Counter Story

We know more than we are told

If I listen I can hear my ancestors speaking to me. Look to yourself they say. But know also know that you are not alone. The grandmothers are with you. Their talk stories guide me, countering the bully voices all around. It has always been so. Look for perspective. Listen to the counter stories. Allow them to speak to you. Come down through the ages, they tell me what I need to hear, what I need to know. Giving me perspective, space, time, hope and joy. Solace and courage. They always have. Since childhood. Drawing, dancing, telling stories, reading stories. Writing stories. Traveling in my mind. Looking for the ways, things might turn out okay.

Books shielded me from blows. Books slowed my fast-beating heart. In books I found another place to be, to live, imagined a world much kinder, nicer than the one I lived within. Books were patient with me, gave me time to understand, soothed me in my loneliness. I carried books with me from one place to the next, like johnny cakes in my pocket, to feed me on the journey, reading in the motel, the car, every new place too soon to be the old place, often the book I carried in my paper sack of possessions was the only thing I owned aside from my own memory.

Knowledge accumulated on the run.

In the backseat of the car, amidst the screaming, the confusion, I focused on the page. When told something was wrong with me, that I would never be loved, never be okay. When she said I wasn’t going anywhere. That I would never leave her. I would stay with her forever, for all of my only life. Helping her take care of my siblings. Helping her take care of herself. When she tried to make me feel hopeless. When she said I was her possession. That I had no choice. When she grabbed me and screamed, you belong to me! When harm was forced upon me as if I’d brought it on myself, as if cruelty were inevitable, as if I deserved what I got; when what was given was not mine, never mine, I turned to my imagination, to the wild hope I found in old stories.

In stories I found new maps, ancient connections, and humane solutions to life’s dilemmas. When I found myself in a blank and painful place, I turned to contrary stories. Stories where I recognized the dangers I lived with, where I read about those dangers fully formed, yet learned they were unable to harm me.

Knowing more than I was told. Early on understanding I was in danger.

Books taught me to face my fears. In books I found the words for what I could not say back to her; found words for all the things I was afraid to talk about openly. I read and my heart moved upward. Year after year I read stories passed down from those who came before me and stories come from the future, into now. Books where there was no final ending, where possibility lived in every character. Characters made of more than words on the page. Counter stories of courage and defiance always and forever alive within us.

No end to our story.