EQ Reflection: Revisiting Stories of Love and Loss

Driving to meet a potential client, hurtling toward uncertainty down a unknown highway, I turned on the radio to stay awake. Stairway to Heaven came on, and with it a visceral memory of longing and rejection.

It's around 1980, I've just started junior high, there I am at my first school dance. Guided by TV mentors, somehow I gather the courage to ask Janine Pipher to dance. Janine is new to the school (we are all new to junior high, but the school ran from kindergarten through 12th grade), and in my memory she is a vision of nubile perfection.

On this random Connecticut highway, hearing the song takes me right back to dancing to Stairway to Heaven with Janine. I remember her wearing a backless dress, and dancing with her is the most intimate moment of my young life -- it was like holding a small bird thrumming with life. In my memory, we danced the night away -- who knows, it might have been just that one long, long song. I also remember not really knowing what to do in the "fast part" of Stairway to Heaven, surely a mystery to many in my generation.

Now over 25 years later, I vividly remember the feeling of being alive, of sensing just for that moment what it might be like to become a man. I remember the overwhelming longing to at least talk with her the next day. And I remember terrible embarrassment to follow.

I HAD to talk to her, but I did not know how to reach her. So with the ultimate gracelessness of a 12-year-old boy, I called every single person I knew in our class to ask for her number. None gave it to me, but surely the gossip mavens enjoyed my indiscretion.

As it has for untold generations, Monday morning dashed my puppy-dog hopes. Janine didn't seem to notice me, and probably spoke under a dozen words to me in the next three years. I was half expecting it, half surprised, and fully devastated.

What I find fascinating now is how I explained this to myself. The story I made up to make sense of my confusion and hurt. In the end, I told myself that someone must have told Janine that I was a dork (as if she needed to be told if she'd heard about my desperate phone-a-thon), and that she would be uncool if she went out with me.

When I tell the story to Patty (my wife whose love seems unaffected by my adolescent geekiness), she is wounded on my behalf. How could someone say that about me? She offered a story that, in her perspective, is less hurtful: "Well maybe dancing just didn't mean as much to that girl as it did to you?" UHHH, her explanation is an arrow in my heart! My story, at least, protected that one night of hope -- where Patty's leaves me unrequited in both fantasy and reality.

We all tell ourselves stories to make sense of our experiences. We create meaning, often on scant evidence, and cling to it as truth about others, the universe, and ourselves. Then we make more and more stories to reinforce and confirm the earlier ones. So through my own stories, I came to know myself as unpopular, maybe even (in my secret fears) unlovable. My mom, of course, denied this -- but who can believe their mother has any objectivity?

The story also, I suspect, has formed some of my archetype of passion. Goodness knows I'd have had no idea what to do if Janine had thrown herself in my arms, but I suspect that all of my life I've longed for the story to be different.

The problem is I forget the stories are just that -- stories. I forget that there are other stories just as true, just as meaningful, and often more helpful. I suspect this is true of most of us. Fortunately with time and effort we can re-write the stories, and even realize the are not all that important anymore. Maybe experience is learning new stories, and wisdom is letting go of them.

I've experienced that I am lovable, and my story has changed -- love may be the most powerful editor. Still, there are these "story fragments," like my explanation of lost Janine, that haunt the attics of memory. These old stories come into conflict with the new stories. Especially when I'm hurt or lonely, tired or anxious, the old stories erode the new and hard-won truths of self-worth and self-efficacy.

What stories still haunt your memory attic? Do you sometimes forget these are autobiographical fiction, and begin to doubt the hard-earned truths of yourself? Maybe for some people the old stories are truer than the new -- especially when new ones are created in trauma and grief. Maybe the old ones are mere ghosts, or maybe the new ones lack full substance?

Perhaps emotion is a useful test of veracity -- stories concocted in times of hurt and fear are probably more a self-limiting form of self-protection than a testament to inner truth. How we felt when we made the stories, and how we feel now recalling them, provide clues about the sense we've made.

The Janine story was crafted in hopelessness, and now it elicits a mix of sympathy, shame, and joy. I feel sympathy for that boy faced with the terrible confusion of coming of age. I feel shame at making myself so small -- and hiding it behind all kinds of bravado. At the same time, I recall this story with a sense of nostalgia. I felt so FULL that night, and over the weekend -- and even Monday. I suspect I rarely let my grown-up self experience highs so high and lows so low.

I also notice that Friday night is more alive in my memory than Monday morning. As Stairway to Heaven plays into the night, I feel a kind of jubilation. While hurt came later, I had that one perfect night in 1980 -- and its vitality is undimmed by time. Every story has another story, and ultimately that's all they are, but like reading a cherished volume, revisiting the old stories and seeing a new side is the very heart of growth.


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This is an EQ Reflection by Joshua Freedman of the Six Seconds EQ Network. To learn more about increasing emotional intelligence for yourself, your corporation, or your school, please visit http://www.6seconds.org

©2006, Joshua Freedman