, underneath the coping mechanisms, there’s always the belief that if I could change, become a slightly superior version of myself, maybe the shitty little voice would finally just shut the hell up. There’s always an insidiously lingering belief that the voice is probably right.

Once my cancer treatment got underway, I discovered this part of me had actually given me a gift. Because those coping skills I’d developed to co-exist with her were also the skills I needed to handle the nattering worry that I might be dying. The years I spent learning to co-exist with depression showed me I can live with fear and even despair, as long as I don’t mistake them for the full truth.

And yet, even as I traveled all those well-worn mental paths, I was also waiting (secretly and hopefully) for the new me who would surely soon make her appearance. After all, wasn’t I on a hero’s journey, my personal descent into the underworld, from which I’d emerge a shinier, more enlightened human? (Possibly just in time to die, but like, better late than never.)

Without realizing the limitations of that narrative, I was basically hoping cancer would act as sort of the psycho-spiritual equivalent of a green smoothie cleanse or a silent meditation retreat – it would utterly suck, but then I’d be scoured fresh. I’d stop being awkward and uncertain and at odds with myself and/or the world.

This is the true heart of most pre-packaged cancer stories (and stories of adversity in general), especially the stories meant for women and people socialized as women. These stories are illness as self-help, as aspirational transformation.

We’re supposed to discover our true purpose and our inner strengths (you know, the ones we’ve been failing to demonstrate so far because we aren’t yet our best selves). We’re supposed to inspire friends and family with our resilience (because our experiences are actually about how we look to everybody else). We’re supposed to wear fun pink spandex and run 10k fundraisers while we’re still getting chemo (because men aren’t the only heroes).

We aren’t supposed to accept the full, unmediated reality of ourselves. Not when we’re sick, and not when we’re well. The story keeps dragging us down a never-ending road of performed improvement, of suffering in the service of levelling up, in the hope that someday, finally, we will stop being merely who we are.

And meanwhile, while I kept looking to self-actualize, my cancer treatment went by. In a way, my body really did go through a hero’s journey of a sort, from both the cancer and from the medicinal battering required to save my life. It was a kind of transformation that permanently altered the trajectory of my body as I continue to live and age in it.

But in my mind, I’ve never felt transformed by the cancer. I feel the same as always. And secretly, I’ve always felt frustrated to have missed the promised upgrade, to have somehow failed to discover the prize that’s supposed to come from the journey through the dark – even though I was looking so hard for it.

And here’s the full, ugliest truth of the story that shaped my experience of having cancer: In the face of death, I still wanted to become someone else almost more than I wanted to live.

When I had to go back in for that follow-up scan, the one my doctor assured me could very well be nothing – luckily, it turned out she was right. The suspicious spot was nowhere to be seen. But in the moment, I felt more blank than relieved.

At the time, I described it to my partner as an emotional hangover, an anti-climax. And those descriptions were accurate, but there’s another one I kept to myself. Part of me was disappointed. On some shadowy, subliminal, cellular level, I wanted a second chance to pass the hero’s ordeal properly and get the story right.

It’s the same part of me who seems to exist only to hate everything I do and everything I create, the part who’s convinced I’m so inept I even did cancer wrong. I must not have changed because I was too stupid to understand my own mortality. Or I must not have suffered as much as I deserve. These are the things she still tells me, almost ten years later, on the days my coping mechanisms can’t shut her up.

I’ve tried over those years to create a countering narrative. I reassure myself that life-threatening illness is not, in fact, a growth opportunity with correct and incorrect responses. That cancer is not a self-help process. I remind myself that none of us has to earn their existence through pain. I even ask myself to consider the possibility that I didn’t need to be transformed in the first place.

But it’s hard to hold fast to these countering narratives, because when it comes down to it… they don’t feel like much of a narrative. My Western-culture-trained brain doesn’t see the plot there. And as a story lover and storyteller… I really want there to be a plot I can recognize. I may not want to be an inspirational hashtag or a religious conversion story, but dammit, I want to be some kind of story.

This is what surfaced for me when I considered what it might mean to be un-storied, as Marisa Goudy phrased it in her podcast episode. What might it have been like to have an un-storied encounter with cancer – to enter into that experience without any maps? Would it have been better? Would it have been worse? Was the flaw in the particular map I followed, or in my insistence on following one (even as I managed to believe I was free of any ill-fitting narratives that might lead me astray)?

I suspect that as with most questions about the deepest kinds of truth, there isn’t a simple answer here. Maybe the best kind of maps are the ones that offer guidance and shape but ultimately refuse to dictate how you’ll pass through the territory. Maybe the map should be teaching you how to travel, not where you’re going.

It’s honestly difficult for me to imagine what that kind of un-storied experience might feel like, or how it might look as a creative expression. Which I think is why it’s important to try to imagine it – to sit with the weirdness that comes when you manage to hold your most foundational story maps at arm’s length and try to see the territory beyond and behind them, simply as itself.

On the KnotWork podcast, Goudy sums up this weirdness in a series of questions for writers:

(quote) “What does it mean to hide behind stories? And what does it mean to get un-storied? What does it mean to still retain all the beauty and magic that comes with being a story lover and a storyteller, even when we know there’s so much to gain when we release the old stores that hold us back?” (end quote)

Even now, making this episode, I have to resist the urge to impose a storyline on my cancer experience, complete with a heroic ending: “After nine years of remission, on the eve of my ten year cancerversary, I finally finished the journey, and now I can finally tell you… [insert paradigm-shifting candy-coated wisdom bomb here].”

I’m not entirely sure that using the cancer example for this episode is really the best idea (like, as I’m recording this I am still unsure if this version of the episode will see daylight). After all, many people rely on stories to get them through this kind of experience. Many people find genuine strength and hope in narratives that frame illness as a kind of hero’s journey. And when that happens, it’s obviously a positive thing.

The limitation comes, I think, when we forget that the map is not the territory. When we don’t recognize narratives as fundamentally constructed – as designs overlaid on reality, leading us with an intent that may not align with how we want or need to travel.

The problem comes when it’s so deeply assumed that everybody is going to have the same kind of journey, to the extent that the assumption and the design becomes invisible – is just seen as the way things are. And I think we tend to get this kind of map blindness in any area of our lives that touches on the Big Stuff – on mystery and fear and hope and meaning. It’s like we’re least able to tap into our awareness of the narrative in the contexts where we need those maps the most.

During my own experience of cancer, I almost got it right. I knew all these hero stories floating around were powerful but ultimately artificial – artificial not in the sense of being fake or inherently meaningless, but in the sense of being artful creations, ideas crafted to contain something fearsome and give it a relatable shape.

But while I was able to say “that’s not the kind of hero’s journey I want to be on,” I wasn’t able to realize that I hadn’t released the actual core shape of that constructed map. I was still navigating by the narrative that I was something unformed and unproven, someone who was about to be violently transformed – finally! – into a character worthy of my own story.

I mentioned at the top of the episode that I don’t want to over-index on the cancer example, or on my specific viewpoint, and I’m saying it again here because it bears repeating: My cancer experience is not universal. Nobody’s experience of anything is.

That’s part of what makes stories such powerful and needed maps – they help us make sense of our lives when the ineffable or the fearsome takes a main role, and they help us feel less alone. They make us part of the human community. And yet, I think it’s a mistake to ever let the story stand in for our true, living experience – to wait for the story to tell us who we are and where we’re going.

I’m struggling a bit with how to close this episode, because I usually do have some sort of soundbite-style main idea to end with, even if it’s more open-ended than neatly tied-up. But I really don’t know yet how to approach being an un-storied storyteller – I’m not sure how these two powers of understanding might interact and inform each other. And as much as the hero-style story of transformation has sometimes lead me astray… I do still very much believe in the power of stories to transform the way we live, and I believe in the value of that power.

So I think I’m just going to leave you with these very genuine and very open-ended questions: Do you think it’s possible to both live stories deeply and hold them lightly – to see both the territory and the map? And if so, how does that change your sense of the maps you travel with? Which of those maps feel the most precious to you, even though you know they’re not the whole or only truth?

 

Thanks again for sharing space with me today here in the messy middle of these thoughts about story. And if you happen to be a newer listener, I want to make sure you know about a special resource I’ve made for members of the pod community – especially for those of us who tend to experience creative anxiety as part of our writing lives.

The Creative Rescue Kit is a set of three bite-sized but powerful tools to help us get out of the drafting doom spiral and back onto the path of actually writing our stories.

Everything in the Kit is designed to help you shift blocks and make the most of your creative time. It includes a quick guided audio practice to bypass anxiety blocks in the moment during a writing session. There’s also some low-pressure but deep-diving journal prompts to help shift your creative anxiety at the source. And to help you reclaim your writing practice for the long term, I’ve also created a streamlined digital writing session tracker to spot patterns in your writing life and discover which practices really increase your creative flow and fulfillment.

If you’d like to get access to the Creative Rescue Kit, just scroll down in the show notes wherever you’re listening and look for the link to become a newsletter subscriber. You can also join by visiting inspiritedword.com/contact – just look for the big peacock green button that says “Join the newsletter.”

And for folks already in the newsletter circle, check your inbox for some prompts to explore where your own creative life might benefit from throwing out the map and just being within the territory.

As always, keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.