The oldest human tradition
On storytelling and listening
Today is my 29th birthday, which naturally means I am beginning my 30th year of life. And I have never been so excited.
You might expect a woman my age to cringe and retreat at the number 30 and sob mournfully for the magical jungle of my 20s. And while there is a a sort of goodbye I’ve already begun, I’ve been excited to turn 30 for a few years now. Confidence and grace. Unashamed. Thirty, flirty, and thriving.
Humans love stories. It’s the oldest tradition we have, passing down lessons learned and miles walked so those behind us understand what may come their way. I am beginning my third decade guided by stories of women seeing their lives expand in unbelievable ways as they age.
Women on Twitter furtively describe a newfound wildness to their sexualities in their 30s. Chelsea Handler and Amy Poehler talk extensively on their podcasts about how they found the fullest versions of themselves in their 40s and 50s. Women take risks and change their entire career paths after finally realizing their dreams decades after they were told to decide. Pop culture and shared tales over glasses of wine describe the 30th decade as one of confidence, self-assuredness, growth, exploration, and an intolerance for the bullshit that permeated the decade before.
Yet, I imagine, many of you felt a twinge of surprise when you read that I’m excited to turn 30.
Somewhere along the way, stories stopped being guidance and become omens, the smallest slivers of discomfort or harm turning us away from experiences that could also be fruitful and exhilarating. Stories that tell us that youth and beauty are king, that heartbreak will be the end of us and vulnerability is too much of a risk. These stories became distorted through the lens of our fears. It’s an evolutionary survival method to avoid threat, and nothing could be more threatening than someone deviating from what the majority has deemed most desirable.
Or, even worse, we pretend the stories meant to lead us don’t exist. Because it’s easier to fear. Because if we are scared, knowing others are not, that we don’t have to be, is too much of a mountain to climb.
These faulty forms of protection are doing more harm than good when they cause us to care more about image than the substance of our lives.
When I was in middle school, 5th or 6th grade and just beginning puberty, I told my mom that I thought I was fat. “My thighs are big!” I remember telling her, convinced I had developed an untenable bodily largesse. (This is long before we were having conversations around body positivity and not viewing fat as a bad word, so please give me a bit of grace.)
“Well, my thighs are bigger than yours, so what does that make me?” she responded.
This response made me pause for a second. I knew my mom was thin. I knew that I was smaller than her - granted, I was smaller because I was a child, but it revealed the fault in my logic. And there was something about that truth sitting there, wide open, unavoidable, that made me realize I didn’t even believe what I had said in the first place. A few other girls at school had said this about their own bodies. It felt like something we were supposed to believe about ourselves.
How lucky we are to have access to those who want to encourage and prepare us. These stories are there, if you listen, to guide us through whatever new period life upon which we are about to embark. How shameful that we toss their knowledge aside.
We ignore these stories because we are searching for solutions to problems that we convince ourselves exist, and the more of us that buy into this, the more those problems do exist. The real solutions like in embracing the myriad and accepting the course of time while choosing to spend it in the ways that fulfill us the most.
In Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, the aging Reverend Ames writes a letter to his young son to be read long after the reverend passes. His son was born to him late in life, and he feels the urgency to provide his son with guidance long after he dies. He tells his son, “It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you acquire.”
The gift of longevity is letting go of the sense of bitterness and regret we have developed - that’s the message Reverend Ames wants to impart to his son. Live long enough to understand what matters. And maybe, if the reverend can help it, his son will learn what matters a little sooner than he did.
More than extolling the gift of time, his act of writing to his son is extolling the gift of knowledge passed. Storytelling is the oldest human tradition and it’s also the most important because it means no moment is faced alone. I wonder at our insistence to try and face these moments alone, any way. I hope we start heeding this gift more often.
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