When I was in college, Mom discovered that her mother had been dating a married man for the last fifteen years, with no regrets. As Granny said to me later, with a shrug, “Sometimes you just need a man to put his shoes under your bed for a little while.”
While I didn’t share her views on monogamy, I always thought I want to get older like Granny does — in other words, for a long time, not at all. In her 50s, she took up competitive club tennis and routinely beat women twenty or thirty years younger than her. When my Aunt Nancy bought home her fiance, a Naval officer and college athlete, Granny stole a set from him on the tennis court, a story we told at every family gathering for the rest of her life. She had intense disdain for growing older, rejecting one suitor her own age with horror: “Why would I date an old man?” She beamed with joy when a doctor looked at her mammogram and marveled, “You have the breast density of a forty year old.”
I loved my kickass, forehand-smashing, sex positive grandmother. but biology did eventually come for Granny, as it does for us all. In her case, an ulcer burst, causing invasive emergency surgery to stop the bleeding, and she sort of…never came back all the way. Little health complications started to add up. She couldn’t play tennis anymore. Her mechanic boyfriend broke up with her.
It was a plot twist. It was the plot twist: people get old. It’s inevitable, and universal, but Granny couldn’t handle it.
I’ve spoken about Susan Spencer-Wendel, choosing her story in the parking lot of the Burger King, and how it helped her to transcend the tragedy of her ALS diagnosis.
I’ve spoken about Jennifer Pharr-Davis, who at a crucial moment, reset her narrative, powering her through to the speed record on the Appalachian Trail.
All her life, Granny pursued one story with complete passion and purpose: If I work hard enough, I can stay young and beautiful.
That story was true in her 40s, and her 50s, and her 60s, and deep into her 70s. But it was never going to be a story that lasted forever. Sooner or later, her story was going to break.
Which brings us, naturally, to the movie Jaws.
Specifically, that moment in the movie two-thirds of the way through when Roy Scheider finally gets a look at the shark that has been terrorizing his town.
I’ve used this image in my workshops for ten years, partly because it makes me laugh, but also because I think it speaks to this deep universal craving we all have in a world that feels scarier than ever before.
Roy takes one look at the monster and he doesn’t scream, he doesn’t panic, he simply says we are not equipped to handle this beast, and has there ever been a more universal fear?
I’m getting old and there’s no way around it. The doctor confirmed my ALS. My hiking pace is way too slow. I’m scared and I have no idea what to do from here. I’m not ready for this. Little help, please. Little help.
When the demons rise from the sea, we call out a little help please, and because we are humans and storytelling is our superpower, what we seek is a story that will show us the way forward. And we find a better story, from Stephen King or Martin Luther King or Jesus or Buddha or Oprah or Steve Jobs or V.E Schwab.
Or maybe we don’t.
Granny didn’t.
Every Story Breaks
Granny had one story about herself, the driving story of her life: I am worthy because I can live the life of a young woman. For decades, that story kept her young, kept her engaged, kept her moving forward with purpose and literal power. But when that story stopped being true, she did not want to write another one.
After her boyfriend dumped her, after surgery shoved her off the court, Granny despaired. She stopped eating, almost dying in her apartment before Aunt Nancy drove from South Carolina to intervene. She stopped speaking. She stopped walking. She just…. stopped.
We spent years trying to convince Granny to reset her perspective. Even Mom, the original creator of hope, could not break Granny’s conviction that an older life, life in an imperfect body, was not worth living. As Mom said to me, everyone I work with wants to live, and Granny just didn’t.
It took Granny about three years to die, but die she did. And ironically, the thing that killed her was the same thing that had been driving her for the last forty years. It was her story.
I realize that it sounds sort of comically manipulative, for me to be like, “Twas a story killed my grandmother!!” But it’s true, and my aunts can back me up.
Sometimes we have stories that are true for so long. They are the rocks of our lives. I am young and strong and in perfect health. I have a thriving career and an identity in the world. My marriage is solid and my family is thriving. And then the plot twists, the monster emerges from the sea, and the old story isn’t true any more. Then what do you do?
Well. If you want to go on, you better be able to build a better story. Because none of our stories about ourselves are true forever. The one thing about life that is guaranteed is that there will be plot twists. No matter how much tennis we play, we live in mortal bodies, and we will get older. We live in an unstable climate, in every sense of the word. There will be storms of our own making, and storms that come from out of nowhere.
For instance, our mom will die, and so will our dreams of a family, and so will the career that has always been the bedrock of our identity, and now I’ve described the three years of my life heading into 2014, and what story are you supposed to tell to survive that?
That’s not a rhetorical question. That is precisely the mystery I set out to solve, nearly ten years ago.
If there is a science to storytelling, then surely science can show me how to build a better story. Surely science will show me how to feed the good wolf, how to flourish despite loss, how to reset my narrative when the plot twist sends me to me knees.
And ten years on, after studying thousands of scientific studies and hundreds of years of human history, after investigation into cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology and neuroscience, after years of testing one storytelling model after another in the field, after seeing how my different models perform in a wide range of industries, I have cracked the code.
Today, I stand confidently in front of CEOs and advisory boards, and I say to them, “This story will change everything,” and it’s all grounded in science. Or at least science the best way this holder of a B.A. in creative writing can understand it.
The Hero’s Story Has Six Syllables
One perfect story. The story I tell, again and again. The story I’m telling you now. It’s a survival story. It’s the survival story. The story that will see you through anything at all.
This hero’s story covers endless plot twists. It’s a story that will help you survive your diagnosis, find love, come out, rebuild a career, build a family, march for progress, stand up when you fall down, capture your temper when you’re on edge.
One story. Three acts. Six syllables total.
No matter what you are facing in the world, in what stage of life you are living, if you master this one story, these three acts, these six syllables, you can take on the world with resilience and faith and spirit and joy.
Come back next week and I’ll tell you what they are.
I should offer a caveat, though, to be totally fair. When I offer you a new narrative, I’m fooling around with your neural pathways and your bloodwork. I’m hacking into your core operating system. Stories are the instrument of every good thing humanity has ever done; but they’re also the instrument of a hell of a lot of destruction. We all have believed, in our lives, lots of stories that turned out not be true, and those stories have done a lot of damage.
If my story is wrong, if it’s unreliable, I could do real damage not only in my life but yours as well.
Technically speaking, it’s even possible I could sort of accidentally undermine your faith in humanity itself. But we won’t think about that part right now.
This is one chapter in a year-long saga of love, grief, and the stories we tell to survive it all. To start from the beginning, go here. Or subscribe for free to get a new chapter every Tuesday.