Day # 61: Exploring Storytelling and Forgiving Some More

 #61

Forgiveness has helped to free me.  I wonder if what I have left protects me from actually doing the things I truly want to do.  Is maintaining that hurt and armor protecting me in other ways, too?

It may all have to do with freedom; would forgiving protect me from being hurt again?  That’s the true question, or would it at least take the narrow long hole one falls into when re-hurt away; remove the remembering all the past hurts and questioning the whys and the lines of responsibility?  If I forgive do I take the power out of the bite?

As I have said before, the Tutu’s The Book of Forgiving holds telling the story as the first step towards forgiveness.  I have seen so much good happen through telling the story, and I know well the power of telling the story.

The first ABE (adult basic education) classroom I ever taught was in some ways comprised of the most remarkable group of people I have ever met.  One of the young women in the group, I will call, Lisa, presented in many ways as developmentally delayed, but she had a great smile and an awareness in her eyes when we talked.  I knew she could learn.  She took to reading and writing like a duck in water.  I watched her go from a first grade to about a sixth grade level of academic skills three times.  Each time she reached that level it would all rush out of her like a sandbag that had sprung a leak.   I knew it was not a cognitive issue.  Lisa occasionally showed up hurt, black and blue, a couple of casts and always talking happily about her stupid basement steps.  She was pregnant now and I worried she was being abuse.  She married a man 20 years her elder who was not kind. 

After about a year, Lisa began to keep a dialogue journal with her teachers and to write poetry and began to disclose the trauma of her life to us, but still would not speak the truth, claiming what was written was fiction.  She was telling the story, but was not quite ready to own it.  One day she showed up with a broken arm.  Lisa couldn’t write and she was ready to tell her story to someone who could change her living situation, she let me bring her to an intake at the women’s shelter.

This is by far not the end of my story with Lisa.  This woman taught me more about working with people and teaching literacy than anyone else in my 30 years of education.  I will continue her story at a later date.  But what I wanted to illustrate tonight was the power of learning to tell one’s story.  Lisa learned to tell hers, but did not move to change her life until someone tried to take her right to tell it away by breaking her arm.  Then she moved.