Stories I: Our Story
have a friend who has a hard time connecting to her peers. I was trying to figure out a way to explain it to a family member of hers. I found myself returning to the phrase “it’s her whole story” meaning the sum total of her life choices and values that she developed. Her choices and values were alien to the majority of her peers in her age group. Well at least the ones who entered into the middle class. Where they had careers, she was bouncing around jobs waiting tables. Where they were in families or independent, she was dependent or codependent. Really she never grew up.
Even though I knew what I was trying to convey with the analogy of “telling a story" for summing one’s values and decisions, I realized it wasn’t a good way to do it. To do it right I had to walk the family member through it step by step. I needed to actually plot it out. So that’s what I did.
The following is the True Story.
She didn’t like High School and she convinced her parents to allow her to drop out and go to a modeling academy. The parents were always suckers for a sales pitch, and the one from the modeling agency was so good, they let her go. That went bust. Unfortunately it put her behind in her high school, and when you add in the fact that she was never really interested in school, she was lucky to get her GED.
She always liked the bad boys, and always dated them. Her desire for the party life had her moving out as soon as she could. She bounced around family members and mostly worked at bars and restaurants. Ultimately she learned that food service has low pay, high turnover, uncertainty, and no benefits. She moved back in with the parents for a bit. She continued to date more pretty boy bums.
She convinced her gullible parents to pay for training at a questionable culinary arts school with a smooth sales pitch. Within a few short years she discovered that the life of a chef is hard, there is no glamor and only long hours and low pay and limited benefits. Unsurprisingly she quit. She went back to what she knew which was working at bars and restaurants. She dated more pretty boy bums and pretty quickly got knocked up by one. He promptly disappeared.
She started hanging out at a gym. She liked it. Again, she convinced her parents to pay for some personal trainer accreditation school. For the third time, she learned short term training by an independent for-profit educational business led to a job that results in a position where you are working long hours for very little pay and have limited or no benefits. She quickly realized she can’t work long hours as a personal trainer for little pay with an infant and no father/partner to help out.
She got a break and started working in the mortgage industry doing the back end paperwork. It was her first time working in a desk job at a company offering benefits and decent income.
She bought her first house. Unfortunately she decided on a major fixer upper. It was also an hour away from her parents and thus made it very challenging for them to help out with their grandchild. Since she had no construction skills or really the ability to learn them, she had to rely on her parents for all repairs on the house that was continually in different stages of falling apart. Unfortunately the mortgage industry went through a down cycle and she lost the good job. She went back to waiting tables and now has to rely on her parents’ generosity to keep the roof over her head.
Her story stands where she is in her mid thirties. She has no healthcare, no retirement, and she’s back in a codependent relationship with parents. She’s only able to maintain her life because they are paying the mortgage and for virtually everything for her child. She’s permanently single. She has no idea how to have a relationship with a reasonable partner. Every relationship she’s ever had was with a bad boy/pretty boy burdened with major issues including unstable laborer careers, legal issues, substance issues, etc. The list of their flaws is endless. She is in this cycle, in large part, because her social skills are more aligned to hanging out in a bar than with managing middle class families. She is forever a bratty teenage girl dependent on her family, but playing at being an adult.
Or
The Following Could Have Been the New Story
She didn’t like High School and she convinced her parents to allow her to drop out and go to a modeling academy. They were always suckers for a sales pitch, and the one from the modeling agency was so good they let her go. That went bust. Unfortunately it put her behind in her high school, and when you add in the fact that she was never really interested in school, she was lucky to get her GED.
She always liked the bad boys, and always dated them. Her desire for the party life had her moving out as soon as she could. She bounced around family members and mostly worked at bars and restaurants. Ultimately she learned that food service has low pay, high turnover, uncertainty, and no benefits. She moved back in with the parents for a bit. She continued to date more pretty boy bums.
She convinced her gullible parents to pay for training at a questionable culinary arts school with a smooth sales pitch. Within a few short years she discovered that life of a chef is hard, there is no glamor and only long hours and low pay and limited benefits. Unsurprisingly she quit. She went back to what she knew which was working at bars and restaurants. She dated more pretty boy bums and pretty quickly got knocked up by one. He promptly disappeared.
She decided she wanted independence and a better life for herself and her kid. Most of all she didn’t want to be dependent/codependent on parents. She knew it wasn’t going to be easy, and she had to be dependent on them for a while longer, but only until she could permanently change her story.
She understood that the only way to get a decent job was to go to school. She went back to school, to a local community college to get an RN. She knew nursing was a good career that paid well. What she didn’t expect was that while in school, some of the required classes included introduction to psychology. She learned about personality types and child development. She realized some of the reasons for her poor choices in men. When dating, she started to look for more stable personalities who would be good life partners and hopefully good father figures for her kid. She found a guy who worked in engineering. He wasn’t attractive but he was kind and he was very stable. She dated him with the goal of getting married. When she got out of school they did get married. Together they bought a sensible, low-maintenance house in a good neighborhood. They had another kid.
Her life was better but she realized she didn’t like long hours as a grunt in the medical world. Now she knew what she needed to do. She went back to school at nights and weekends to get a BSN and MSN. She specialized in psychology and is now a nurse practitioner and is also credentialed to be an LCSW.
Now, her story stands where she is 35. She’s married to an unexciting, but stable guy. She has a growing family and a highly in-demand job where she’s treated very well. She has good benefits including healthcare and retirement and flexibility to focus on the part of her industry that is most interesting to her. She lives in a nice house in a good neighborhood. She is not dependent on her parents, in fact she grew to be their equals.
I chose these two stories because the person in the story is a friend of mine. Why would I want someone so fundamentally messed up as a friend? It’s because I find flawed people interesting, mostly because of what I can learn from them. In this case, I don’t think the flaw was on the part of the parents. Yes, they could have refused to enable her. That would definitely have nudged her away from the life she chose. But I think, ultimately, we are all responsible for our own decisions. The person in this story could have decided to change her own story. She didn’t have to go into medicine. She could have gotten the training to become a teacher, an engineer, or even an IT tech support person. Really any training that would lead to a professional job with benefits and a stable career path, or at least as stable as you can have in our modern world.
What I learned from my friend’s life, and her current story is that we all have our own story. We are usually very comfortable in our own story, but being comfortable with something is not the same as liking it. It just means we are used to it. We can look at our story, and decide if we like it or not. I didn’t like my story and I changed it. Who knows, I may need to change it a second time. I think we should all do this every now and again. We should look at our lives like it’s a story. Is it a good story, one you will enjoy sharing or is it an unpleasant or unhappy story? If it’s a bad story, we should change our story. The way I see it, unlike the movies, the middle part of our story is the most important part. Let’s face it, everyone’s story ends the same. For us, it’s not the end of the story, it’s what we did to get there that is the most important part.
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