Everybody has a story – and I don’t know what it is – despite what I tell myself
This morning as I sat at my desk writing in my journal, I was stuck by the image out my window. Our farm here in Vermont is up on a hill that overlooks the Village of Randolph. The sun, bright with the promise of spring lit up a dense covering of fog that enveloped the village hiding it from my watchful eyes. With the village lying like a dream beneath this glowing blanket of fog, I was struck by how this vision matched a thought that has been rattling around in my head since I left Denver:
Everybody has a story (or stories) and I really don’t know what they are, despite what I tell myself.
So much of what makes up the stories we tell ourselves is based on what we think we see. We look and we judge, and we tell ourselves a story about who is in front of us without knowing what’s hidden in the glowing blanket of fog beneath their surface of who they are. And that’s what this journey has been teaching me. No matter what I think I know about someone, no matter what story I’ve told myself about who they are, how they live, or what they stand for, I really know nothing about their true story.
As an example, I introduce you to Angel Nomikos (the lovely lady to the left in the photo above), one of my fellow RIM Certification students and a wonderful human being. When I first met Angel at our RIM Essentials training, I did what we all do when we first meet someone – I took in what I saw (in this case a glamorous, affluent blonde woman in a pretty yellow dress), and I told myself a story about her. A story that was almost entirely wrong. Why is this? It’s because the stories I tell myself about others are still MY stories. They are steeped in my own feelings, my own past experiences, my own biases and my own traumas.
After training with Angel, I understand her story as it really is – that she is a strong and unbelievably deep woman. She has worked extraordinarily hard to build her own business and someone who deeply cares about others and wants to help them heal. And she is someone who has endured a lot of personal trauma. Through my work with RIM, I have realized that unless we are given the rare and sacred opportunity to hold and share space with a person while they share their true stories about themselves – we cannot trust the stories we have told ourselves about them.
One of the biggest components of training to be a RIM Facilitator is “self evolution” for the trainer. This means that while we’re training to be a facilitator for others, we are also working with senior trainers to work through our own stuff. And for me, part of my own journey of self evolution is to realize that as I go through my life, telling myself the stories of others, I need to always recognize that what I really see is only a fraction of the depth of people. So much of the human condition is lost beneath a soft white layer of morning fog. And when or if that fog burns off, revealing the beauty (no matter how broken) beneath, only then can I hear their story.
