I didn’t know it at the time, but I’ve spent the past year collecting stories. I’ve always loved stories, ever since I was a little girl. My love of stories and words would find me curled up in my room, reading for hours on end. It would find me at my grandparents’ houses listening to stories about their childhoods. It would find me writing and receiving countless notes from my friends in school, catching up on all the latest news. It would find me asking my parents to retell me stories about my childhood. It still finds me scrolling through social media and blogs and those long posts that most people scroll past because they take too long to read. It finds me patiently listening to one of my sixth graders’ long, drawn out, “could have been over 5 minutes ago but it’s not” stories at recess and sometimes even in the middle of class. It finds me at school, when most people have left, in a neighboring classroom listening to the story about my coworker’s weekend. It finds me pouring over my own past journals, devouring my own words and reflecting on memories. My love of stories has taken me a lot of places. But none as far, or as profound, or as revealing as this past year.
Owning your story is incredibly hard, especially if there’s stuff in there that hurts or that you’re not proud of. I would venture a guess that most of us have those chapters within our story that make us cringe, that we don’t share, or that we share with a bunch of disclaimers like, “But that was when I was young, “ etc. I definitely do. Some people can put those chapters behind them, and not revisit them again. They can forget them or bury them deep down inside. However, something that I learned when I went to treatment is that there, in that place, those things don’t get to stay deep down inside you. You’re there to work, and part of that work is digging up all those chapters that you hoped would never have to be seen again. Then, not only do you have to dig them up and lay them out there, but you have to then go through them piece by piece like a detective. There’s nothing like going back through all those painful memories with a fine toothed comb, your therapist that you met a few short weeks ago at your side. But I digress. One of my best friends has told me for a very long time, “Everyone has a chapter that they don’t read aloud,” which is true, for some. However, for others, like me, those things that I buried started to fester and they had to be dug up, looked into, and owned for me to start to heal.
For a long time, I expected perfection from myself and the people around me. During this time, I found myself constantly disappointed because neither I, or the people around me could ever live up to the expectations that I set in my head. Although I have been working on this for years and have made great headway, this past year has been the culmination of all that hard work. This year, instead of getting frustrated or angry, I have been working on seeing people as perfectly imperfect. I was reminded of this very thing this summer during Family Week. We were talking about temperament, and I had filled out a long set of questions the day before so that the family therapist could explain to me and my parents how my temperament has affected the evolution of my eating disorder and how I can use it to my advantage in my recovery. Within her explanation of my personality and temperament (that almost felt like a psychic reading it was so eerily accurate) she looked me in the eye and said, “You see people as perfectly imperfect and it helps you to know people on a real level.” The fact that someone from the outside could see how hard I’d been working on something on the inside, and actually see evidence of that evolution was huge for me. It remains one of the best compliments that I have ever received.
When you stop seeing people as their mistakes, and start seeing them as human beings that are doing their best with what they have, your perspective drastically changes. When you do the same for yourself, your life drastically changes. That is what I feel has happened to me over this past year. As Brene Brown would say, “If you bury it, you forever stay the subject of the story. If you own it, you get to narrate it.” Owning my story, instead of burying it, owning up to my mistakes instead of making excuses, and looking at those ugly parts of my past instead of sweeping them under the rug has taken a lot of work and has resulted in a lot of discomfort. But being able to see yourself and others as perfectly imperfect, helps you to change your perspective and helps you to start to give the grace that you and others so deserve. This life does not come with an instruction manual, and we are all just doing the best that we can, which is all anyone can do.
Watching others be brave and share their stories over the past year has helped give me the courage to do the same. This year of collecting stories has shown me the power of speaking your truth, no matter how scary or ugly or sad that truth is. As ugly and chaotic and scary as this past year has been, I’m finally starting to be able to see my experiences as a gift. Not everyone gets the opportunity to see people at their lowest of lows, and then see them triumph and walk out of that dark place under their own power. This year, I have been blessed with the opportunity to do just that. I’ve heard dozens of stories, witnessed growth and realizations and aha moments, sat in on ceremonies and celebrations, held people as they’ve cried, sat with people under immense grief, seen genuine smiles after years of sadness, and been a listening ear to words that no one else has heard. And I’ve had some pretty amazing people do those very same things for me. As human beings, we are perfectly imperfect. We mess up, we undergo immense tragedies and profound happiness, we see things we wish we didn’t have to see and witness beauties that we could never have imagined. We walk this journey of life together and our stories weave in and out through one another’s in all the good and bad ways possible to be connected.
This is one of my greatest realizations this past year: Through it all, we are all here on this Earth together and we have so much more in common with each other than we realize at first glance. There are SO MANY MORE similarities than differences we have with our neighbors, we just need to take the time to listen to each other’s stories and be brave with our own, so that we may find that common ground that is undoubtedly there. Start to see yourself as a story collector, not as a story judge.
My goal every day is to see each and every person that I come into contact with as perfectly imperfect. I try my best to give people grace, and to keep in mind that everyone has a chapter to their story that they don’t read aloud. Although it may be hard at times, changing my perspective to this attitude of patience and grace and understanding has been transformational for me as a teacher, as a family member, as a friend, and as a human being.
I am perfectly imperfect, and so, my friend, are you. And you know what? There’s something so very serene and beautiful in that. So next time someone makes you mad, or next time you mess up and are tempted to get angry at yourself...pause. Remind yourself that they are only human, and so are you. We’re all doing the best we can with what we have, and we are all perfectly imperfect just the way that we are.
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