The Terrible Stories (We Don’t Want To Tell)
“The story you don’t want to tell is the story you have to tell” said a dear friend and mentor, the eighty-six year old author Jill Schary Robinson, shaking her head like a swallow in a birdbath on the screen of the iPhone. She improved in her adoption of video calls over the course of the pandemic although, at the start, I’d find myself speaking to her ceiling, or a part of her ear, as she breached the new digital world order.
“The story you don’t want to tell will free you and, the more uncomfortable it gets, the more obvious it is you’re on the right track. Pain is a royal flush, my dear, and the gift of the trauma is the power of the story,” Jill continued, “Would you like something to drink?”
While she did eventually grasp that although we could see each other, we were not actually in the same room, offers of tea, coffee and cake would remain.
But don’t let this lapse fool you. At her age, while not altogether caught up with the times, she is nonetheless vivacious and spry. An octogenarian awakenness fueled, it is my theory, by a lifetime of perpetual writing and unabashed taste for brutal honesty.
“It’s funny. The deeper the pain and the shame goes, the deeper the capacity for sharing what you’ve learned with others. If you can make it back alive and share your story, that is. Warts and all!”
And she is right.
The terrible stories are the ones that liberate us because they carry they greatest weight. They’re the things we’re afraid to tell. And it’s not just the things that we’ve done that we think are abominable. The times the addict mothers drove drunk and high with their kids in the car. The times we had sex while we knew we were carrying an STD. The hostile thoughts we harbor in silence.
It’s also the things we’ve done that we think make us weird. The things, I like to say, which make us tock, as well as tick. Stuff we don’t really want to talk about because we have no idea how common it likely is. Everything from crapping your pants to the strange characters and voices you put on when you’re home alone.
It is these things that make it difficult for us to ever fully connect with one another because there’ll always be something we cannot say for fear of not fitting in. And god knows how hard we’ve all tried to fit in!
These darker parts of ourselves are some of the most fecund parts of us. Like a narrative microbiome, we are teeming with bacterial stories, shame-tendrilled fungus, and autobiographical viruses. Until we embrace and feed these parts of us, instead of flushing them out with the antibiotics of sanitized self-concepts, our existential immunity is compromised.
And that’s something Jill knew very well indeed.
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Back in 1974, Jill, daughter of the filmmaker Dore Schary, published “Bed-Time-Story,” in which she chronicled her alcohol and amphetamine fueled lifestyle and highway-chase courtship with future husband, Stuart Shaw.
Early on, in a shocking sequence, one minute Jill is carousing at a beach house party thrown by long-time friend, Jane Fonda, and the next she is abducted and sexually assaulted.
All in, the scene lasts maybe one page, but its horror rocks you to the core.
The most devastating thing about this brief, psychodramatic bomb shell is that in it, Jill perfectly captures the casual nature of such deeply complicated trauma. Just outside the manicured freeze-frame of the perfectly staged Instagram moment, the story people should be talking about is taking place.
Tragedy is baked into the fabric of life itself. To deny it is useless, not to move on is dangerous, but to avert our eyes is much worse. To confront it is to become free. And despite the freedom that’s entirely within our grasp, those are the stories we least want to tell.
It’s easy to understand the reticence. The terrible stories often contain elements of shame. They include details which we don’t want others to know about us. Details which fall outside the range of “normal” or “acceptable” human experience and morality.
They are the rear window we hope that nobody across the way is peering through as we indulge thoughts, words, and deeds which we believe will have us cast out of polite society.
They are the farts we hold in to the point of impossible stomach ache. They are the moments in which we waddle, pants around our ankles, to the bathroom where we clean up some masturbatory sacrifice to the gods of our baser nature, avoiding ourselves in the mirror because that euphoric peak of blithe and impulsive inevitability has made way for what Jean-Paul Sartre called “the Look”. That reflexive self-indictment through the judgmental eyes of the other. The wide-ranging super ego of public propriety which eternally cleaves us in two.
How can it be? We reprimand ourselves
I am the father, the mother, the son, the daughter, the lawyer, the elected official, the beloved celebrity, the married, the betrothed. This behavior, these thoughts, do not align with the expectations people have of me, and so I must stuff them down and keep them hidden.
But these are the naked moments in which we reach into the plutonic voids and round out the full spectrum of real, authentic human experience. They are when we look over our shoulder in the bowels of Hades.
The terrible stories reveal us in all our dark infancy, our unresolved shadow and, because there are so many reasons not to tell them, we forever remain trapped in the lather, rinse, repeat of our fictionalized auto-biography.
And these sanitized self-narratives can be dangerous indeed.
I straddle a few roles where I encounter these dangers daily.
I work in the addiction and mental health field. I am a life coach. I am a writer who talks about their troubled past and their recovery from drugs and alcohol addiction. I say drugs and alcohol, but really it’s drugs, alcohol, sex, love, fantasy, avoidance, the internet, validation, masturbation, ad infinitum. You name it. Whatever short-term fix can combat the way I feel about myself, I’ll take it. An attempt to fill holes created by sensing a separation between myself and you. A sense of separation that the secrets perpetuate.
And secrets are things which I think all addicts are good at sensing in others. We’ve been there, done that, sold the t-shirt for crack.
I can see the people who are trying to cover their intoxication. I can see it in the way they talk. The way they move. The way they can’t look you in the eye, for long or at all. The creative ways they find to dab their leaky nostrils. The manic charades they busy themselves with to “act normal” to throw you off the scent of their high.
Put your hands in your pockets. Look at your phone. Nod. Agree. Smile.
But I’ve developed a sense for the deeper secrets too. The uses of language. The avoidance of topics. I have been lucky enough to develop this sense because I have been entrusted with secrets.
“Ben, can we, erm, uh, talk?” They ask. They, because this has happened so many times. As the only gay person in some largely heterosexually identifying male circles, I get approached quite often.
“Sure, what’s going on?” I ask, knowing that they’ll want to take the conversation around the corner. To somewhere more private. When we get there, and while I already know what’s coming - I’m used to the slumped shoulders, the ashen grey resignation and the way they look down to the left and the right - I make sure that my face registers as unassuming, open and ready to hold space for them individually even if it is a song on repeat.
“It’s embarrassing…” We go a few rounds on the precipice. That terrifying moment when the secret’s about to breach the water but the ego wants to reel it in and throw it back. He provides backstory, context, justification for what comes next…
And it’s almost always sex with another guy. That or sex with a trans woman. Things he can’t reconcile it with his public heterosexual mask. Often the only way he can access that part of himself is in the privacy of a motel completely cranked up on meth. And that secret keeps him trapped in a never-ending cycle of relapse.
I say I have been lucky enough to develop this sense because I have been trusted with secrets, but that sixth sense begins with me and my secrets. I had to learn to be willing to give up my secrets first before others would share theirs with me. I had to learn that it’s where the secrets fester and you experience that disconnect between the way you want to be seen and the way you actually are, that’s when the pregnancy test of real becoming registers a positive. That locus of contradiction is where you apply the gel and roll out the ultrasound.
I circled the drain for thirty-four years with a rosary of secrets I’d thumb through one by one but never confess, until I reached rock bottom. And, once there, I clambered out up a frayed but sturdy rope ladder extended me by AA where I was taught that I’d need to be nothing less than rigorously honest if I wanted to survive. Where, in fact, two of the twelve steps - steps four and five - are about literally writing down every single one of your secrets and sharing it with someone else.
The unbearable weight of the double-life I had been leading damn near destroyed me. In Alcoholics Anonymous you learn quickly that you don’t have the liberty of picking and choosing which secrets to reveal. It’s that willful bait and switch selectivity that screwed you from the start. Reveal this but conceal that. The white-knuckled grasp instead of the cradling hand where you squee and squeeze until one day your life is the sum total of the faulty fabrications you need to remember to keep up the charade. As a mentor once told me, “we tell the truth because it’s the easiest thing to remember.”
And so here’s the truth.
All throughout my life there have been and continue to be moments where I question my sanity, my morality and my humanity. For a long time I let them remain trapped in the feedback loop of my own private hell. And it isn’t the usual story of closeted boy hides his sexuality, although that disintegrated secret is surely part of it all. My story is full of moments where underneath the straight A student in a red tie and quintessentially English private school suit was something baser and unfit for public consumption.
At six I dressed up like a girl and spooned with my primary school friend.
At eight, I sat in the toilet stalls of the gym where my mother would do her step classes, and defecate into my hand. Something about the contours and smell of the fecal matter absolutely fascinated me. I used to poop in the garden too. Of all places, right behind the holly bush, with its serrated leaves when there were fifty other equally discrete and less lacerating.
At thirteen I found my mother’s sex toys and couldn’t restrain myself.
At fifteen, I had sex with a prostitute on the third floor of a townhouse on the highstreet of Leicester, England with money I had stolen over the course of several weeks from my mother’s purse. The desperate act of a boy who needed to have sex with a girl first so that losing his virginity to a guy didn’t have to mean he was gay.
That same year, I would abandon my friends at a nightclub, walk down to the only gar bar I know and seduce a guy in his forties. When my mum would call at midnight to ask me what the hell I thought I was doing being out so late and who I would reassure that I was coming home. I would rush through my unprotected gay deflowering behind the cinema, the rain coming down as he bent over and I moved inside him, before rushing to the taxi rank to appease my mother’s worry. I would wake up the next day to find that my clothes were covered in the grim orificial aftermath of this guy’s untended to backside and I would, before mum roused from her slumber, bury them deep inside the trash cans and play dumb when, a week later, she would ask me where her favorite jacket of mine had gone.
“I don’t know,” I said, knowing full well an entire brand of clothing would for years carry the stink of my shame, my self-loathing and my secret.
All the extremes followed me, and it would culminate in my clutching a broken glass meth pipe, hovering over the stove to ignite the crystalline high. I singed my eyebrows I got so close because I was smoking mostly shards of glass and then emptied the contents of two trash bags received from the dumpster out back and searched through raw tuna fish and mayonnaise for anything I could find to get high.
And the shame didn’t end there. When my mother would die at her own hand after a long and troubled life, the first thing I felt after sadness was relief. And after that, I wondered how much she had left me.
Google searches would show me a whole range of resonant explanations for my pooping habits, from ADHD and OCD to PTSD, sexual trauma and ASD. While I got a little comfort in knowing it happens sufficiently frequently to warrant pages of search results -it’s called scatolia or corporphagia - my shame only really dissipated once I shared my story without fear of judgment face to face with another human.
Only years later after finding my place in the gay community and comparing notes did I attain some kind of peace around the facts of my sexual awakenings. About how we had all tried to bargain with our preference by kissing the girl first. About how we had experimented with anything we could find in the fridge or our mothers’ drawers. About bottoming and those messy, secretive early experiences we the closeted had to seek out in the trenches of our incipient, societally aberrant, desires.
Only in recovery would I discover a league of comrades who likewise had rifled through their trash for whatever soiled drugs they could find.
Only in speaking with others who had similarly complicated relationships with their mother was I able to understand that relief was a natural product at the close of that burdensome enmeshment. Only when my therapist told me that years of absorbing her legal invectives against dad in the divorce meant that the only metric of love I could fathom had decimal points. I couldn’t stand the sound of my own mind until I realized that thoughts just arise. They come, they go. I am not them, and they are not me.
And with every single terrible story I told, I’d encounter someone with another story they had considered likewise too terrible to tell. Something they’d never shared with another living being. The result? An osmosis of lip puckered poison sucking salvation.
The topsoil of my life was so much sideshow and performance. What I have found in my sobriety is that people on the path to recovery would much rather talk about the terrible things buried beneath the surface because they are eating away at them. And, often, when they do talk about these things they find a room full of people who understand principally because they have been there themselves.
And it’s not just the addicts. Ten minutes in the car encountering the vicious zeal with which people will prevent you from cutting in lane, a quick scan of the comments on any social media post reveal a seething unaddressed anger that might just stem from having to hide in plain sight.
And if this raw material is as much, if not more universal than the epidermal ephemera of our projected and sanitized selves, then why the hell do we not more often pick out each others’ fleas?
Perhaps it is because we feel we need permission to tell our stories?
Another dear friend and well-respected writer, David Hollander, told me, “You never ask permission to tell your story, bubby. It’s yours and nobody else’s. If you did that, you’d be telling someone else’s story.”
And I needed his advice. While I have committed my life to speaking the unspeakable and midwifing the secrets out of other people to lighten their load, I recently took it to a new level.
At the end of last year, I recorded a podcast, going out to about twenty-thousand people, in which I detail these things and more. My terrible stories.
I was scared because that’s probably about 19,700 more people than have ever heard some of my story; and about 20,000 people who have ever heard it all. And that includes my family.
My family will be hearing about my experiences with my mum in the bathtub when I was younger along with thousands of others. They will be hearing about my confusing early sexual experiences.
I know that if I spoke first to my family. If I asked their permission, I know I would hold back. I would silence myself and foreclose on the importance of telling the story.
But, even if we accept that this is my story to tell, , it still begs the question, why am I making plans to tell these stories at greater and greater scale? Why not just keep this between me and my therapist? Am I being needlessly shameless?
The truth is, I’m doing this because I know that this is not just my story. In many ways, it is everybody’s. We silence ourselves partially because there are some things we want to forget. But we want to forget them because we have never had the experience of those parts of us being accepted. We have never had the chance to learn that those parts of us are in actual fact a lot more common. In fact, those shadowy, buck-toothed foibles, fuck ups and feral moments of humbug are the most universal part of us. And love cannot grow until we accept them. I am willing to have people look at me askance even if the net outcome is that just one more person comes out of their shame closet.
And the anticipation of shock is exactly the point. The reception of the stories is difficult to gauge. The ears on which the story lands have a critical role to play in this deep unburdening. The reason why the terrible stories so often remain hidden and private is because of the way they can be received.
Most often people simply don’t know how to hold space for the profoundly sad and shocking. Although we were built to navigate prehistoric plains, fighting, flying, cradling infants and protecting them from the Serengeti, it seems our capacity for cradling the truth of life’s ugliness without needing to fix or make sense of it has fallen off in the evolutionary scheme.
Eddie Izzard, the English stand-up comedienne turned political candidate, captures it perfectly. Regaling a day in the life of her early, then self-labeled transvestitism, she tells the story of walking - in full high-heeled authenticity - into a convenience store where she encounters a shopkeeper whose sheltered heteronormative parochialism utterly unravels.
As the clerk spirals in either/or category overload, Eddie offers us a glimpse into his disorganized and untrained for sense-making monologue.
Errrrrmmmmm, act cool, act cool. What do we do? Put the Snickers bars in the back of the shop, yes, put the Snickers in the back of the shop.
“I’ll have a snickers bar, please.” She asks.
“Wait…you eat those?” The confounded clerk bumbles.
But there are certain places where even the gnarliest of secrets - information that makes the average Jane recoil - are treated with a beautiful spectrum of non-judgment, love and, more often than not, emancipating humor.
When you sit in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous or any of its sister programs of recovery, very quickly you’ll see the exquisitely cavalier economy of redaction as people say the darkest of things only to met with love and, quite often, a sense of normalizing humor.
“And that’s when she stabbed me in the eye with a pencil,” says the newcomer mere days after hitting rock bottom and starting their journey, to a room that erupts in gallows laughter and multiple mouths make a note to themselves with a knowing smile.
“Oh, I remember the ole pencil eye stabbing days of my addiction.” Everybody effervescently unites.
Because in Alcoholics Anonymous, it is a daily experience to hear your story come out of the mouth of someone who on the surface seems absolutely nothing like you. Black, white, old, young, gay, straight, trans, able-bodied, or neurodivergent, there is this miraculous sound hovering underneath everyone’s tonsils at the end of each story shared.
“Me too.”
In Alcoholics Anonymous most people have arrived at the conclusion that their life literally depends on the truth. That the only outcomes for someone who is less than “rigorously honest” are jails, institutions or death.
But the terrible stories happen all the time to addicts and non-addicts alike and the shame we feel around them prevents them from being incorporated, learnt from and transformed through. When we gather with an honesty and authenticity so provocative that it makes it not only easier, but essentially organic to share ourselves so vulnerably and meet others there so openly, we are on to something meaningful.
And the beautiful thing is, with every vulnerable baptism, we add yet another person out there who is able to hold space for those yet to come. With every secret shared, we may well quite literally save someone’s life.
There is a connective tissue that grows once you become willing to both tell and listen to the terrible stories. It is like a new limb or a new organ. It expands your humanity.
I volunteered with the Trevor Project for a year during the pandemic
“Hi, Trevor Lifeline, this is Ben, what’s going on?”
Silence.
It was my first call on my first shift. When I heard nothing but wind, breathing and the sound of crying on the other end of the line I began to wonder if I’d already made a mistake.
I wasn’t used to that silence. The sound of someone summoning the courage to speak and ask for help. The heaviest and most difficult of admissions that kept the Trevor phone lines busy every second of the day with struggling LGBTQ+ youth across a country in which it was still too painful for many of them to exist.
Finally they broke the silence.
“I’m standing next to the railway…I’m going to jump.”
I could hear them shivering and sobbing, gusts of wind blowing up against the phone.
During the training, you learn to ask open ended questions. To keep the caller on the line, to establish rapport and to validate their experience. To hold a space and listen, without trying to fix them, but rather to explore other ways of making it through the day.
The days that I had struggled to make it through. The bathtub I had sat in on more than one occasion without anywhere to turn. Not knowing that there was a phone line I could have called for help. Not knowing what it even meant to ask for help.
In my sobriety I had made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t let that happen to anyone else. But right now, on the phone, I kind of wished I could be anywhere else. Terrified at the responsibility of a life in my hands without any answers.
“I hear that you’re thinking of killing yourself.” I said, because we don’t say “commit suicide”. You commit murders, you commit crimes. This, this is the one area that most people feel their most agency.
“Can you tell me what’s making you feel this way?” I continued.
They told me about their pain.
They told me that they’d lost a loved one to suicide.
They told me that they were queer and had wished they weren’t.
They told me they felt alone and that they drank and did drugs to forget.
They told me that they felt like a failure because they hadn’t even been able to get suicide right.
They told me all things I myself had been, and done and felt before. They told me their terrible stories.
And, although we’re taught not to disclose details about ourselves, they allow for it in the most imminent and essential of situations. When a personal connection might be the only thing left to try.
I told them about my childhood and the confusion. I told them about losing my mum to suicide. I told them about my own battle with addiction. I told them about the knife, the bathtub, the voices and the shadows climbing the walls.
And then the tone of their voice shifted. The tears subsided and a space opened up. We talked about AA, sponsors, god, and how drinking and drugs felt like the only ways we could stay alive. Until they didn’t.
And as we talked I heard the wind replaced by the sound of a car door closing, a train in the distance moving past and a little shy laughter at the stories we both had to share.
There’s a dark side that we have to befriend to make ourselves whole. It’s what I like to call the compost heap of identity. The compost binds our humanity together. Into the compost goes all the detritus and the dirt, the tossed out, discarded, disgusting rotten matter, the ejaculate and excretion, the dreams, failures, births, deaths, suicides and immortal victories to slowly but surely turn into fertile, nutrient rich soil which returns everything back into the cycle.
I think that’s why I was so attracted to Jill’s insight into the writing life. She was the closest I got, in-person, to the heroes of literature. The Henry Millers, the Hunter S. Thompsons, and the Bukowskis. She rubbed the compost together in her hands and sprinkled it on my sapling pen.
I had come to her with a story inside of me that I wanted, but didn’t know I needed, to tell.
It was a story about secrets, sexuality, suicide, isolation, generational trauma, addiction and hope, but most of all about the wash cycles of pain, shame and performance which had completely ghost-written my life.
With a few years of sobriety under my belt, when I met her I was ready to be reborn. A critical mass of open-eyed awareness, I was awake to all the things that had shaped and waylaid me, and begun to replace the idea of it being anybody’s fault with the question of what I would do about it.
At that time, however, while I could fathom the theory, I didn’t yet fully understand the next right action: every resurrection requires a death. Every recreation calls for a destruction. And I couldn’t truly become something new unless I put my hands in the fire of honest, total confrontation.
Inside Jill’s every action you can see the truth of that belief system. There’s a fight in the way she walks. A “damn ain’t this life fucked up and funny” kind of gratitude, flowing with sorrows like four randomly picked aces. She draws blue coyotes on the walls of her Beverly Hills apartment. The symbol of both sides of the coin. The dark and light. The playful trickster.
“Ben, I want you to tell the story. The story you never wanted to tell anyone. Your story.”
“But what is that story? I feel like there are so many trails to go down. I don’t know where to start!”
“Your redemption by telling your story is the story, Ben.” Jill told me, “Listen here. Life is like a painting. It’s in the lighting shifts and the angles. It’s in the color blends and all of the brush strokes. The light isn’t light without contrast and contour. The story isn’t true unless it exposes the very worst of you. The things you think have happened to you, that made you the victim, or the things you absolutely hate yourself for having felt, said, done or believed, that make you the villain. They are all just things which simply happened. We all make everything so personal when its just chaos; and chaos is the most benevolent and welcoming host because it doesn’t judge and it doesn’t know shame. This life can be the story of a victim or a hero. Ben, you must tell the story you are too scared to tell. That’s the only way to conquer the fear and become the hero. ”
