Revisions
“If you’re here, I came to meet you, to share a drink with you, and to — if all fares well — be family with you. Thank you.”
So I ended my TALK, my life story, as a room full of people began to applaud and cheer. Having fiddled with the Coors Light in my hand for the last half hour, I downed what remained — a distraction from the awkward attention of the 30 people around me, and a couple hundred more in the Zoom-o-sphere. I felt good. I felt strong.
In the hours prior, mementos of the occasion came flooding in: a bottle of whiskey from my TALK coach and dear friend Devyn, excited texts from classmates, and even a tequila-themed personal theme song to the tune of Pokemon. But the spark that got me through the day was the ownership I felt in telling my story, of knowing who I was, and sharing that confidently, after weeks of focused reflection.
In the months that followed, that sense of control and steady warmth would slip from my shaking hands. I would, for a time, not recognize in myself the man in the story I had just told.
Scars, Not Wounds
I’m a TALK coach, myself. I sit with classmates, hear their stories, and cheer them on from what I call the “passenger’s seat” — they take the lead in processing and weaving together the stories that made them who they are. I only hold them accountable to their own goals, soothe concerns, and help lift blockers along the way. “Yes, you’re coming off self-aware. No, you’re not dodging the hard stuff.”
And, like my four fellow coaches, I gently nudge them toward sharing “scars, not wounds.”
Scars, not wounds: a tricky distinction to protect TALKers from having to process in a real-time, vulnerable setting those traumas that weigh on them still. Well-intentioned practice, but as I found, harder than it sounds.
Scars are still sensitive, and can be reopened. Two scars I shared in my TALK — two scars made wounds again — I repeat here: tension between my faith and my sexuality, and my experience with grief and mental health. Not simply because they were tough in their own right (though rest assured, they were), but because they sparked within me a fear. A fear of whether I had been honest when I told my story, of whether I had come all that far, of whether these chapters were really closed.
New, Old Narratives
I am a Christian. I am a gay man. Two sentences I declared with confidence, courage, and consideration of the tension that night. For years, I knew the conceptual conflict. But in business school, where adulthood meets a warped, relived adolescence, I had to live it.
Before Stanford, I rejected relational intimacy often throughout my twenties, claiming a fierce independence and that I wanted to walk many parts of life alone. But as part of the grand MBA experience that no one ever talks about, I found myself preoccupied with romance, or lack thereof, as a first-year student. Jumping into the dating pool was jarring. I was exposed to latent insecurities, and when I turned to my faith to find purpose to the pain, as I often do, I felt silence. Prayers may have been heard, meditation peaceful, but in my spiritual community, I found I was subtly censoring myself from exploring my grief. Because to talk about dating was to talk about my sexual orientation. I was out — but apparently, not that out.
Spiritual health hobbled, my mental health wavered as well, and an all-consuming anxiety grew within me in the months after my TALK: my body was always one trigger away from hyperventilating, from fight-or-flight, from manic spirals. Ironic, since my TALK featured a poignant journey with the twin emotions of grief and joy. (I had buried several close family members in recent years. Shouldn’t that have been the hard part?) In the face of my anxiety, this victorious anecdote disappeared. This was not the confident, proud man I had presented and known myself to be. This was not my story.
Control. I tried to exercise it over my very body to manage anxiety, to reclaim my narrative. Beginning therapy. Praying, meditating, and journaling daily for hours at a time. Running 50–60 miles a week, intense tempos and interval training, peak races and time trials. I did it all, but I couldn’t push the feeling out of my own body — it wasn’t something out in the world I could fix, but something within me I couldn’t expel by effort or prayer.
I was a stranger to myself. Until I let myself be different than I was.
Rewriting
My TALK itself took many revisions. It took going back, remembering and questioning my own memories. So it was painful to again look back, and then ask whether I had been honest — with myself, and others — in that process.
At the end of last summer, I reconnected with and visited old friends: college buddies, fellow dancers, hometown communities, pre-GSB transplant families. Throughout my reunion tour, these friends saw my brokenness, but they didn’t dwell on it. Instead, as reunions often go, they recounted times we had spent together — times when I was doling out (or goading people into) peppermint patty shots; times when I showed up to the party in the most energetic, “Joey” way — only to be the first one napping; times when I was laughing, smiling, sharing joy in periods of undeniable loss (see buried family members).
These stories resembled those I had told in my TALK, now recounted by people I trusted. Hearing them from outside myself, I began healing, assured I did not “fabricate” a self outside reality. I was confident again that, at the very least, the man I was in my TALK was the man I believed myself to be — the man others believed me to be, as well.
From that point of confidence, I gave myself permission to change, bit by bit. Permission to re-experience scars I had celebrated then dismissed as past, to reopen them as re-formed wounds if need be, in all their grotesque uniqueness. Just because I was certain, and correct, about who I was at the time of my TALK did not mean I forever had to be that man. My journey was not over.
As I write this, many parts of this journey continue. Entering this school year, I did recover some parts of myself I had “lost” in the months prior: reignited love for a good party, and great drinking games; a fire for running and competition; prayerfulness, fervent and expectant, and better conversations with those in my spiritual circles about romantic relationships. As I reclaim my joy, my confidence, I see my anxiety dissipate.
But I still grapple with the certainty of the past — the impetus for this piece. I wonder which scars should remain untouched and honored, versus studied and probed to test their integrity. As a TALK coach, but even more as a person, I wonder what the line is between scars and wounds. I spend a lot of time thinking about scars, and the ways I might look back on them tomorrow, with a different lens.
Scars, Revisited
I have many literal scars on my body, most of all my legs; I shared this, too, in my TALK. After a car accident in high school, I had surgery to stabilize a broken femur and knee with plates and pins after both had shattered. The scars are healed skin, but sensitive. In one area, I have lost immediate surface feeling, but there’s an itchiness right beneath the surface. When I put hot water on it, I find my leg aflame (it satisfies the itch, though).
Physical or emotional, wounds are notoriously messy. It turns out scars, in their elusive sensitivity, are just as inconvenient, mercurial, intractable a mark on our bodies and psyches. In business school, we are all storytellers — most of us say so on LinkedIn, right? As storytellers, we diligently examine and arrange these marks to get to the crux of who we are. Whether baseball stats, an application essay, or a TALK, we are all creating narratives of ourselves all the time. But those narratives are not meant to be static. We are not meant to be static.
And I’m learning to be okay with that.
