Writing for Your Life: A Guide and Companion to the Inner Worlds

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Every Life Is a Story

When I ask a gift from my death, it is that at the last minute I will be able to look back
over my life and know, without any doubt, the entire story I have been living. As this
final gift, all the details and events that I have been relentlessly ordering my entire life
will arrange themselves in a simple and startlingly beautiful structure, until mean-
ing-surprising and dazzling-flashes out of the dank, sticky, and entwined chrysalis
of daily life. Then I will know, despite pain, disappointment, and limitation, that this
life of mine has been a good and meaningful work.

It seems
the story of my life
is the story of trees I've loved,
some are standing, some fell down.

Every life is a story. Telling the story and seeing our life as story are part of the
creative process. Under the best of circumstances, the process of writing allows us
to give ourselves over to the realm of the imagination, trusting that within it, we act
in the best interest of the self. Sometimes the simple willingness to explore story asserts
the reality of the individual, and then the creative process of finding and telling the story
becomes part of the way that we construct a life. Our life becomes a story that we are
always in the process of discovering and also fashioning, a story in which we both
follow and lead—a story that grips us with its necessity, posseses us unmercifully, and
yet, paradoxically, that we create and recreate.

In this life, those willing to live in the imagination, walk that odd path between
the inevitable and the spontaneous, between the ancient and the unique, between
what is given to us and what we make, between what belongs to history-the history
of our people and our culture-and what is as quintessentially ours as the sound of our
own voice.

The story of our life is the substance of it. And our story is also the cross we
bear. It can, simultaneously, be both our joy and our suffering, our enlightenment
and our ignorance.

I am in something now. I am in this story of me and my mother. This FIRST
story. My story. I need to know this story. In one million ways, I need to know
this story.

As much as I hate this story, it is MY story and I have always wanted to know
MY story. It is the place for me to stand. The true and deepest knowledge of
this story with all of the accompanying feelings, thoughts, emotions, ideas is
my foundation. It is the place for me to stand although I cannot even talk
about it yet.

-Barbara Lipscomb


Not Claiming Our Own Story

There's an old folk tale called "The Sorrow Tree": for aeons, people complained con-
tinuously and piteously to God. Unable to bear it, God suggested that they hang their
sorrow on the Sorrow Tree. Then they were to choose any sorrow they wished from
among those hanging there. They circled and circled the tree, looking for the very sor-
row that would be exactly fitting and bearable, the one sorrow that would fulfill them.
But after much searching, each inevitably reclaimed his or her own pain.

Whatever our story is, we must come to know it. It is given to us the way we
are given ourselves; it is the source and the record of our identity. Perhaps story is the
only thing we have at the end of our lives, and it is everything.

Imagine that you are at the end of your life. Without hesitating, without think-
ing, record the story you have lived in five sentences.

It is difficult for us to give up our grief because it is ours and through it we cre-
ate identity. But sometimes the story, or the sorrow, to which we are clinging is no
longer dependable. Story, if we allow it, can also trap us. It can become the treadmill,
the rut. It can ravage and reduce us rather than inform and expand our life. One can be
as zealous in creating a false story as another might be in discovering the authentic one.

Rated1y telling a cover story is one of the ways we avoid the one story we must come
to know. Offered the opportunity to know the deepest story, we tell the very same cover
tale again, ever more ardently, out of fear of being in the unknown, out of self-pity,
self-righteousness, out of despair. Refusing to relinquish these misbegotten tales, we
find ourselves choosing a life that has nothing to do with our own.


Stalking the Authentic Tale

"Do you have a story to tell about your ethnic background?" I once asked Dan Saucedo.

"There is no story," he said. "My parents are completely assimilated. We never
talk about Mexico, and it doesn't matter to us."

Is there a story, then, of their assimilation? I wanted to ask him this question
but didn't. He was adamant that there was no story to be told, and I felt it would be
disrespectful to insist. But my intuition persisted. The way he insisted on the absence of
story sounded like an amputation, and I wanted to know about the missing limb. Over
time I suggested there might be a story, and over the same period of time, circum-
stances alerted Dan to the possibility that another story might be hovering beneath
the one he was telling of his cultural neutrality.

Indeed, he discovered that his grandfather had kept a journal at the turn of
the century during the first years that he had come to this country from Mexico. This
discovery opened a door into story that Dan could not have predicted. It took Dan
back into the past, and it changed his future. A few years ago, following the trail of
this story, he went to Mexico; there in the remote mountains he discovered, as he told
it, "villages of people looking exactly like me."

The exploration of the Grandfather is a rummaging through the forbidden
story, which was admitting I am Mexican. Being born in the fifties meant
Mexican was a socially incorrect nationality, especially in Covina. I did not learn
Spanish when it was mandatory in the lower grades, because it took me one
step closer to the bloodline I was denying. "Mexican? No, no. That's not me."
When light-colored blacks passed as white, I passed as Italian. By using my
imagination, I was able to approach my heritage through the back door. It
was a way of easing into the current without knowing it.
-Daniel David Saucedo

An authentic story is open-ended. It can change. It can be transformed, and
it has elements of the unknown. It combines all the elements until everything fits. It
resembles other stories sometimes exactly, giving us the impression that we have been
here before, and yet there is also something mysterious about it, something ambiguous,
even contradictory, and that part is equally fascinating. We are consoled by the famil-
iar and intrigued by what we don't know. Here is one way to evaluate a story's authen-
ticity: if you think you know the entire story, you're outside of it. You are in illusion.

The exploration of the Grandfather is a jumbled story with three primary
sources: the image of the ideal mentor grandfather; my maternal grandfather,
of whom little is known, except that he was an Indian from Mexico who loved
to play music and left when my mother was young; and, lastly, my paternal
grandfather, who was a working-class property owner from Zacatecas, Mex-
ico, and whom I know through his journal and the stories my father tells.

In your workshop, my imagination was freed to create a composite grandfa-
ther. My maternal grandfather left twenty years before I was born, and my
paternal grandfather died eight years before I was born. Thus, knowing some-
thing of them, but not too much, gave my imagination a foundation and the
freedom to explore the prism of heritage. The three images fused into a single
character-the teachings of one, stirred in with the mysticism of the second,
infused with the practical world of the third.