I’m Haley. Book midwife (editor), author, and single mom of four.
I have always understood my life not merely as days and years stretching out behind me and in front of me but as a Story. In general, I think this has served me well (although I look back at certain times in my life and realize I was telling myself a story that wasn’t true). And that is the danger, I suppose. What stories are helpful and what stories are destructive?
But if you think of your life as a Story, you want it to be a good one. We all naturally want to avoid pain, suffering, emotional wounds, broken messy things. We long for safety, security, familiarity. This is normal. Healthy, even! And more than understandable. (After all, our brains are trying to keep us alive and sticking to what is familiar is often the path it takes.) But, as Mrs. Croft in Jane Austen’s Persuasion reminds us, “None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.” And we couldn’t even if we wanted to. Life is full of curve balls. And without plot twists, well, you haven’t got yourself a very good story.
Something that always strikes me about the popular Humans of New York project by Brandon Stanton (combining photography and biographical storytelling of people he encounters by chance) is that we all have a pretty wild story to tell. I doubt anyone has ever said from her deathbed, “Well, everything turned out about how I expected. No surprises!”
A few weeks ago I bought Martin Shaw’s new book Liturgies of the Wild at the oldest bookshop in Ireland and started it on a bus ride to the Cliffs of Moher. (Getting to see Ireland was itself a plot twist I didn’t expect and am grateful for.) I think Shaw is a bit of a kindred spirit who understands the power of Story and of how we all view our own Stories. He writes about the story pattern of Severance, Threshold, and Return. In many stories, there is a breaking off from the familiar, a complete disorientation. The stable world gets turned upside down. Stable ground is split into a vast canyon, like a giant’s open mouth. Or perhaps the sea carries you far away from the shores you know, and you are spit out from the belly of a beast into a foreign land. Here you struggle to survive, to find your way to comprehend the shift in your fortunes. You get lost. And something of the old you, well, dies to make way for the person who will find her way home.
After Severance, the journey to the Threshold is set in a world of danger, of catastrophic mistakes, of reckoning and struggle. The parts of one’s identity and ego that have been tightly grasped begin to slip from your fingers and evaporate. And only after walking through the Threshold to this other world can you begin the journey home. That Return is what Shaw describes as a gift that cannot be simply for the main character, but for the homeland. (My first thought was Diggory in The Magician’s Nephew bringing his mother the magic, healing apple.) Perhaps the gift is knowledge. Perhaps it’s love. Either way, it isn’t just for you.
I know the world of Severance very well--to have your world become a ship in a storm that is rocking side to side as you slide across the deck. There is no way to tell which way is up to breathable air and which is down, down, down, into the depths of the ocean. Which ropes can you hold fast to when your feet are no longer steady beneath you? How do you survive?
I don’t think I’ve fully entered the Return chapter yet. I must be somewhere near the Threshold: seeing it ahead of me, or just having walked through and beginning the journey home. But so much has changed, shifted, fallen away and been rebuilt, that it is a disorienting journey back to myself. What will remain, and what will die? What parts of me will be permanently lost? What familiar lands have fallen into the ocean, into nonexistence? What will the new shoreline look like? How will the maps of my soul need to be redrawn?
The journey is brutal. But what if there is simply no Story without these plot twists and sorrows? No triumphant defiant joy without the unexpected blows?
Stephen Colbert had a powerful interview with Anderson Cooper about grief that I return to every so often. Colbert argues that you have to learn to love the thing that hurt you the most (in his case the tragic loss of his father and two of his brothers). Not because you wanted it to happen. Not because you wouldn’t give anything to change it. But because there is Gift in the mystery of the loss. It is, strangely, possible to be grateful for the worst thing that has ever happened to you and Stephen attributes a quote to Tolkien: “what punishments of God are not gifts?”
In many fairy tales, something profoundly unwanted and often unfair has happened. Hansel and Gretel are abandoned in the woods by the adults who are supposed to love and care for them. Snow White’s stepmother hires a hitman to take her out. Cinderella is reduced to household staff and falls asleep in the kitchen fire hearth’s ashes. Whether it’s illness, death of a loved one, mental health struggles, or relationship trauma, many of the griefs we experience feel paralyzingly unfair. And I can get stuck gripping the sand of the unfamiliar shore where I’ve been shipwrecked with my toes and screaming at the Heavens in fury. And I think there would be something wrong with skipping this step. (God in his Heaven can handle our cries of rage.) But eventually we grow hoarse and must take a breath and make a survival plan. We shed the salt-soaked clothes and find something new to cover ourselves with. We find the springs of fresh water on the island. And one night, as we fall asleep under the stars, an inkling of hope begins to flicker. Maybe the person who enjoyed years in the calm waters couldn’t survive this. But you’re not that person anymore.
You didn’t get to decide where the storm will shipwreck you, but you do get to decide who you will be on the new shore. And if you Return home, God willing, you will be unrecognizable. Is that the homeschooling mom who thought if she checked every box, she could control the outcome of her life and family? No, it just looks a little bit like her.
How will the knots in the plot of our lives be untangled? And what good does it do to refuse to begin the next chapter? At some point, we will find ourselves far out of the shallows into angry and overwhelming waves. Can we see the storm not as an unsurvivable tempest but as the prelude to what Tolkien calls “eucatastrophe”–the unexpected plot twist of grace that breaks in when the battle seems all but lost, the overturning of the curse that brings unprecedented joy? Is your Story’s triumphant ending only possible because of the journey you didn’t think you could survive?
A quick note: most of my posts about my divorce are protected behind the paid subscription paywall for privacy reasons. (Substack subscriptions are a huge help to me financially as a single mom, so thank you to everyone who has upgraded to a paid subscription.)
These are some of those recent posts:
A Year After My Life Fell Apart
Please, let me save you from “Wuthering Heights”
The Terrible Gift of the Truth
Have a beautiful weekend,
Haley
(Editor of Word on Fire Votive, Author, Podcaster)
Haley’s Catholic Kids’ Cookbook
Haley’s Children’s Mystery Series about Mouse Nuns
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