Recently, a Storyteller friend and colleague, Tony Toledo, shared a quote by author and artist Lynda Barry with the LANES List-Serve.  (LANES is the League for Advancement of New England Storytelling.  Our List-Serve is open to anyone who is a member of LANES, and it generates a lot of great questions, discussions, revelations, etc. about Storytelling.)  

Here is what Tony, a deeply thoughtful and compassionate man, as well as a voracious reader, shared with the LANES community:

“There are certain children who are told they are too sensitive, and there are certain adults who believe sensitivity is a problem that can be fixed in the way that crooked teeth can be fixed and made straight. And when these two come together you get a fairytale, a kind of story with hopelessness in it.

I believe there is something in these old stories that does what singing does to words. They have transformational capabilities, in the way melody can transform mood.

They can't transform your actual situation, but they can transform your experience of it. We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable.” 

― Lynda Barry, What it Is

In response to Tony’s posting this quote on the LANES List-Serve, another Storyteller responded that she was having trouble interpreting Lynda Barry’s words.  This Storyteller was worried that she was “missing something” but, probably because she knew that Tony chooses the quotes that he shares with care and thoughtfulness and therefore it was a point worth pursuing, she initiated a discussion of the meaning behind Barry’s quote amongst our community.  

Meanwhile I had been digesting the quote ever since Tony posted it, repeatedly rereading the words, which had released a flood of emotions and memories.  When the questioning Storyteller posted her query on the LANES List-Serve, I felt compelled to respond.  I had reached a point where I could no longer keep my feelings - or my wounds - to myself, and it all burst forth in my response on the LANES List-Serve.  At the suggestion of another Storyteller on the List-Serve, I have posted it here:

Lynda Barry's quote had a very powerful resonance for me.  For the first 18 years of my life, I endured unceasing bullying at the hands of my peers; bullying which was compounded by the insensitivity and misunderstanding and sheer lack of imagination of many of the adults around me, who believed that the problem stemmed from an essential character flaw within me, the person targeted for bullying.  I was given to understand in no uncertain terms that my torment would cease if I could somehow learn to not be tormented.  To them, I was a honeypot of trouble, so no wonder that flies were attracted to me; it was up to me to fundamentally change what and who I was, not for the flies to stop their buzzing.  My refusal or inability to change simply reinforced their belief that there was something wrong and bad about me.  At best I was lazy - "not trying hard enough to fix my part of the problem"; at worst, I was a truly bad person, who deserved the badness that was drawn to me.

When Barry uses the phrase "fairytale, a kind of story with hopelessness in it", I guess you could say she was being metaphorical.  If I could be so bold as to translate her words for you, I believe that she is saying that there is a kind of sad and familiar narrative (what she calls a “story” or “fairytale”) being played out among children and adults, in schools and playgrounds.  She describes the narrative as a story/fairytale because that is shorthand for saying that it is a narrative which has been reenacted over and over and over, all over the world, throughout most of recorded time.  And she calls it "hopeless", because it continues to reenact itself even today, on school playgrounds and in classrooms and in homes everywhere, despite the efforts of many to stop it.

In other words, we aren't making the kind of progress we ought to be making to ease the psychic pain of children who are "different" from their peers.  We - the grownups - are failing to recognize that the "different" kids are just as worthy of love and praise and encouragement as their peers.  We are too focused on our besetting sin as humans - the desire to be similar, to fit in, and be the same - when our true virtue and our greatest strength is our differences, and our diversity.  

The human race did not get where we are today - did not make incredible advances to improve life - by means of uniformity of thought and appearance.  We have made amazing technological, medical, and artistic breakthroughs precisely because certain individuals among us were different.  But it took more than merely being uniquely different for them to prevail; those special individuals had to fight to maintain their precious essential true selves - despite intense peer pressure to conform - so as to achieve their special destiny: discovering a new way of dressing, a new way of communicating, a new way to cure a disease.  The very qualities that cause some of us to be teased on the playground and scolded in the classroom are PRECISELY those qualities that lead to some people growing up to be Beethoven, Einstein, or Coco Chanel.  After all, what do you suppose those Difference-Makers were like as children?  You can’t imagine that they conformed to the way all the other kids behaved and thought, dutifully bending their head when the teacher taught them that 2 + 2 = 4?  Not when they knew that it sometimes equals 7.  Difference-Makers are necessarily Different.

Lynda Barry understands this narrative, has seen it play out in real life, and has made the connection between real life stories of bullied children to Stories and Fairytales, in which imaginary children suffer and try to find their way in a harsh and insensitive world.  She recognizes that Stories and Fairytales provide many of us with psychic roadmaps, or at the very least a little bit of human understanding.  They show us that we are not alone in our suffering, that other people have also been persecuted or driven away for being different.  And that sometimes those folks find their way to happy endings, if they persevere and have hope.  Have you heard of the "It Gets Better" project?  It's an on-line film project where adults record themselves telling their stories about how badly they were teased and hurt in their youth for being gay, but how they have managed to survive to a happy, or at least better, adulthood.  Their mission is to give hope, in the form of stories, to gay youth who are facing the prospect of suicide as the only way to end the misery of their current existence.

As Barry says in the quote which Tony posted, "[Stories and Fairytales] can't transform your actual situation, but they can transform your experience of it."

I could continue to explicate Barry's extraordinarily wise and very rich words, but I have to take my daughter to her bassoon lesson.  As a personal aside, I want to mention that she is the only child in her school who plays bassoon, an instrument that looks and sounds like a loudly farting bed post; in fact, she plays it in her Jazz Band, where she is the only girl in an otherwise all-male ensemble.  I am thankful every day that she embraces her own uniqueness, and fearlessly faces the world as a Jazz Bassoon-playing girl.  She knows that doing something which nobody else does is not something to be ashamed of, but something to celebrate, something which can bring joy to people around her.  It feels like a miracle to me that when she honked out her solo (her Jazz Band leader arranged Michael Jackson's "Bad" for bassoon and Jazz ensemble; he is a man with fearless intelligence and imagination) last weekend in front of a gym-full of people, with the boys in her band playing backup, it never occurred to her that anyone would put her down for who she was and what she loved.

I am thankful for the grownups like Lynda Barry and my daughter's Jazz Band leader, who understand the value of ALL children, not just the normal well-adjusted ones, but the strange and unusual ones.  All of those children have something special to give, but only if we don't crush their spirits.  And yes, stories help.  I read stories and fairytales with hungry desperation throughout my childhood, and they were a kind of solace that, as Barry says, helped me to face the harsh reality of life in the "real" world.  "We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay."  For those youth who have no one to turn to and cannot sustain a nurturing fantasy world in the face of intolerable cruelty, many choose not to stay with us, to our eternal loss.  Because every time we hound a “different” child from our world, we lose a Difference-Maker.  

Let’s make our world a place where all children are loved and nurtured, so that each one can grow up to surprise and delight us with their gifts.