I heard a four-year-old girl say a version of that today.
She was following her mother around with a book that was nearly as big is she is, and all she wanted to do was find a cuddly spot on the sofa so she could get lost for a little while in a good story. It’s such an innocent desire. And for people like me, it’s also so much more than that — it’s how I live and breathe.
But I had this big reality check about stories today. The way I see it, everything in our world is framed up inside of a one. My story, your story, stories of the people around us that we know, stories of the people around us that we don’t know… Stories in the newspaper, stories on the evening news. Movies, television shows, a binge-worthy original series on a subscription platform. Documentaries, shorts, the all-important journalistic exposé… Even a phone call with a friend with a lot to share… Or the end-of-the-day-download with your hubby who’s been away on business for too long… Stories keep our lives moving and flowing, and they sit at the heart of everything we experience on a daily basis.
NERD ALERT: My apologies for this sudden interruption, but I’ve been told that I talk about podcasts too often and that the “sheer neediness” of my desire to consume stories this way needs to be prefaced with a warning at least. So you’ve been warned. I’m going to talk about one of my favorite ways to consume a story. A PODCAST
A super awesome friend in my life is just as into podcasts as I am, and over the weekend, she alerted me to one that has me totally hooked. It’s called The Drop Out, and it’s about the downfall of the tech company, Theraons, and the company’s illustrious young founder, Elizabeth Holmes. It’s such a fascinating story to me for so many reasons, but I guess now, more than ever, it’s got my attention for a more personal reason.
It’s got me hooked in because this real life story is built on top of a myth.
The form of storytelling known as mythology is closely linked to religion and culture, which makes the collision of a real story and a myth extra twisty and fascinating to me. The genesis of these kinds of stories always starts with a critically flawed belief that somehow becomes an accepted and nearly unquestioned truth. And once that false narrative is established, every action, every choice, and every outcome is doomed if anyone starts to challenge the mythology with the light of the real Truth.
Usually you only hear a mythologically-based story like The Drop Out once the myth has been exposed as a fraud or a lie. So as each layer of the story is carefully unpacked, the listener has the added wrinkle of knowing how the story ends, and therefore, is often left to wonder how so many people believed what is now such an obvious lie. That’s what’s so surprising about the Theranos story when you hear it in this podcast. Some outrageously smart, incredibly talented, highly-noble people got caught up in a huge fraud…
All because people wanted to believe that the possibility wrapped up inside of the myth was true…
Writing about my own life story on this blog has given me this unusual perspective. Whenever I write something about my life or post an entry about my past in The Imposition Tour posts, I feel myself stepping outside of my inner narrative, and joining the reader on the outside of my story for a minute. And because I’m sharing the story, I know how the various events of my life ended up, yet I catch myself becoming a sometimes judgmental observer, too. But I’m also the whistleblower who is outing myself to the world on some of the myths I’ve believed in my life… So at times, when I’m considering my own story, I can’t help but ask myself the same questions I’m asking when I listen to this podcast:
How could some like me fall for so many bad myths?
I guess I know the answer to this. I’m an entrepreneur and as such, I’m probably more willing to chase a good idea or story down the proverbial rabbit hole. But for the most part, the good ideas I’ve believed that simply weren’t true started out from a genuine place of creativity and the freedom found in possibility thinking. There’s such a rush when ideas are forming, and people join you in a belief in something big, something new…and something revolutionary.
And even when there are signs that the ideas might be too big, or the expectations too ambitious, the rallying point of the belief in the possibility ends up becoming enough for a person like me to keep trying. And in my experience, when you start trying harder, that’s when the myth fully takes over, and you lose all sense of any real Truth to guide you forward.
I felt compelled to post this particular entry today because I’ve gotten some really moving private messages in response to the first 24 posts of The Imposition Tour. The messages have been incredibly encouraging — because that means people are reading the blog — but more than that, they are from other people who have been caught up in a mythology of possibility, too, and some of these people ended up losing everything just like me. Their gratitude is genuine when they thank me for being willing to write about my life this way…and all I can say is how thankful I am that my flaws and failures have the new possibility of giving someone else a space of understanding and connection (now that I’ve finally emerged from my own dark and gloomy rabbit hole).
And, I’m incredibly thankful that the clarity of my faith has been greatly tested, and has fully come up to proof every single time I’ve exchanged my belief in a myth for the Truth I always find inside of my relationship with God.
I have this deep empathy for the people who got caught up in the Theranos frenzy. When they’re interviewed in this podcast, I just want to connect with them somehow and thank them for owning their story and their part in the debacle with such dignity and transparency. It isn’t easy to share from a place of shame and confusion. But even when I hear soundbites of Elizabeth Holmes when she’s speaking in her phony deep voice from a stage of honor and prestige at an award ceremony, or from the boxed in corner of a room during a deposition for her criminal trial…
