You probably think this blog is about you.
I confess that, when I started toying around the idea of writing for public consumption, not just this blog, but the sheer notion that anything might live outside my head, my first concern was how others would react. How do you tell your story without bringing other people into it? I'm always reminded of Ray Romano's quote about how when his wife complained about her portrayal on his show, he used to tell her to go and cry on a bag of money. But truly, if the goal is that we live intertwined, how do you tell your own story without telling someone else's?
The wonderfully supportive friend and talented author Liza Palmer reminds me to never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
We all have a story. As my grandmother was fond of saying, paraphrasing the quote, "If everyone threw their problems in the middle of the table, you'd gladly take back your own." Sometimes I look at my life and think I've gone through a lot, and then, more often, I feel truly fortunate.
Over the years, we all become expert at telling our stories, revealing what we want to, and holding back the parts that we'd rather stay dark. I think that's why old friends are so cherished - they've been there, they know, we don't have to cover that part of the tale, no need to start at square one, square 14 will do.
But even still, we whitewash our stories, sometimes without even realizing it. When I went to my high school reunion this summer, we were just randomly talking and reminiscing when somehow it came up that my dad had died one summer while we were in junior high. Literally everyone was like, "Um, we did not know this." Which blew my mind. How did I keep that a secret? Why did I keep it a secret? I don't think I tried to, but I think I just didn't make it a part of my story. I mean, I certainly saw friends that summer and some of them must have known, but looking back, I guess it just never came up. Pretty unbelievable when you think about how I grew up in a tiny hamlet and went to school with the same 75 kids from age 5 to 18. I skipped a serious chapter of my story, and by doing so, I missed out on the support and comfort I could have gotten from my friends, and perhaps kept them from understanding a little more about who and what I am.
But sometimes starting at square 14 can be liberating -- having the chance for a fresh start, the chance to wipe the slate clean and reinvent yourself. With old friends, it's harder to do that. Old friends have memories like elephants -- "Good luck trying to be cool. I remember when you fell down that flight of stairs."
I find myself guilty of that all the time - and more so, I think of my longtime friends as the same age when we were making our best memories together. Which is why I'm always asking them, quite seriously, "Why does everyone else so damn old and we still look 21?" Because when I look at them, I don't see how old we are now, I see 14, 21 or 25.
And that's both a good thing and a bad thing. By keeping everyone in these boxes, I'm not allowing them to grow in my mind, and, perhaps, vice versa. And everything they say or do, I see and hear through the lens of our shared history. "Oh boy, this is just like that time..." "She always does this..." When, with someone new, they get the benefit of the doubt, they get a chance to tell their own story with no judgment.
Doesn't everyone deserve that, especially the people we care about the most?
I recently had dinner with someone I had grown up with, after not seeing him for 20 years. Everyone wanted to know whether he had changed. He was exactly the same and yet completely different, both at the same time. And thank God. Maybe it would have been comforting for me to see the same guy I always knew, but I would hope that 20 years would have brought him to a different point than when I last saw him at 18. I found him to be candid and mature, and, well, not 18 anymore. He's a dad and a husband and a successful businessperson. And as much as we walked down memory lane, we also spent a fair amount of time talking about our lives now, and how, honestly, a lot of the time, we felt like we had no clue. And it kind of blew me away.
When we were leaving, he started laughing when I pulled out a pack of gum - "You still carry gum." Something I've done since I've been old enough to, well, chew gum. And the recognition of this small, shared thing brought us back to square one again.
I'm not going to lie, it felt really nice, a nice place to visit now and then, but I wouldn't want to live there.
And since he has his own version of this story, it may well go differently, and that's okay. But in my version, I look much younger and thinner, and I most certainly did not casually pull a hair off the pack of gum before I gave it to him.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
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