Step Out of Your Story. Kim Schneiderman
would I root for as the reader of this story?” Second, because I appreciate good character development in novels, I’d wonder, “Why would a benevolent author place this character in this particular situation?” And, “What might this situation be teaching her?” Finally, because I see life as a spiritual story that I’m coauthoring: “How might she make the most of this situation to become a stronger, more compassionate human being?”
The answers to these questions and similar lines of inquiry helped me successfully navigate many challenging chapters in my life, emerging from them as a stronger, wiser, and happier person. Enhanced by my insights as a psychotherapist and journalist, such questions became the basis for a series of writing workshops I began offering around the New York metropolitan area in 2008. My hope was that self-exploratory writing in the third-person voice could help participants — many of whom had been impacted by the recession — reframe their losses as stepping-stones to a richer spiritual life and a deeper sense of self.
Like the protagonist in many stories, my Pollyannish premise was soon put to the test. In February 2012, my seventy-two-year-old father developed an aggressive form of cancer that took his life a few months later. Suddenly, I was a single, middle-aged orphan. My father’s death was the third cancer fatality in my small, immediate family in seven years. In 2005, my sixty-one-year-old mother lost her decade-long battle with ovarian cancer. Less than a year later, my father found love again. Four years later, his girlfriend died after a year-long battle with lung cancer, also at sixty-one.
After experiencing so many devastating losses, I had to ask myself, “Could I walk my talk? Did I truly believe that I had the power to transform my tragedies into triumphs simply by choosing to widen the lens through which I viewed my own story?”
Yes, I did, but understanding how requires reading between the lines. My father was the antagonist of my childhood story. The external narrative — how it looked from the outside — was that he was a good provider who worked tirelessly to offer his children all the opportunities he had been denied growing up in a working-class Jewish family in the Bronx. Yet the internal story, how I experienced him, was quite different. I never felt he understood me. He was a benevolent despot of sorts, and his “because I told you so” was never a satisfying response to all my important “why” questions. Because I was equally headstrong, I challenged him, and I made my mother my confidante. When I graduated college, I moved to San Francisco, putting several cities and mountain ranges between us.
Yet our story took an unexpected, positive turn after my mother died and I moved back to New York. Suddenly, my father and I were spending more time together, grieving my mother over Chinese food, biking up northern Westchester trails, sharing our mutual love of dance, and flying to California for family gatherings. I was older and wiser, and having undergone years of therapy, I had come to appreciate my father’s many positive attributes without taking his rougher edges quite so personally.
It wasn’t until my father suddenly became ill that our father-daughter narrative reached its inevitable climax.
It’s December 2011. My father, who has recently moved to Florida, has just been transferred from intensive care to a hospice unit at Delray Medical Center, less than a mile from his new home in Boca Raton. The admitting nurse explains that he needs twenty-four-hour supervision to receive services at home. My brother is immersed in a rigorous master’s program at Cornell University. I have been my father’s primary health advocate for the past three months, flying back and forth between my life in New York and Florida. Hiring a full-time aide is not only unaffordable, it’s also unthinkable.
So I decide to take a leave of absence — from my private practice, my friends, my community, and my frenetic but full life in Manhattan — to care for my father. It’s been eighteen years since we lived under the same roof; the last time, he was my provider. Now, the tables are not only turned, they are covered with painkiller cocktails, Ensure, and a stockpile of sweets. Over the next two months, I fix his meals, administer his meds, clean his house, learn to manage his finances, and hold his hand, both figuratively and literally, through waves of fear and pain.
Despite the stress, which I alleviate with exercise and beach walks, I feel my heart softening and expanding. My father and I share surprising moments of tears and laughter. We come to appreciate each other’s minds, feelings, and strengths more deeply. Old friends and family show up to talk about the good old times, offer support, and say their good-byes. I reconnect with long-lost relatives and see how fortunate I am to have such a supportive community of friends and family.
As this new and final chapter in our story continues to cook us, all our oniony father-daughter pungency melts into sweetness. One evening, my father tells me that, despite his fear and misery, he can’t believe he is still learning and growing. I ask what he means, and he responds, “That people have found a way to love me and that I have found a way to love them.” That’s all he ever wanted. That’s all anyone ever wants, isn’t it?
Today, I realize there are many ways to spin my story. Mine is but one version; others might tell it differently. As both the narrator and protagonist of my narrative, I exercise my authorship rights to tell it as a story of love and redemption…of the prodigal daughter, perhaps.
I also recognize that not all stories end in redemption. There is a place in this world for sadness. The more tragic the event, the more difficult it can be to put our faith in an empowering narrative. Some events — war, genocide, terrorism, disease, poverty — can lead us to question the stories we’ve always taken for granted. They defy the comforting plotlines or the preexisting narratives we have created about divinity, humanity, and justice. Had I been given a choice, I would have chosen another storyline and resolution for my life’s lessons. But for now, I embrace the gifts of my bittersweet fortune.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live…. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely…by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria — which is our actual experience.
— Joan Didion, The White Album
Sometimes the story of your life reads like a comedy; other times, like a tragedy. But if you read the text through the proper lens, you can always read your story as a personal growth adventure.
This book is built around a series of structured writing exercises designed to help you reimagine yourself as the hero of your unfolding story with the power to reclaim your personal narrative through choice and voice.
As a psychotherapist, former journalist, and consummate seeker, I offer you a framework, tools, and insights gleaned from both sides of the therapy couch. My aim is to help you respond to all the moving pieces in your life so that they conspire to help grow the best possible version of yourself — I want to help you to play your best role, so to speak, in the story of your life, your family, your society, and perhaps even the world.
To do this, I will guide you in applying classic storytelling elements to your own life, using the third-person narrative to elevate your perspective. This is not just a gimmick; rather, it’s a therapeutic technique inspired by a growing body of research that shows that viewing your life as an objective observer can help you see yourself through gentler, more compassionate eyes. It is also aligned with narrative therapy techniques that put emotional distance between people and their storylines so they don’t overidentify with their problems.
My book doesn’t follow any single ideology. Rather, it is a carefully constructed stew of ideas, consisting of several parts psychology; a few heaping tablespoons of Buddhism, Kabbalah, and Mussar (a nineteenth-century Jewish character development program); a dash of very basic literary theory; and a sprinkle of imagination sifted through my life-long fascination with human potential.
This method presumes that a) telling our story is a fundamental way that we come to know ourselves and make meaning of our lives;