What's your story?

Integrity and self-narration

Last week I invited you all to a thread where I asked you what question you are living now. I didn’t know how it would go over, honestly. I grew up with the notion that sitting with unanswerable questions is sacred work, but that idea flies so completely in the face of our modern culture. Instead of unknowns, we want certainty—to believe there is an answer to every question, a wall that will keep all the fearful things at bay, and a story that will save us. Making space in your life and heart for the unknown can feel like swimming upstream against the current. It’s tiring, vulnerable, and sometimes lonely.

You all rose to the occasion, though, and it made me so happy and hopeful. Reading every single contribution I felt… I can’t think of better words… well accompanied. Thank you.

(Feel free to go over there and weigh in if you haven’t yet. I promise to read every comment.)

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Belonging isn’t a feeling I have much experience with. If finding our place within commonly held stories is how we mostly access belonging, and I suspect it is, then this makes sense. I have felt, at one time or another, outside of every prevailing story I’ve ever encountered in my life— stories about family, romance, marriage, patriarchy, religion, race, community, country, and capitalism.

It’s not easy to feel fundamentally alienated by the world. In response, it’s been tempting to rush to commit to an alternate story, to become a fundamentalist for my transgressions from the norm, as if there’s still an answer out there and I’ve finally found it (unlike all you other poor suckers). It’s harder to stay open to the idea that there isn’t a single answer, or any fixed story outside of myself that will cure my essential isolation from other people. The only way to feel connected, to feel like I’m inside anything, ever, is to stay in constant, open-hearted conversation with the people I love and the world as it transforms endlessly around us.

Who are you? Who am I? How do the stories we are telling about ourselves and the world overlap or diverge? How do we make space for each other? How do we find common cause and connection as everything and everyone evolves in unknown directions?

There’s a way of approaching integrity that is really about enforcing a common story. This is integrity as moral consistency. Because what is morality, ultimately, but a collective story about what is right and wrong? To be consistently right is, in this schema, a means of belonging. To be wrong is to risk not just shame, but exile.

It may not surprise you, I’m not at all interested in this framing of integrity. I’ve had enough of that schema for one lifetime, thanks very much.

What I am interested in is a practice of integrity that is wilder and wider than that, that recognizes how much of our sense of reality, of belonging, and of who we are is constructed. Even the forces we experience as facts, as scientific givens, are mediated by our stories about them (It’s called the Theory of Relativity.), and stories are always partial. There’s always more we don’t know than what we know. There’s always space for revision or reconsideration. We are always better served by staying open, receptive, curious, as opposed to closed or definitive.

This also isn’t easy. It’s unsettling to feel like there’s so little known ground to stand on. But if you can allow it, it can also be thrilling.

I was listening to a podcast interview this week with Alok Vaid-Menon, a transgender activist, poet, writer, and comedian. Even from my open perspective, I’ll admit, Alok kind of blows my mind. They are exploding so many stories, disrupting so many categories, and as I listen to them I feel a part of me rising up to protect what I think I know. But there’s another part of me that finds their commitment to their own freedom electrifying. I mean, isn’t that what I’ve always wanted, and what has alienated me from so many of the stories swirling around me— my deep and abiding desire to be simultaneously known and free?

When my son came out as trans there were aspects of it that were tough, I’ll admit. I had had so many expectations about who we would be together, what markers of his maturation we would share as women. I imagined us going wedding dress shopping. I imagined him having a baby and my being there.

I had to grieve those stories I’d carried so close to my heart about his future. This required me to recognize they were just stories— mine, not his. But if letting go of those stories was hard, loving him wasn’t. I had loved him from the first moment, hadn’t I? It was just that my story about him was partial, like every story about myself I’d ever encountered or tried on for size. How could I not allow him to expand into the fullness of himself? Would I continue a pattern of exile, or do the necessary work to throw the doors of my heart open wide enough to hold all of who he is?

It is thrilling to watch him bloom the more deeply he is known. The more free he feels to author his own story and practice his own integrity, the more I feel able to be in the fullness of myself with him, too. We are learning to be whole and loving and free together.

That’s what practicing integrity means to me. Working so that we can all be whole and loving and free together. It doesn’t look the way I expected it to sometimes. I don’t know what it will look like after I’m gone. But as long as I’m here, I want to be in that conversation with my people and the world.

Thanks for being in it with me.

XO,

Asha