Shifts take place ad infinitum, both in the outside world and the inside world. This is inevitable. Life is all about shifting – and about handling changes as gracefully as you can.
Grace, as you know, is a disposition to kindness, courtesy and clemency. It is an inherent part of us, but we must train it so that we may behave better, lifting ourselves and our surroundings to higher levels. As a trait, grace is linked to empathy, which, as has been proven by multiple studies, is cultivated best through storytelling.
Whenever something shifts, we need to remind ourselves we are a pair of stories, inside and out, intertwined but not necessarily mutually dependant, as I will demonstrate by recounting my own two stories.
On the outside, I am a multifaceted and talented woman in her forties, scraping by as the breadwinner of a family of four. I am stuck in a big old house without the means to properly support it, in a part of the Netherlands that has been hit hard by a fatal combination of earthquakes induced by natural gas pumping, economical decline and an ageing population.
My husband is equally talented, but unable to find a job to help support us. He has to reinvent himself over and over again, which is quite tiresome for someone who has already gone through quite a lot, both physically and emotionally. On top of that, we have two amazingly bright and sensitive children, who need a lot of guidance and attention, and above all, stability. Chaos is lurking at every corner. These past six years, in this cramped story, everything and everyone have been out trying to get us. Surely, a bad ending is unavoidable.
There is something so sad about the outside story that I used to choke when telling people about it. But one can only take so much choking, and what is more, after a long struggle, I realized that me choking meant that I could not tell the other story, the one from the inside, with as much enthusiasm as it deserved.
The second story, though it does get some of its ingredients through interaction with the outside story, is in no way co-dependent. I know this, because in and of itself, it is a cheerful tale, with an intriguing story arc that aspires to stimulate as many people as possible to reach inside and start developing their own story. Some of the sadder parts of my inside story are documented in my novel, but most of the good stuff finds its way to my poetry, articles and other writings, and of course to my art.
I live each of these two stories to the fullest, blown away by the shifts as the pair (and what an odd pair it is!!) continues to unfold side by side.
In the first story, I am the tenacious bitch fighting day in day out to keep her act together. She’s merely a casualty in the bigger picture. I jot her story down like a journalist, and a good one too, because if you’re forced to tell this kind of story, then you’d better make sure you got the facts straight.
In the second story, I am relentless too, but on a different level. I work hard to make room for creativity, so that I can follow where the flow leads. I am forever in pursuit of pliability. A peculiar mix of writer and protagonist, I recreate myself countless times, and each time I alter the story, it actually gets better.
By zooming in on the second story, I help myself to a healthy portion of empathy and grace. These are traits the tenacious bitch did not ask for, but now that they are there, in the tool kit both heroines have at their disposal, she might as well use them, so she can hang in just a little longer.
As I said, we all are a pair of stories. Though inside and outside are intertwined, they are NOT mutually dependant by default. It is up to us how we let each story influence the other.