Ashes to ashes: a Journey to the Place Beyond Fear

I flew to San Francisco for the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) Annual Conference, “What is Your Story? The Power of Trailblazers, Catalysts and Calamities.” I registered, slipped my name badge over my head, and opened the program. All of the first-day sessions required pre-registration, which I had not done!

The woman next to me was in the same boat. “Do you want to walk?” she asked, “I need to walk.” I looked down; her name tag said “Kate.”

I was still in my heels, tired from the plane, and thought briefly of going back to my room. “Sure Kate. Where?” I put my phone away.

“To the water. Do you know which way is the water?”

“I’ll ask.” I walk over to the doorman. He says, “Turn left on Mission. Go down Mission.”

“What is Story2? What do you do?” Kate asked. Depending on the audience, there are different stories I tell about the founding of Story2. I call these well-worn stories “scripts,” set pieces I tell again and again, almost without thinking. This time I started somewhere else: “It took me a long time to find my way. In the fall of 2008 in an instant it all made sense. I saw an opportunity to teach students, all students, to tell their stories.”

“It took me a long time to find my way too,” Kate sighed as we turned the corner.

We walk by a man with tangled hair. He’s wrapped in a blanket and talking to himself. He opens the blanket, and he has no pants.

“What exactly does Story2 do?”

“We teach high school and college students how to tell their stories. And how to use the neuroscience of storytelling…”

“Yes, yes I know. Storytelling changes everything,” she says. “The last time I was in San Francisco was 23 years ago with my daughter…”

“I want to get it to every student. We can’t change education fast enough. It will change the whole way writing is taught. The way people communicate.”

“Yes. Students today need and are ready for a type of education we are not prepared to give them. We talk about transformation. We write 70-page reports. But we just can’t change fast enough.”

“I know. I meet young people who see how to lead the change. They begin the change, and don’t have the authority to play it through. They join the establishment. Can you help me get storytelling into schools?”

“Sure sure,” she says it twice like Chinese people. “But tell me how you got to this.”

I tell her the prehistory. About struggling to write.

“That’s how you know you’re a writer,” she says, “you’re willing to struggle with writing.”

I laugh. I tell her about teaching developmental writing at Rutgers and Seton Hall. “Nothing I’d been taught in grad school at Princeton or UVa prepared me for someone who couldn’t write, who just didn’t know the moves. It was the biggest challenge I faced as a professor, and I went after it like an entrepreneur. I saw a problem; I started fixing it. I was a very unhappy academic….

“In one of our early classes at Story2, there was a young man, Mike Rodriguez, who was getting solid grades in honors classes at a very bad school. He was about to graduate from high school and go to college, and he could not write. He could move words around, but he could not put them in order. He was a brilliant storyteller. Over five days we got him to writing through storytelling. And then we overhauled the curriculum again, so it wasn’t just for elite kids. I’m pretty sure we can teach anyone to write. It’s not a mystery. It’s just taught wrong.”

“Why do we teach writing that way?” Kate says. “It obviously doesn’t work. You don’t use the 5-paragraph essay for anything real in adult life. Who invented the 5-paragraph essay anyway?”

“Google will know,” I say. “Look at that sculpture.” We stop for a long time in front of a tall sculpture with two open discs cycling back and forth. For several minutes we watch the wheels turn around and back, around and back. At some point we start walking again.

“Tell me the rest of your story.”

“You are a great listener. Thanks. We started in small workshops in public schools, but I’d always seen it as an online business, connecting young people around the world through storytelling. When I was working in EdTech in the ’90s, people were fighting about digital vs. paper books. I would say, ‘it’s not either-or people; it is both-and;’ and here we are. Online is great for practice. And writing takes practice. We divide writing into three parts — content, structure, and voice. Most people are innately good at one of them, but the convoluted way we teach writing the three are all tangled together, and most people just can’t do it.”

“Yes, I get it. It’s starting to make sense…”

“We worked with Yale’s GEAR-UP program in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to create a writing curriculum that worked with all types of students, and I published a book, Write Out Loud. And then we won a spot in TechStars to create an online writing center…

“TechStars was fantastic, but it left me face to face with my demons. It was just me, and all these twenty-something men.”

We reach Embarcadero. We cross the street halfway, wait for the light to change, and finish crossing. We pause at a sculpture by the Flaming Lotus Brigade. “Two neurons,” Kate says, looking at the sculpture, while I read the same words aloud from the plaque.

“Is it OK if we walk out there?” She points down Pier 14 looking out to the Bay Bridge.

I can’t remember what she asked next. I answered with another question: “Do you know EMDR*?”

She nods knowingly, “Why did you start it when you did?”

“I was not able to do what life had given me to do because I was stuck in my own gunk. People had recommended EMDR a couple times. I dreamed the initials, so I figured the time had come! I’d done tons of talk therapy, and there was always this residue of trauma; things I stumbled over again and again. Once I started EMDR the shifts happened very fast, in just a few sessions. I would feel bone tired when the session was over, as if I had worked very hard, an almost physical labor, but also free, in a way I had imagined but never previously felt.

“After the first session I had a vivid dream. The man’s face was gray. At first his voice was kind. ‘Come here I have something for you.’

Cheery, I say, ‘No thanks.’

He grabs my arm, ‘Come. Here. Now.’

It’s a room. Dark. The door is ajar.

‘I’m not going there. Not. This. Time.’ I start to put my fingers through his eyes, and they turn to ash. His face and then his body shatter into dust.”

“That’s what EMDR does, really,” she said “It cleans out the ash from the crevices of your brain. It goes down into those places where things are stuck and sweeps them out.”

“The other sessions were very focused. I would mention a figure from my childhood that still caused me pain. ‘Figure’ in the sense of something I talked about as ‘always,’ that place in the brain where things harden and then persist.

“And, one by one, I’d sit with them, feel the pain wherever it was in my physical body, and as the physical pain lessened, the figure would also release. Sometimes I would walk in and explain something in the present that reminded me of the past, and sometimes I’d just say ‘here’s the thing I’m stuck about…’”

It didn’t matter where I started in words. By separating the brain’s hemispheres, EMDR took me to a more primitive part of the brain, the place where experiences get tangled with emotions. Where they turn into scripts and get stuck.

“My gunk” is how I described it. I felt it as hands around my throat; my heart in a cage; my stomach acidic and cramped over in pain. “Those things do not happen to me anymore. EMDR brought me to the place beyond fear. I can sit with things, whatever they are, and let them settle.”

“Yes. That’s it,” she said, “the place beyond fear.”

“What would happen if there was EMDR in schools?” I start walking and talking faster. I can almost see it, “If when a student acted out or acted different, they learned how to sit with it? There was nothing that had to be tamed or changed; we just let the young person sit with it?”

“Imagine…” she said. We turn and start to walk back.

Later, talking about Mary Carr, I described great memoirs as taking a sculptural view on the past. Learning to back up and see everyone as not-themselves, yourself as not-yourself. That is the storyteller’s view. It’s not engaged; it’s curious, watching.

Storytelling gave me that view. EMDR swept out the cobwebs that felt like shackles and kept my stories scripted and safe. EMDR let me open the window of storytelling into present action.

I wrote the tangled way I did to keep people away. To keep me safe. But I was alone in a prison of words. When I write now, I want to let people in — not to me exactly because my stories are not me, after all, though they are the closest proximation. I let them in to learn from my failure, my fear, my fantasy — all of it, just as it is.

I wonder if EMDR liberates some residue of our shared knowing, our common past, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…

*Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a treatment for people who experience anxiety, stress and other symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). I completed eight sessions of EMDR and Brainspotting, a treatment protocol developed by David Grand, PhD.