This weekend my long-time friend Chris invited a dozen people into a time of guided story-telling at my house. Chris approaches conversation like an artist to a canvas. He brings out the depths in people, whether he’s teaching poetry to middle schoolers, cooking cafeteria meals, or greeting neighbors in the little French town where he now lives. I knew this was going to be good.
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As we finished up heaping plates of pork and rice lovingly prepared by our Dominican-American friend, Chris passed around stacks of notecards. We grasped pens in hand and followed his simple instructions: write the numbers 1, 2, and 3 on the card. For each number on the cards, we wrote a word or phrase pointing to a bit of a story from our lives.
With the first card, we began by writing a person who came to mind with the word “dad.” I wrote my maternal grandfather’s name. Then for number two, Chris invited us to write to adjectives describing that person. In the silence, I remembered pieces of a story I’ve often retold myself—how this grandfather refused to speak to his own Black son-in-law, how he presided gruffly over a family where alcoholism ran rampant. “Broken,” I wrote.
But here’s the magic of Chris’ activity. When we had filled in all the pre-written numbers, he asked us to add one more number to our cards.
Just when we thought we had written the end of the story, he invited us to find one more chapter.
Just a few days earlier, I had listened to this podcast about research showing just how valuable this kind of activity is. Psychologists have compared what happens as people tell themselves four different kinds of stories about their lives: stories that go from bad to good, good to bad, bad to bad, and good to good. They found that often people with unhealthy thought patterns get stuck retelling life narratives ending in bad. But often the difference between a bad-to-bad story and a bad-to-good story just depends on where to end the story. What if we could learn to extend the story to a next good place?
There is a danger in taking this idea too far. White Americans in particular are socialized to write every story with a happy ending, even when it means erasing real on-going social problems. But slapping a happy ending on a tough narrative isn’t the only option. Research also suggests that we need “stories of integration.” These kinds of stories find good intermingled with the bad. My own research suggests that resilient hope demands stories of integration.
And so, when Chris said to add number four to my card, I found myself writing a more integrated story. I recalled how even though my grandparents’ home was a place of tumult and brokenness, I encountered holiness there. My grandfather had a sense of humor, and my cousins and I loved to joke with him about his big belly. I can picture him kneeling in the garden among the long rows of potatoes and asparagus to feed his family. Yes, I remember his blatant racism, but I also remember how he tended an orchard full of apples.
My mother once told me that in her first job as a store clerk she had a terribly harsh boss. She mused with a tone of wonder, though, that she wasn’t intimidated standing up to that boss because she’d learned from her dad that even sometimes-cruel people are not one dimensional. Every person is complicated. As Esau McCaulley’s new book How Far to the Promised Land shows through his own family story, legacies are complicated. We need to question overly simple narratives and make space for more chapters.
To fill in words after number four, Chris prompted us: “What’s something good that’s a part of your life now because of this story?” I wrote on my card: apple trees, and empathy.
I hope this week you’ll listen for another chapter in your life. When have you stopped a story with bad when something good is also in the mix? What stories have you oversimplified? Let’s write better stories together.
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