Welcome to the ten year anniversary of the worst year of my life
Here’s how I’m going to celebrate
When I was 24 years old, I went on my first Outward Bound course, an experience akin to climbing onto a stairmaster and not being allowed off for eight days. It was sold as a multi-adventure program, but the OB definition of adventure was “hiking” and also “hiking while climbing rocks” and also “hiking while using a map.” Fresh off two years walking primarily between subway stops in Manhattan, I fell so far behind that when the front of the crew stopped to rest, by the time I caught up they were pulling their packs on again. I got more panicked with every step and by Monday afternoon it felt like there was a fire alarm going off inside my head, and I was as shredded emotionally as I was physically. At our afternoon rest stop, when I dropped my pack my legs would not stop shaking, and I clenched my fists so no one in the group could see how vulnerable I felt.
The instructors spread a rumpled topographical map on the ground. We were in a deep thicket of wilderness, no visible trail in any direction. It was late in October and the trees were barely holding onto the last few shreds of fall. The woods felt dark and brown that day, dark and brown and endless.
There’s a mountain up there, the instructors said, pointing into the steepest part of the forest. We’re camping tonight on the other side. We can go over this peak, or we can hike around. Up to you.
The crew discussed the two options. I worked in advertising, and sold the hell out of the glories of a nice leisurely flat stroll through the woods. We have been hiking for days, we have seen so many beautiful sights (lies, there had been no vistas, just endless stacks of trees), let’s save ourselves for the hardship yet to come.
It was a close vote; first a tie, then one traitor slipped to the other side, and the whole crew headed up the mountain.
I was terrified. What if this was going to be the climb that broke me?
I can’t remember anything about the hike up that mountain thirty years ago. I assume I suffered, I know I was scared, but that had been true for days.
This is what I do remember: the view from the top. Mountains for miles, sky arching to meet the curve of the horizon as if we were looking into the future. Up this high, facing north, the colors were glorious, a coral reef of mountain range. It was like nothing we had seen before. I was astonished.
And ashamed.
If it had been up to me, we would have missed it.
That night, in my journal, I grappled with my cowardice, how I had allowed my fear to nearly cost me the most astonishing vision.
Never again in your life say no, I wrote, then again in all capital letters: NEVER AGAIN IN YOUR LIFE SAY NO. Do not go around the mountain. Climb all the way up; that’s where the view is. That’s the whole damn point of the trip.
Create Hope, Just Kidding
I started this newsletter in late February of 2020. With the impending election I thought it would be a hard year, and I wanted to help tell a story that would get us through it.
I was speaking from experience. In the past few years I had lost my career, my baby, and my mom, in the most horrible way imaginable. It was a wilderness far deeper than my Outward Bound course had ever imagined, but here I was. I had survived! And how did I do it?
Storytelling, my friends.
If you define faith as the thing that you turn to for strength when you are most afraid, then my faith had always stood on two central pillars: My Mom. And storytelling itself. So when I lost Mom, I quadrupled down on storytelling. I built my career, and my life, around a simple promise, grounded in science:
Success starts with the story you tell. So if your life feels broken, you just need to figure out how to reset the narrative.
I had spent the last ten years doing deep research into the power of storytelling, through the lens of history, psychology, and biology. I could tell you what happened in your bloodstream and on your neural pathways when you told a certain kind of story, and I could deconstruct the elements of a narrative that could predict human flourishing, and what elements left you vulnerable to attack. I was confident that I had cracked the code for stories as survival instruments.
Change the story, I promised, and everything changes.
But as we sidled into 2020 like we were approaching a wild animal, the surge of toxic storytelling was giving me the heebie jeebies for humanity. If success starts with the story you tell, what happens when you tell a really terrible story?
My husband sometimes preaches about repent; not in the creepy way a televangelist might preach about it; more the periodic call from scripture to “turn around, you’re going the wrong way.” This newsletter was my own call for repentance to a planet that had lost the plot: Hey world, there’s an epidemic of toxic storytelling out there, and it’s poisoning us. Repent, repent, repent. Tell a better story.
When I launched, my goal was to demonstrate all that I had learned in my years of exploration: to teach the science of storytelling, to show that no matter how hard life might be, you could create hope if you knew how to write a better story.
Notice the date?
Check the timeline of my first entry. I really wasn’t trying to dare the universe.
COVID hit two weeks after I launched, like the universe saying “Challenge accepted!” I was up to it for a while, answering every horrible news event with a bit of scientific data about resilience, or a metaphor about seasons. But the world kept spiraling downwards. Derek Chauvin put his knee on George Floyd’s neck. California caught fire, then Colorado. There was an Insurrection and fires burning in front of the US Capital. When kids finally staggered back to school in 2021, there were riots over facial accessories, and an epidemic of mass shootings more regular than the lunar cycle.
And let’s be honest, me versus late stage capitalism? It wasn’t precisely a fair fight. My voice was nothing compared to the horrors being broadcast all around the world every day, but that wasn’t even the problem.
I believed every single thing that I said — I still do — but to say it over and over again started to feel repetitive. My attempt to be all optimistic all the time started to feel weirdly disingenuous. It didn’t cover up the deep thrum of dread that was knocking at the door all the time, every day, louder and louder.
Something else was happening as well. Whenever I sat down to write, I always seemed to end up writing about my mom, about her loss, about her life. Something deep inside was scratching to get out. I wasn’t sure what it was. But when I wrote about the deep grief pulsing at the very center of my life, it almost felt…better. More honest.
Nine years ago this week. We had both just survived the worst year of our lives. It doesn’t matter how hard I hold on, though. She’ll only live a few weeks longer than that sunset.
We are all living with grief at the center of our lives, these days. And I started to wonder if maybe I had been missing the point of the story.
In 2020, without being able to put it into words, I started to suspect that I was going around the mountain. I was trying to tell everyone that if we repented, if we told a better story, we could make it to the other side without suffering.
But there is always suffering, and it is never okay, and it often feels not survivable. There is often no way to go around the mountain.
This year marks the ten year anniversary of the worst year of my life. It is the year my mom spent dying. It also is a year that launched the worst decade I suspect many of us have ever known. Sometimes I think Mom didn’t die, she escaped this world that seems to be more on fire with every passing month.
Create Hope, Mom always said. But what does hope look like, when she has been gone so long? What does hope look like, when the ground we always thought was stable — the love of a parent, Democracy, the planet itself — is in fact sinking where we stand?
How do you tell the whole truth, the often terrifying truth, and still create hope?
Is it possible to climb that mountain, instead of going around it?
I’ve been trying to find the answer to that question for the last few years. It’s taken me to some unexpected places and with the recognition that I am tempting the universe again, I’m going to give this another shot. One week at a time, counting down to January 26, 2024
You see, all this time, I haven’t been telling you the whole story. Not about me, not about Mom. And not about story itself.
Stories, I have come to discover, are quite slippery things.
Robyn, I'm so happy to have your beautiful words and perspective to start off 2023. Looking forward to more! (Anderson Cooper needs to have you as a guest on his excellent All There Is podcast.)
Beautiful, poignant, deep and so completely you. As my eyes passed over the words you wrote, I didn’t hear my own voice in my head, I heard YOURS! Thanks for letting me hear you.