What's your inner voice telling you?
The idea that we are all made of stories is one of my core beliefs. Our stories, memories, experiences, both good and bad, shape us — whether we're aware of it or not.
From our stories, we acquire lessons. We grow or shrink, even get stuck. From our stories, we believe things about ourselves — and not all of these things are true.
Years ago, I taught the personal essay to college freshman. At first, this may seem like an odd choice for an introduction to college writing class. After all, most students will not write much about themselves in their other classes. But I believed, along with the smart composition theorists who trained me, that students starting the next chapter of their lives could benefit from pausing to understand where they'd been, how far they'd come, and where else they wanted to go.
Memoir teacher Patricia Hampl says that writing about our lives gives us the opportunity to reattach the value to the memory. According to Hampl, over time, the memory (the story) and the value (the meaning) become estranged.
In other words, writing about your life puts you in the driver's seat of the story you tell yourself about yourself.
Today, I get to help people of all ages, stages, and backgrounds write about their lives through life story writing, or guided autobiography. In our online workshops, participants write two pages a week on an important theme and bring their story to class to share with the group.
They are often surprised by what stories stand out and the direction they take. Many find that they can write far more than two pages (roughly 1000 words), but the page limit is more than a restriction.
In wrapping up their story, writers naturally gravitate toward meaning, and the final lines give them space to make sense of their experience, even integrate it into how they see themselves today. In addition to the pleasure that comes from putting your life into words, making sense of your life is one of the big pay offs of life story writing, and as a guide, it's probably my favorite part.
The following piece is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. In "The Rage Cage," CJ explores a turning point in her life, when she attended a 12-Day Silent Retreat. She went in wide-eyed and optimistic but soon found the experience heightened some of her deepest fears.
Read on to learn more about the challenges CJ faced, what she did when she wanted to leave, and the profound lessons that surfaced because she stayed.
Learn more about life story writing and our next guided autobiography workshop here.
The Rage Cage: What I Found in Twelve Days of Silence
I was four months pregnant when I made what seemed like the worst possible decision: to go on a silent meditation retreat. The kind where you don't speak to another human being for twelve days straight. No phones, no books, no writing – just you and your thoughts, locked in together. As I drove up I-5 to Washington that summer morning, I stress-ate an entire package of miniature York Peppermint Patties, trying to quiet the voice in my head asking what kind of pregnant woman voluntarily signs up for torture. What in the hell was I doing?
But somewhere beneath the anxiety and chocolate-induced clarity, I knew this was my last chance. My last opportunity to explore the uncharted terrain of complete solitude before stepping into motherhood. The next window for something like this wouldn't open for another eighteen years, and I wasn't about to let my growing belly stop me from this final adventure in silence.
Let me be clear: this wasn't some spa retreat. This was Vipassana – no talking, no phones, no reading, no writing, no exercise. Just me, my thoughts, and a strict meditation schedule that started at 4 AM every morning. In my mind, it was now or never. As a soon-to-be single mom, I knew the next chance I'd have for something like this would be somewhere around my kid's high school graduation.
The first hour, we could still talk. I met my roommate Christine, set up my sleeping bag on a squeaky cot, and tried to joke away my nerves. Then the silence fell, and everything I'd been running from caught up with me.
Here's what they don't tell you about silence: it's loud. Really loud. Especially when you're trapped in there with rage you didn't even know you had. While other women floated around the grounds like serene butterflies, marveling at flowers, I was sitting, trapped in my own private rage cage, face-to-face with decades of unspoken hurt from my family that I'd been too busy to face. All that anger I'd been outrunning with my phone, with sugar, with work – it was waiting for me there in the quiet.
Then on day three, I woke up to find Christine's bed empty. She'd moved out without a word – though, to be fair, we'd literally vowed not to speak. I spiraled through every possible story: I must have done something wrong. I must be impossible to live with. I must be broken in some fundamental way. Each day brought a new flavor of emotional torture as I passed her on the walking paths, making up entire narratives in my head about why I deserved to be abandoned.
I wanted to leave. God, did I want to leave. Every night I'd promise myself: "Tomorrow. Tomorrow I'm getting out of this hell hole." But my pride kept me there. Just as a prisoner keeps track of time, I marked a single line on the wall for each day I had endured. Those parallel lines became my countdown to freedom.
On day five, something broke open. During meditation, as that familiar rage bubbled up, I did something different. Instead of fighting it, I talked to it: "Oh, I see you're angry. You have every right to be angry. Now, let's get back to the breath." The shift was subtle but immediate. Each time I acknowledged the anger, and validated its existence, it loosened its grip a little more. I became a witness to my own pain instead of its victim.
When the vow of silence finally broke twelve days later, Christine immediately ran up and hugged me. "I'm so sorry, your bed was just so squeaky it kept me up,” she said. “I asked them to fix it, but they moved me to a new room instead. And they wouldn't let me leave you a note because it would break the vow of silence."
All those stories I'd written in my head – every single one of them wrong. Not just a little wrong. Completely, totally wrong. The bed was squeaky. That was it. That was the whole story.
Would I recommend a silent meditation retreat to others? No. Would I do it again? Hell no. But sitting in that rage cage taught me something valuable: the stories we tell ourselves about other people are usually fiction. And sometimes, the only way through our darkness is to stop running, turn around, and say hello.
I drove away from that retreat fundamentally changed. Not in the blissed-out, enlightened way I'd imagined, but in a way that felt real and earned. I'd faced my rage, my stories, my fears - and somehow, in all that silence, I'd found a friend inside myself.
