My Story Is Currently a Hot Mess

I texted those words to a friend two weeks ago when I was trying to get ready for a Moth storytelling event at World Café Live in Philadelphia. It was maybe six hours before the doors opened, and my story was nowhere near ready. I had the gist of what I wanted to say, but the details kept rearranging themselves and my story was turning out far too long.

Maybe you need to know a bit about the Moth for this to make any sense. The first thing to know is there’s a podcast—The Moth Radio Hour. I recommend giving it a listen; think Humans of New York in podcast form, except it casts a wider net: These are people from around the country (and the world) just telling a true story from their life. Each episode features a few stories based around a theme. Occasionally the storytellers on the podcast are famous people, but usually they are people just like you and me. Second, most of the stories on the podcast are drawn from the live, open-mic storytelling events that happen monthly in venues around the country.

Every live event has a theme. You’re given plenty of latitude with it, but if you tell a story that has nothing to do with the evening’s theme, then your scores will reflect that. Yes, scores: These are storytelling slams. Every story gets judged and scored by three teams of judges (who are just audience members that evening, not storytelling experts). Ideally the story should be five minutes long; if you’re not finished by then, they ring a bell or toot a recorder, and if you get to six minutes, it’s a few taps on the bell or notes on the recorder and you need to wrap it up. The storytellers are amateurs, and anyone who wants to tell a story that night fills out a waiver and puts their name in the bag to be potentially called to the stage. Names are called one at a time as the evening goes on; you have no idea you’ll get to tell your story until minutes before you go up there.

I’ve been going every month for the past eight months, and there is something so compelling about being invited into another person’s experience for a few minutes, something so astonishing about people’s willingness to risk telling a story on a stage. But it’s not just the storytellers who amaze me. Every time I go, I’m impressed by the way people are so invested in the storytellers’ success. They want to hear you, and they’re willing to overlook the umms, the confusion, the false starts. I feel that when I’m sitting in the audience, and I feel it when I’m standing on stage with two hundred strangers engaged and listening.

Obviously, I’m a bit of a Moth evangelist, but I believe in the power of stories. Henry David Thoreau famously said, “It’s not what you look at, but what you see,” and that’s why stories matter. The story isn’t just the plot—the things that happen to us—it’s how we perceive them. What do we tell ourselves about what has (or hasn’t!) happened? Up on stage, I get to frame my experiences, but I don’t have to be on stage to do that, and neither do you.

What are you telling yourself about what’s happening in your life right now?

I spoke with someone recently who was considering leaving her job when she received some news from work that made her feel even less appreciated. “I’m a failure,” she declared. “I’m garbage.” This person is prone to seeing the worst when it comes to her own life, and she speaks to herself in a way that she’d never ever speak to anyone else. So I said, “Here’s what I see when I look at you and what you’ve done,” and proceeded to name all her accomplishments in the past few years; I reminded her that she’d done all of that in the midst of challenging circumstances. “Not everyone could have done that,” I said. Then I suggested that maybe it was time to make a pact with herself to never call herself a failure again.

What is failure anyway? Does it even exist? Isn’t what we label “failure” just another opportunity to try? If you try again, that is nothing like failing. Trying again is brave. And who could BE a failure? How can a person, a living breathing human who can always make new choices, ever be a failure? To call a person (or yourself) a failure is to declare the person powerless, to say that nothing can change, to imply there is, in fact, no hope.

That most recent night at the Moth, my name got called first, and my story was not a hot mess. The setting was, however: Something was wrong with the spotlight, and it shone so brightly and directly that I couldn’t see a soul. The mic glitched out a few times at the beginning and I kept wondering if they’d stop me to fix it. They did not. Despite the blinding light and popping mic, I felt calm and quiet inside and wove the pieces of my story together just as I’d hoped to. The theme for the night was happy, and I was happy to be telling my story, happy as the audience held my words so tenderly, happy for the way the truth of my experience bloomed in that dark theater.

A friend recently told me about a woman she knows who lived through a difficult marriage to a man who was emotionally abusive; in the end she cared for him as he succumbed to Parkinson’s. After her husband died, this woman started dating, and then she herself started having tremors and was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. But this woman didn’t quit. She decided she’d lived enough of her life unhappily, and she was going to make the most of the time she had. She didn’t tell herself the story that she was undesirable. She didn’t say, I’m a sixty-year-old woman with Parkinson’s and no man will ever sign up for that. Instead, she kept right on knowing her own worth, knowing her own heart, knowing what she wanted. She kept right on dating, and now she’s happily married. But where would she be if she’d told herself a different story? What would life be like for her if she’d looked at her past and present and said, “Things never go well for me. I guess that’s how it will always be”?

That day when I texted my friend and said, “My story is currently a hot mess,” she texted back: “That’s going to be the title of my first book.” I snorted. Because yes. Sometimes that’s exactly how life feels. Sometimes that’s exactly how life IS.

What’s magical about storytelling is that we get to choose how we see the story. Sometimes that makes all the difference.