It is my second date with Steve and I’m screaming.
At first glance it’s not clear why I am screaming. It is a gorgeous spring day in Asheville, North Carolina. I am with my new boyfriend, launching our kayaks onto a gorgeous river with mountains on either side. Mom is still alive, the tumor inside her still a clump of pre-cancerous cells. My career is humming along at its peak and I think it will stay this way forever.
Steve, who was not lying on his dating profile about being a proficient Class IV boater, has loaned me his ducky, which I name Barney because he is huge and purple. Look at us, gently guiding our boats through this mountain valley. MAYBE THERE WILL BE A KISSING SCENE!
Minor technical detail: I have never actually been in a kayak before, but this feels irrelevant. After all, I have done two Outward Bound courses, and I used to sit in the front of my dad’s whitewater canoe; surely, I have picked up some skills through osmosis, it’s all water, after all.
However, as I take my first confident strokes down the river, Barney pokes his big purple bow in between two stones that have barely been promoted past pebble, and settles in for a rest.
“Ha ha,” I say, shoving Barney awkwardly off the gravel, as Steve shoots me a look of puzzlement similar to the one he will give me a week later when we go mountain biking and I crash in the parking lot. “That was weird.”
This initial snafu becomes a recurring motif. We are on a very gentle Class II river, but Barney is like a dog determined to sniff under every rock. While Steve navigates downstream, a tiny flick of his paddle sending him into the flow of the rapid smooth as a mountain trout, I ping pong around the river like a giant blind Roomba.
It is a beautiful day, the birds are singing with such volume they might be animated, but instead of a Disney power ballad, my soundtrack is nothing but expletives and shouts of frustration, growing in volume with every hundred yards.
Steve eventually calls back, “What are you cursing at?”
“I’m hitting every. Single. Rock. On this river!”
He laughs. “Well then, stop looking at them!”
“Your boat goes where your eyes go,” Steve explains. “Beginning boaters get really freaked out by rocks, and they stare at them. But staring at the rocks just makes you crash right into them. Instead, keep your eyes on the current, and you’ll glide right through.”
I laugh when he tells me that.
“It’s just the same in life,” I say, and I’ve got the science to prove it.
Success Starts With The Story You Tell
In the late 1970s, Martin Seligman did a landmark research study on the difference between happy people and depressed people. He expected to find certain life circumstances that predicted depression: divorce, or economic hardships, or illness.
I was a college sophomore when I encountered this research for the first time. I had recently permed my hair to shocking results, my freshman 15 had drifted towards 30, and I wasn’t sure any of my friends really liked me, largely because I wasn’t sure I liked me either. I was a good target for a cult or a religious conversion, but the faith leader I found was a psychologist named Martin Seligman.
I’m not sure the stakes of any academic research had ever felt so deeply personal before. As I scanned the chapter to his findings, it felt like I was reading a horoscope for the rest of my life. What if happy people had universally flat stomachs? Or were effortlessly attractive to friends and romantic prospects alike? Was I doomed?
The results were startling. He found that from a “how’s life going” standpoint, there was no difference between fulfilled, happy people and people struggling with depression. They were equally likely to be married or single or divorced; to be rich or poor (once core standards of living were met); to be healthy or struggling with health issues.
I was shocked. It didn’t matter if you had friends, or were fat? It didn’t matter if you graduated at the top of the class, or lost in the middle, or not at all? If that didn’t matter, what did?
Seligman called it the explanatory mindset. When bad things happened, as bad things always will, what do you focus on? How do you explain it? What do you imagine will happen next?
Are you a divorced person who says I shall never love again or a divorced person who says now I am free to soar? Do you hit a plot twist and panic, or do you hit a plot twist and say I can’t wait to see what happens next?
When you focus on all the problems you’re facing and spend most of your time obsessing about what’s going wrong, you’ll find yourself crashing again and again, whether it’s a boat or, you know, Democracy. If you focus instead on what you want to accomplish and searching for opportunities, you’ll naturally start telling a different story — and you’ll find yourself taking a much different journey.
In other words: See the river, not the rocks.
This Story Will Save Your Life
My mom was a Presbyterian minister, so is my husband, but I have always put my primary faith in storytelling. As a child, I had a deep sense that stories mattered, in some way beyond imagine I am Laura Ingalls and I have my own horse. Seligman’s research felt like discovering a scientific formula for my faith. His work lit a pilot light that’s been burning ever since, and not just in me.
In the decades since Seligman’s groundbreaking work, thousands of studies have confirmed his findings – and in ways that even Seligman might never have imagined. People who are effective storytellers are more likely to get elected when they run for office. CEOs who tell a good story to their employees and shareholders are more likely to survive a crisis. Disaster survivors are less likely to experience PTSD.
Stories even change the way we age.
Researchers at Yale University profiled thousands of adults aged 50+, and then tracked them through to their 80s, to discover what habits, health profiles and behaviors influenced longevity. As expected, habits such as not smoking and exercising prolonged life by about three years on average.
But here’s a plot twist: something else mattered far more, and Seligman might have predicted it.
As part of their research, researchers asked 40somethings to describe what they thought it would be like to get old. People who had a positive story about aging lived on average 7.6 years longer than people who had a negative story about aging.
In other words, do you picture getting older and think, oh, my body is going to fall apart, my mind won’t be as sharp, it’ll be terrible? Or do you imagine getting older and think, wow, I’ll be so much wiser, I’ll know what really matters, I’ll be surrounded by all the people I love?
If you tell the second story, you’re going to live, on average, 7.6 years longer than if you tell the first one. And here’s the really good part, and it’s the jumping off point for decades of work from neurologists, psychologists and even evolutionary biologists: people have the ability to change our stories.
So if you decide, right now, to start telling a good story about getting older, then you have just increased your lifespan by 7.6 years. And you didn’t even have to break a sweat to do it!
Since I was 20 years old, this research has given me a deep sense of peace. I did not have to fear the future, because it did not matter if I lost my job, or never got married, or stayed heavy forever. It did not matter what happened to me; it only mattered what story I told about what happened to me. When I change my story, everything changes. That’s true for me. It’s true for you. It’s our heritage, as humans. Stories are our superpower.
The First Plot Twist
But also, it’s not quite that simple, is it? See the river, not the rocks but hi, have you paid attention to what’s happening with our Democracy? Our climate?
When you’re paddling in Class V rapids, and right now we are all paddling in Class V rapids, success requires a hell of a lot more skill than see the river. There’s literally tons of water slamming you into the rocks, water that has more strength, power, and momentum than anything you could muster on your own. Sometimes the river drops out from under you and suddenly you’re falling through midair, in a boat when you really should be in a plane, plummeting out of control, and “see the river” is… well, the river is all you can see, and it isn’t helping.
Storytelling in an era of late stage capitalism, or in any crisis situation, is like paddling in Class V whitewater. Sooner or later you are bound to find yourself upside down in a low oxygen environment, and survival requires some high-stakes performance.
It’s one thing to know that a good story will help you survive. It’s something else entirely to know how to tell a good story, when the river falls out from under you.
As mine did, on a Friday morning in June, 2012, when Mom knocked on my door way too early in the morning and said “I’m so sorry, I never wanted to have to tell you this.”
This is the third 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.
Getting old has its moments,lik when you doscover a whole new group of younger friends who havent heard your stories that you have been telling over and over, for ever!!!!!
Oh my gosh, Robyn. I finally opened your substack and started reading and I am completely hooked.