So… I posted my third episode of NERD ALERT today!
It takes so much longer to create a podcast than it does to write a weeks worth of blog posts, but so far, I’m enjoying the process. (But I really am so sorry that my blog posts have been so irregular…)
Anyway.
Podcasting pushes me to find my words differently, and when I’m producing each episode, I get convicted by my words more often. Hearing myself say something is profoundly different than reading my thoughts. I catch the hypocrisy or the blind spots in my life much sooner, and, I feel more vulnerable about that fact on the day when I’ve scheduled a podcast to load onto Spotify.
But this current episode is called “When Stories Converge,” and it’s an exploration of two huge American scandals that took shape in the 90s — the Bill Clinton & Monica Lewinsky scandal, and the OJ Simpson murder trial. Those were two stories that got completely hijacked by the media, yet they were very complex and very personal human stories before they were ever a scandal. And, each story had a lot of players — which created a lot of collateral damage when the stories got so big and so sensationalized. But the world eventually moves on from stories like these, however, that doesn’t mean there’s no lingering damage or unrequited truths that persist in the lives of the key people who were involved.
The news cycle always moves on…
And the human toll of a media frenzy may never fully heal for some people…
But reclaiming a story that got lost in the commotion is a start.
I had so many thoughts for how to present this content in my podcast, and so I probably created three very different versions of this episode before I finally edited it into what it is right now! But one of the things that ended up getting cut out of this episode about how stories converge is this:
Even when a story is only a small one that no one else in this world cares about but you, if there is more than one person involved in the mix, each person has his or her own side of the story. And if those stories are never examined from the other person’s point of view, that shared story can create a loss of connection in this life. I probably didn’t say that very well — which is why I ended up cutting it out of my episode!
But let me give it another try by personalizing it a bit….
Since I posted my first episode of NERD ALERT, I’ve truly been working on grieving things from my past, and I’ve made a lot of progress on some fronts, but not much progress in one main area: the area of dying relationships. I guess I’m having trouble making peace with the loss of one primary relationship in my life that seemed to get all tangled up in the messiness of my “survival” as a person and as an author, and I feel like I can’t go back and fix this one. So I’ve decided that my best choice is to fully grieve it, and let it go for good…
It was the kind of friendship that I treasured. I remember very early on in our connection believing that this relationship could endure just about anything. When a few storms disrupted things in the early years, after they passed, and the damage was assessed and repaired, the relationship was only made stronger. But back then, when a storm created a two-sided story that felt like it had the power to change or divide us, this person and I unpacked both sides of the story and found the common ground. We heard each other’s side, and then we affirmed it, forgave it, and collected each other’s details with grace.
But as my life grew more personally complicated, my story started to turn very inward at times. And that inward turn made it difficult for me to invite people in — even people that I loved and trusted. There were things happening in my life that I didn’t know how to sort for myself, and therefore, I could never sort them for others either. And I think this person’s life got super complicated, too, and so neither of us pursued the other one so we could keep that “sense of place” between us that we called true friendship.
I know for certain that the strain of my personal life started to make me a different person — one who was fearful and lost much of the time, and a person who doubted her words so much anyway. So because I grew vacant, important people in my life moved on with their lives, and I moved on with mine…and we drifted away from one another. Maybe early on in this drifting process, I thought I’d regain my strength and try to paddle back to my friend, but I think we both got caught up in undercurrents that made that effort feel too daunting. I can’t speak for anyone other than myself, and so I suppose it’s best to admit that’s what has happened to me.
But after pondering this for so long now, I think I’m finally close to letting go of this relationship, and the good news is, I know I’ve reached a place where I can pray for and bless this loss with genuine love in my heart. I’m still sad, and my feelings are still a bit raw — and, my story is so incomplete without the details of my friend’s side of things, and how we both reached this place of departure from each other’s lives. But I’ve decided to believe that some endings are just going to be that way in my life.
Some stories don’t get to have tidy endings — which is a conclusion that did kind of make it into my podcast!
But so many misunderstandings and wounds happen when people share a story in this life, and because the stories we as human beings can write in our hearts about things we don’t fully understand, these misunderstandings can be so damaging and enduring. And when this reality plays out on the grand stage of this life, the pain must be overwhelming — because, on the little stage of life, it hurts pretty bad, too! So I learned a great deal from the two NERD ALERTS I featured in this episode, and for me, the takeaways I discovered were both large and small.
In my podcast, I really wanted to express how deeply important it is to me to honor another person’s story — even one I’m not personally involved in, or one that features people I don’t particularly want to know personally! But if I ever stop believing that everyone has a story that can contribute to the larger understanding of things, then my passion as a storyteller will have officially died inside of me, and there will be no reason for this blog or any upcoming episodes of my podcast!
