Our brains love stories. In his book 21 Stories, Yuval Noah Harari writes, “In almost all cases, when people ask about the meaning of life, they expect to be told a story. Homo sapiens is a storytelling animal, that thinks in stories rather than in numbers or graphs, and believes that the universe itself works like a story, replete with heroes and villains, conflicts and resolutions, climaxes and happy endings.” Perhaps nowhere is this more personally impactful than the stories we tell about ourselves, whether we share those stories with others or just carry them in our hearts, allow them to shape our ideas about ourselves, our decisions, and our destinies. This week David dives deep to share how he came to see how a story he told himself for decades was false, and what it felt like to come to see the truth more clearly.  

Thanks for sharing this journey with us!

-Mindy

Good grief
Before going to school, my closest friends were girls. It was jarring to have this brought to my attention, so I learned to hide it from the people who made me feel the most uncomfortable. Nobody made me feel more uncomfortable than my father*. 

When I was five, my family moved to a small house in Glendale, Arizona, and I immediately made a friend, Jolene. She was a cheerful person who loved to play with me for hours. We made games and went on adventures together. We “spied” on the mail carrier who would deliver letters and packages to the big mailbox down the block where everyone got their mail. She lived in a cul-de-sac, and we loved to play games in the middle of it, safe from cars zipping along the meandering suburban roads.

My mother had a paper route and two young children at home when I started school at age six, and I would go to my friend Mikey’s house before school. After watching He-Man, we’d walk a few blocks to Pioneer Elementary. I think we met at church. He was delightfully nerdy and earnest. We loved playing Legos, Risk, and games on their Commodore 64. At school, I played with Mikey, Charlotte, and Susan. We all loved MacGyver. Sometimes, Charlotte and Susan would chase me around, and if they caught me, they’d pin me down and kiss me. “Ew, gross!” I’d scream, then we’d get right back to playing other games.

The first few years of my life, girls mostly attended my birthday parties. My father, always needing to be the center of attention, would make “jokes” about their appearance or about the nature of their relationships with me. I hated how obviously uncomfortable they were with him. I felt embarrassed and upset that he made them uncomfortable, which taught me that I would do well to hide.

We all do hide, but I was a bit of a prodigy. As the oldest of six siblings and the primary focus of my father’s attention, hiding became a strategy for carving out some space for myself. My father worked as a fundraiser, and when I was eleven or twelve, he came home from a work trip. I think it was like a sales kick-off that they would do every year. That year, they took the Color Personality Test. When he got home, he and my mother had us all take a self-assessment. I scored equally on Red (doer, competitive, determined, and purposeful) and Blue (relative, cautious, precise, and deliberate). Being so young, I did not know what to think of it, but I remember how eager my folks were that I was Blue. They started quoting scripture and playing up my empathy and healer traits, how spiritual I was, and how good that made me.

I went to my room later and wept. I knew that if I didn’t “fix” this, my parents were going to eat me alive. So, I studied the Red traits and decided that day to kill the Blue in me and focus my attention on a Red personality.

When I was thirteen, my father had spiraled into psychotic depression. It was a hellacious year. My mother was never very stable, which put them both in a bad way. After months of instability and terrifying episodes, things improved. I went to my father one evening and told him I did not believe in God. He was surprisingly kind, and after asking me a lot of questions, he told me that it would be a good idea if I kept this to myself, not because it was bad, but because his faith in Christ “was the only thing that allowed him to get up in the morning,” and that this was true for a lot of people. I learned that disabusing people of their faith was unkind and that I was dangerous.

So, I hid that part of me too. I learned to navigate church and enjoyed a lot of it. I even went to Costa Rica as a missionary. The man in charge hated me. He once told me I was the worst missionary because I broke all the wrong rules (wrong because he couldn’t send me home for any of my infractions). I loved it! I was far away from home. It was the 90s, and we weren’t allowed to call home but twice a year, and I only had to write home briefly every week. I hid on my mission, too,  but less than I had at home. I found more of all the colors in me, far away from home.

By high school, I had learned I could have close female friends, but we couldn’t talk about it without attracting unwanted attention from many of my peers. We were not “secret friends”; it was more that the nature of the relationship was best left unsaid. I learned not to talk about my female friends at home and always regretted bringing them home. Instead, I adopted the policy of having a “best friend” who was male. They were lovely people. I was grateful to have a friendship that was easy to navigate at home and at school. But that, too, fractured a part of me.

There was one person who really captured my heart as a young man. I met her when we were in fifth grade together. I thought she was the best. Her house was close enough to walk to, and whenever I was there, I fantasized that my parents were like hers: warm ex-hippies who treated their children with kindness and openness. It wasn’t until we were both 16 and she asked me on a date that something else woke inside me. I’ll never forget her coming to pick me up in the 1970s two-door jeep she and her dad restored. She parked at the end of the driveway and skipped to embrace me wearing low-rise flare jeans, an adorable halter top, and the cutest sandals. I waited outside to avoid having her come in. Of course, my folks were outside waiting with me, and as she approached, both made comments about her clothes, her breasts, and the danger she represented. I felt my heart constrict and sensed something inside of me shut down.

We had a beautiful date. I was falling in love with her. After she dropped me off that evening, I went to my room and resolved to shut down whatever was happening inside of me. I couldn’t imagine bringing this beautiful soul more into my life and navigating my home life without both of us getting hurt. So I pulled away. She was so sweet; she never pressed the issue. I like to imagine she talked it through with her parents as my children talk things through with me. She was probably disappointed, but she continued to be a lovely friend.

Looking back, I recognize that the need to hide stemmed from a deep-seated fear of rejection and a belief that I was somehow fundamentally flawed. My father's discomfort with my close friendships with girls, coupled with the pressure to conform to a specific mold, instilled in me a sense that who I truly was wasn't acceptable. This belief became a driving force behind the masks I wore and the parts of myself I kept hidden.

You know what’s funny? The narrative I told myself and the story I told of my life until very recently is that I was a person with few friends. I always had a best friend, but only friendly acquaintances outside of that. I could name my best friends from ages three to thirty-eight. But that story was a lie. Throughout my schooling and into my university days I had so many friends.

The problem was they were mostly women.

When I met Mindy on a research trip to the Amazon rainforest, I was excited to introduce her to my closest friends at the university: mostly women. But it didn’t go well. Mindy felt jealous, and I didn’t know how to navigate the all too familiar feeling of my friends being judged and our relationship sized up based on our gender differences.

And thus began the darkest phase of my lying to myself. 

The years of hiding not only fractured my own sense of self but also cast a shadow on my relationships. With Mindy, the woman I loved, I struggled to be fully open about the depth and importance of my female friendships. The fear of her judgment, a fear born from past experiences, created a distance between us, leaving me feeling isolated even within the intimacy of our marriage. For about a decade, I felt guilty that I felt a soul-crushing loneliness even though I had a spouse and a (male) best friend who loved me.

Then, last year, Mindy experienced a complicated friendship situation that brought up a lot of childhood trauma, so it was not handled well. I was caught in the middle, and trying to navigate it wrecked me. The experience played into my false narrative in dark and crushing ways. As the months stretched on, I felt myself closing down and wanting to flee.

But I was fortunate to have several beautiful friendships. Three of them are women I love completely. Each, in their own way, showed up for me over and over last year, reminding me with our interactions and, in happy moments, that I am lovable and worthy of kindness. It was a challenging experience, and I know I would not have been able to navigate this as intact as I did without their friendship.

This aspect of my life all washed over me with so much clarity during a recent mushroom trip. I had tried to live a lie that I told the people around me to “protect” myself from their scrutiny and scorn, and in so doing, I exiled a beautiful part of myself.

No more lies! 

So much pain washed over me. I felt caught by myself in the lie and I felt revulsion at the pain I had caused myself.

But how do I let go?

What are we to do when we finally wake up to the pain we caused ourselves and when we see both the truth of our reality and the truth of not showing up for ourselves? 

I could be rueful. I could be regretful. I could be angry. I could seek vengeance or pull away.

Or I can grieve.

The path towards healing and self-acceptance is an ongoing journey, one that requires compassion, courage, and a willingness to confront the wounds of the past. I am learning to embrace the entirety of my story, the light and the shadows, and to extend kindness and understanding to all parts of myself. Therapy has provided a safe space to explore these wounds, while practices like journaling and mindfulness help me cultivate greater self-awareness and acceptance. It is a slow and sometimes painful process, but with each step, I move closer to a life lived with authenticity and wholeness.

Grief is a beautiful process of letting things that were once alive become only memory. Grief can make room to fully celebrate what was alive and to mourn what was lost. Good grief cleanses the soul.

–david/gonzo

*Parental love can be a complex thing. I learned to love my father. I know my father’s story and the awful forces that formed him. I wish his life had been different.  I am working to make sure that my life and those of my children are kinder and more lovingly held.

NEAT!

Stuff Mindy thinks is worth sharing this week 😊

• I loved coming across this article on the Dutch trend of “doing nothing,” aka niksen.

• The lyrics of this lovely song sound like they were written specifically with our newsletter in mind. 🎶

• Hank, the crow that we raised as a chick at Great Basin Wildlife Rescue last year (where I volunteer), came back to visit the rescue this week!

• Have you ever introduced a favorite song to one of your children, only to then have them want to listen to it so much that maybe it loses a little of its luster? 😅 Zorbing is still a great song, but Mali requests it on the drive to school every single day now. And if you didn’t know, zorbing is what people are doing when they go downhill in one of those inflatable orb things.

SOMETHING TO TRY

What does the voice inside your head sound like? Is there more than one? 

What does the voice sound like when you talk to yourself about:

1. Your career?

2. Your sexuality?

3. Your most important relationships?

4. Your own body?

Note how you feel and where you feel it in your body. Take notice of the tone and speech patterns. Do some of these topics bring up critical self-talk? Do some of them sound kind and understanding? Understanding our inner critic is the first step toward changing negative self-talk. Identifying where we are critical helps us build more compassionate responses toward ourselves.

-gonzo

PARTING

WORDS

PIC

That’s all for this week! If you’re into this, share this newsletter with all your friends. Connecting with new subscribers is magical! 🧚🏻‍♀️

DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice.