That Is Not A Healing Message: The Stories We Tell Ourselves 

By Galen Brandt ©2021

One of my dearest friends and neighbors is a brilliant, wildly artistically talented, profoundly wise, infinitely kind, keenly discerning, thoughtful, generous, funny, loving and very beautiful 78-year-old woman.  She has been unusually beautiful her entire life, and still is.  

She is currently having a most unexpected and torrid relationship with a very handsome (I’ve never met him, but she’s a photographer with a highly developed aesthetic, and oh, the photos she takes of him) man half her age.  The relationship was his idea – to her shock, he grabbed her one afternoon two years ago in her kitchen and kissed her.  She…responded. 

She happened to drive past me as I was taking my daily neighborhood walk this afternoon and stopped to talk from her car.  How was she?  I asked.  Well, T. had just spent the night and left early that morning, and it was his birthday, which meant he’d chosen to spend his fortieth birthday with her, so she was feeling wonderful.  

Except…after he left, she had taken a photograph of herself naked, from her waist to her chin.  And once again, she had realized how incredibly ugly she was.  How much older she’d grown in the past year!  How hideous!  How droopy and crepey her skin!  How how how….

And my heart broke, as it has so many times over the past years, when she’s said the same words to me about herself.    

My friend had breast cancer fifteen years ago.  A firm believer in and educated practitioner of alternative healing methods, it took her a long time to agree to the mastectomy her doctors said was necessary.  Months before, she had finalized a brutal divorce that was not her idea.  

A few months after the procedure, when we were alone in her new place, she raised her shirt and showed me her naked chest, one small breast intact, the other a flat area of skin traversed by a small scar where a breast had been.  Look how ugly, she said.  

I saw nothing ugly.  I saw my beautiful, brave friend.  I saw a survivor of something achingly traumatic.  To me, she looked more truly beautiful than ever.  Which is what I told her.  She got tears in her eyes, pulled down her shirt, and hugged me tightly.  I hoped – and thought – she believed me.  I hoped she might come to believe it about herself.  

And yet, years later, in the midst of the most stunningly passionate encounters she’s ever experienced – with a gorgeous man half her age who chose and is continuing to choose her – she is telling herself variations on the same theme.  I told her how sad I was to hear her tell herself those words.  How they were not true, but rather her thoughts about herself.  Thoughts she could change if she chose.  No, she insisted.  It’s not a thought – it’s the truth.  “I’ll text you the photograph I took,” she said.  “You’ll see.”   

As she drove off, she called to me: “I’m going to write a story – ‘The Beautiful Boy and The Ugly Girl.’”  This time, it was I who had tears in my eyes.  “Goodbye, beautiful girl,” I called after her.  

And then it struck me.  What my dear friend was doing was telling herself a story about herself.  A story she had chosen to believe was true.  A story that was hurtful to her, painful to her – one might even say destructive to her.  

We all talk to ourselves incessantly.  We have running internal conversations virtually every waking minute (unless we’re unusually devoted to and good at mindful meditation – but even then, at least in my fumbling experience, a million thoughts arise which need to be gently set aside).  And of course, we storytellers are particularly good at telling ourselves stories.  About anything and everything.  That’s how many of us get all or most of our material, how we devise the stories we end up telling to others.  

Would we willingly choose to tell others stories that are hurtful, harmful, deliberately injurious?  Would we choose to inflict pain on others with the stories we tell them?  Are we looking to make the outer world worse, more painful, more destroyed — especially these days?  And yet – so often, too often – isn’t that exactly what, if we’re not ever-vigilant, we do to our inner world with the stories we inflict upon ourselves and insist are true?  

Years ago, I was confiding in another dear and very wise friend an experience I’d had and the way in which I’d found myself responding.  

“That’s not a healing message,” he said gently.  

He was right.  Thirty years later, his words have stayed with me.  

Since childhood, I’ve been a writer, performer and musician.  I’ve been fortunate to make my (very modest) living doing the creative work I love.  In the past two years, thanks to beloved friends in writing, performance and music communities, I’ve found my way into the miraculous community of storytellers.  Better late than never – way better.  I’m infinitely grateful to each of you and to all you and your stories have given me.  

In fact, you’ve been life-saving.   Two years ago, I moved cross-country, back east to a little house that had been my “single girl home.”  I was stunned and reeling from an unexpected and extremely painful divorce.  No sooner had I arrived than I turned 65.  All my mail came from divorce lawyers and AARP.  In my mind, I had a giant “S” branded across my forehead – “Single” AND “Senior.”  Then the “polar vortex” hit, and the fifty steep steps from the street down to my tiny house were coated in a treacherous sheet of ice for two weeks straight.  This did nothing to improve my state of mind.  I was sure – my life was over.  Finished. Kaput.  End of story.    

And then the temperature rose.  The ice melted.  I could get up my steps.  The divorce was finalized.  I survived.  Spring came.  I started writing again.  Essays, poems, songs, lots and lots of songs.  I took up work on my two half-finished musicals.  Apparently I was not dead after all (though I did join AARP.  I like the stories in the magazine they send me.).    

Then I found storytelling and storytellers.  And then the pandemic hit.  And I began gorging myself on stories online, storytelling events, storytelling communities.  And over and over, I heard healing messages.  Messages I desperately needed to hear.  Messages of hope and wisdom, resilience and courage and possibility.  

I spent this entire past weekend at the Women’s Storytelling Festival, listening to scores of brilliant (many older!) women tellers tell their fierce, fearless, funny, fabulous tales.  The festival, the women and the stories were wonderful – and that’s the truth.  

My profound thanks to each of you in this community, all you good, fine women and men.  Please may we continue to tell each other stories that inspire and uplift, that enlarge and enlighten and heal.  And even more importantly, please may we tell these stories to ourselves about ourselves.  We need to do that.  Our listeners need us to do that.  Our stories need us to do that.  This world needs us to do that.

Galen R. Brandt is an award-winning writer, performer,  songwriter and singer who is deeply grateful that she has now stumbled her way into the world of storytelling.  She is a new member of NEST.  Galen lives in a lakeside cottage in New Jersey.