What happens when we revisit old stories with fresh eyes? Today we're thinking about how time and perspective can change our narratives completely. And I'll take you on a field trip to my middle school years (and my literal middle school) that changed how I see my past.
What happens when we revisit old stories with fresh eyes? Today we're thinking about how time and perspective can change our narratives completely. And I'll take you on a field trip to my middle school years (and my literal middle school) that changed how I see my past.
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(00:01):
Have you ever re-watched a movie that you loved as a kid, but as an adult, you're sitting there watching it, thinking what the actual [BEEP]? Well, this episode is about finding new perspectives. I'm Micaela Blei and welcome to The Story Letter, the podcast about telling better stories. I'm so glad you're here. So last week we talked about brainstorming and mapping our lives to find where your stories live. And when you're trying to think of a story to tell, it's so easy to feel blank or blocked. This happens to me all the time, and my students talk about it all the time too, but sometimes the block is actually, you can think of stories, they just don't feel interesting enough or meaningful enough or something enough. So this week I want to offer a strategy that you can use to solve that. Today we're going to talk about revisiting our old stories with fresh eyes and what that can do to make them feel meaningful for you right now.
(01:02):
So sometimes we have stories that are kind of stuck in time. We've been telling these stories the same way for years with the same angle. So there might be stories that you have that you think, oh, well, I already know what that story means, or it's about this one thing. And no one wants to hear that. We're worried that we're like the former quarterback telling the story of the big game and the big game was 25 years ago, and he's been telling it the exact same way that whole time. But the thing is, we change over time. So we also change how we view our experiences, how we make sense of our experiences. The first time you talk about a breakup– think about this. When a breakup happened three weeks ago, you tell a particular version of that story, especially to someone really close to you.
(01:43):
It's very different than the one you tell in five years after that breakup is long gone when you've had all that time to process it. And it's going to be even more different in 15 years, in 20 years. You've done some more living, you've got new perspective. Maybe you've even forgiven them for the stuff they pulled. Maybe. So what's possible when you come back to your old stories in a new way? I want to offer you permission to revisit that story or experience that you think you know all about. Because if you reflect and dive a little deeper into it now, you might find a completely different story about it, and that might be a story that you're interested in telling. So here's today's story that I'll tell you. It is about the misery of middle school, but it's also about how we store our old narratives and when it's maybe time to update them.
(02:38):
So I was severely bullied in eighth grade, and the experience was actually so stressful that I developed a lifelong chronic illness. It was an autoimmune disease, still is, and I think it was partly thanks to what the sociologists now call social aggression, what we just called bullying. And I tend to make jokes about what happened in eighth grade when I talk about it now, if I even talk about it at all, honestly. But at the time, it truly sucked. And when I graduated Mansfield Middle School, that was my middle school, to go to ninth grade, I decided: let me never walk into this building again. This is the site of my torture. My middle school was literally a half a mile away from my house. And even being that close, I just never went back. So fast forward to around 25 years later, I was working at The Moth, which is a big storytelling nonprofit.
(03:32):
I was doing their education stuff, and I wrote their education curriculum that we shared with teachers all over the world. So I was the person who would get the requests for the curriculum and people would register and I'd approve their requests or I'd email them back if they had questions. And one fall, I get this email from an eighth grade English teacher who is teaching storytelling in her classroom, and the school she's writing from is Mansfield Middle School, my middle school! She wasn't my English teacher. She was new in the last 25 years I guess. But I wrote back to her immediately. I said, of course you can use the curriculum. And also, by the way, I'm from Mansfield. I went to Mansfield Middle School School. And she wrote back, she was so excited. She said, that's amazing. You're Micaela Blei. I've played your stories for my students.
(04:20):
Do you ever come home? Would you ever want to come and speak to my class about storytelling? And I mean, that feels very good. That made me feel extremely famous. And so I wrote back and said, I'd love to. She said, great. I said, great. We schedule a day. It's actually going to be a whole assembly to present the entire eighth grade about storytelling, and I'm going to be a special visitor. Amazing, wonderful. I will admit I didn't totally think through what it would be like to walk into that school, except it did occur to me that I'm coming back now basically as a star, I mean of some kind. I'm an adult. Look at me with real friends and a whole job with a paycheck and this art form that I love. I'm feeling good. So the day comes, and being a New Yorker at that point, I didn't have a car.
(05:11):
So my dad actually picked me up at the train station in New Haven and drove me to the school, which is what he did when I was in middle school. He drove me to school. And you know that feeling when a place is so familiar to you, you haven't been there in years and you just know every single thing about it? I know exactly how much he's going to slow down before he takes the turn into the school's driveway up into the school. And as we're going up this hill, the school shape sort of emerges. It's this incredibly familiar shape. And my chest is already feeling tight. And we turn into the roundabout where you drop off kids, which is the roundabout where I learned to ride a bicycle. I learned to drive here. This is where he dropped me off for big dances in eighth grade.
(06:01):
He pulls up there and I'm in the front passenger seat just like I always was. And he says, okay, I'll be back in a couple hours to pick you up. And I got out of his car and I was just hit with this wave of, oh my God, I'm back. And I walk in, well, now you have to get buzzed in because of safety. That was not true in the nineties. But I get buzzed in and I open the door. And now at my school, the eighth grade always did murals on the walls as their final art project. And some murals got painted over every year so that the new eighth grade had a fresh canvas to paint on. But some murals were kind of landmarked because they were good or nostalgic or something. So some murals are the same that they have been for 30 years.
(06:49):
So the first thing I see when I walk in the door of my middle school is the same mural I saw in 1991. It's a huge starburst with a moon. And I have a visceral reaction. My stomach clenches. I'm walking into the same hallway with the same mural, and now I have to go to the same front office I have always gone to. And then I have to take a right and go upstairs into the eighth grade hallway and my whole body is going, why did you agree to do this? You should not have agreed to do this. This was a huge mistake. You can turn around, you can get your dad. But I don't listen to my body. I go up the stairs and there are the yellow lockers where they would put shitty things in my locker and fake notes from the popular boys.
(07:32):
And I'm walking down this hallway where I used to read a book while I walked so I could pretend to ignore them when they were screaming at me. And I'm walking down towards the English classroom and it looks like it's actually passing time, the hallway is filled with kids, and they're definitely looking at me and whispering. And now my body's in full panic. And then someone comes up to me and says, “Excuse me, are you Micaela Blei?” And I'm like, “Yes.” I don't know what this kid's going to do to me. And he says, “Oh my gosh, it really is her, you guys.” And another one goes very politely, “May I please take you to our teacher?” And we head into this English class where everyone looks up, and I'm not kidding you, when they see me, they burst into applause. And I felt like I was going to cry.
(08:19):
And the teacher comes over to chat. And it turns out that since they've watched a few of my performances on YouTube, they've decided that I'm funny. And the teacher says, “A couple of the girls would like to show you around after your presentation because they were very excited to learn that you went here.” So that's great. So we go to the auditorium where I'm going to do this assembly, which is the same auditorium where genuinely terrible things happened to me in 1991. And I'm on this specific stage where specific things happened, watching these kids come in, and everyone files in. And I'm looking down at them and they're looking up at me and they're smiling. So my plan for this presentation was to tell them a couple of stories and talk about storytelling and be as much of a badass as you can be as a storytelling nerd, I guess.
(09:10):
And so I tell them this story that I actually tell a lot about making a friend the summer after eighth grade, the summer after that terrible year. And they're totally with me, they're a lovely audience, and it feels very connected, and they applaud afterwards. And I hadn't been planning on telling anyone the truth. I'd been planning on being this bulletproof adult the whole time, but right now they're just being so kind. And I find myself saying, “I have to tell you guys, it feels really meaningful to tell this story here. Eighth grade was really tough for me when I went here and kids were pretty terrible to me. And I'm really grateful that you guys are letting me have this experience instead.” And there's a pause and I suddenly feel kind of terrified. I've broken the spell. I shouldn't have told them. I don't want them to think I'm lame. But this kid in a Red Sox cap and a hoodie and glasses in the second row just yells, “You should come back to eighth grade with us.” And I swear to God, a bunch of them cheer. They're just so completely sweet.
(10:11):
And it's not that I've never been around eighth graders before, since eighth grade. I have, I'm a teacher. I teach all grades. It's just that any eighth grader inside of this building, I had always sort of seen as a vampire, very cruel and clever with, I guess, pointy teeth. And now suddenly they're just really nice kids. And we have Q and A and finally it's over. And these two girls run up to me afterwards. They're like, “We're the ones who get to show you around.” They're so excited to be getting out of class. And they want me to tell them everything about the school from long ago. As they say, they're both in Band and they love puns, and I love them. And actually they remind me of girls in 1991, not the ones who destroyed me, but the ones who were so nice to me.
(10:57):
At the end of eighth grade, there were these two girls who kind of adopted me in the final weeks of school. And I had totally forgotten about them. Even in 1991, eighth graders were not all vampires. There were some silly band kids also. And so these girls, I tell them my memories about this rehearsal room, and that's where my eighth grade mural was. And do you still have school dances in the cafeteria? And we're just gabbing. And they're telling me about their class trip. And finally I say, “I should probably go. My dad is picking me up. And it was really fun to hang out.” And they walked me to the door and we sort of hug goodbye. And my dad is waiting for me in the roundabout in his car, which is still a blue Honda like it's 1991, except it's a hybrid. And I wave goodbye to them through the window, and I get in the car and he says, “So how was it?” And I just… burst into tears.
(11:50):
When it was all happening in eighth grade, I never cried in front of my parents. In fact, I kept it a secret for way too long, which is part of the reason why I probably developed that illness. But I would get in the car after school and my dad would ask me, how is school? And I'd tell him, amazing, I won the spelling bee or whatever, and I'd give him the good stuff that was happening. I never told him the terrible things. And now here I was a whole adult and I was sitting in his car just bawling. And it wasn't that this visit took away the badness of what happened, but suddenly I was an adult walking through there, not a kid. I was remembering that people can be kind too. That nothing is just one thing. And I got this opportunity to revisit a place that made me feel nothing but dread, and to experience this new and kind of wholesome and lovely way for that place to be.
(12:55):
My friend Jason Griffith, he's an education professor and a very smart guy. He has this idea he talks about called emotional timestamping, that you see a memory differently depending on your current context. I think the chance to revisit and retell an experience can transform what we think are very carved in stone ideas of ourselves. And so how do you use this in storytelling? Well, can we all go back to our old eighth grade and meet new people who are not our bullies? Probably not. But we can revisit things. We can take stories that feel ingrained, and ask ourselves: what's changed about me since then? And what didn't I see then that I see now? And how could I tell this story differently than I've been telling it so far? I mean, I hope we can have compassion for our former selves and the way that we saw that story, but we also have the chance to tell a new story about our lives.
(13:51):
So maybe you're not the big baby of your family, you just feel things deeply and that's beautiful. Or maybe you didn't fuck everything up at work. You were just being asked to do more than is humanly possible. So as you're finding stories to tell, here's a couple of questions for you. First, what's a place that holds a lot of memories that you might want to return to? Literally, or just remembering, try thinking about the experiences that you associate with that place. What are the moments that really stand out to you? That can be a great place to find stories. And then the second question I have for you is, what are the stories you always tell? What are the stories that are so part of you that they're just automatic, that you might want to revisit? The way that you can revisit a place to see what is still true and what might actually just be an old version of a story? Okay, those are your assignments, and next week we're going to talk about how to take a story idea and turn it into a capital S story. You're going to learn a few really simple, powerful tools to do that. So I hope you'll join us. If you are enjoying the story letter so far, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. I am going to have my producer Laura read those because I'm too nervous to read them, but she will read me the good ones, and I can't wait for those.
(15:12):
This episode was written and hosted by me, Micaela Blei. It was produced by Laura Boach. Our theme music is the Duke of New York by Adrian D. Walther. This has been The Story Letter Podcast, and I am so glad we're doing this.
OUTTAKES:
I went vaguely viral on TikTok yesterday, by the way. It was about my most wholesome Costco conspiracy theory. Why did I pause so long after that? I think I thought I was in a conversation for a second. That was very funny. I was like, I should give someone else a chance to talk now. I've been talking a long time. This has been The Story Letter Podcast. Wait, where are you going? You're leaving already. Okay.