A Glorious Mess

Tomorrow night, I become an official storyteller. I will stand in front of an unknown number of guests and tell my story. My story. Not one of the stories I wrote in Brush Tales. Not one of my 50-word snippets. Not a poem. A true story about part of my life.

I’ve always been a storyteller. Anyone who has heard me tell them anything knows that to be true. If the answer isn’t a simple yes or no, be prepared for a lengthy reply. If there is a story in anything, I will find it and deliver it with great enthusiasm.

This storytelling tendency is something I’ve often been criticised for. People want you to give quick answers, not explain everything around what happened. But in the last few years, I have been in the company of people who have acknowledged my tendencies and accepted them. It has made a massive difference to realise you’re telling a story, apologise, and have someone say, ‘But you’re a storyteller, and that’s okay’. The acceptance and understanding that this is who I am helped me step into who I’m meant to be.

When I created my Facebook business page, my first cover page stated that I was a storyteller, poet and wordsmith. They are all titles given to me by others. Rowena H helped me accept that storytelling is how I’m designed. Anyone who has read my attempts at prose knows there’s a poetic heart burning inside me. Wordsmith is a title given to me by a woman named Donelle R., whom I went to church with 20 years ago, who loved the way I made words work. ‘You have a way with words’ is something I’ve been told regularly in the past and recently.

So, what does someone who has been affirmed as a word addict do with themselves? They take any opportunity available to exercise that skill. Only after quite a few deep breaths did I gain the courage to publicly announce myself as a writer. I felt like an absolute imposter when I walked into a printing shop and handed over the design I had created for my business cards. Me? An author? With business cards showing the different ways you can follow my writing journey? I was truly waiting for the ‘You’re Dreaming’ police to tap me on the shoulder and denounce me as publicly as I had declared myself.

I felt a bit brazen when I applied for the Storyteller opportunity. I didn’t think my story would be good enough to get into the consideration group. But it was. I didn’t think my story would stand up against the incredible lives of some of the others in the group. But it has. And now I get to deliver it – after spending every spare moment of my time memorising it.

It’s not easy for me to remember words anymore. Before my brain surgery, it was a piece of cake. Write it, read it a few times, say it. I always had palm cards in case of memory failure, but they were more of a prop than a necessity – a set of small, square, numbered security blankets. This process, though, has been painful – for me and anyone who has had to listen to me.

I started by reading the words as they were typed on pages. I read them and read them to anyone who could give me eight minutes to listen. The more I read, the more familiar I became with the flow of the sentences and then with the placement of key words. Last Tuesday, when I was notified that I had been chosen as a storyteller, I ramped up my efforts to commit the words to heart, because memorisation is a requirement of presenting your story.

I created palm cards with each section of the story on a different card and then numbered them. I stood in front of family members, reading from the cards but glancing up more and more often. I was concerned at how hard it was to remember the correct sequence so I pulled every strategy I could recall from my high school debating and Country Week speech competition days. I stood in front of my bathroom mirror, talking to myself. I walked around the house saying the words over and over. But I couldn’t see how I would be able to not use my cards.

On Thursday morning, standing in the shower, I started saying the words to myself. My bathroom tiles have heard a lot of words – the songs I belt out while standing under the warm water, the mutterings of my anger towards others that’s only ever voiced under the sound of running water and a whirring exhaust fan, and the talking to’s I give myself in the only place I am ever truly left alone. Even with adult children, my toilet visits often involve conversations through the closed door, but everyone knows that with the shower running, exhaust fan going, and the oversized shower cap that covers my dreads pulled down over my ears, I can’t hear anything they’re trying to tell me, so they don’t even try.

Some of my best thinking is done under these conditions, so I wasn’t surprised that I could recall the speech almost word for word in my favourite place. But they were not conditions that could be replicated in public, so I started looking for other ways to let my words out. Pacing the house while talking helped, and the fact that I could do that dressed was more conducive to public performance, but I was sure striding back and forth across whatever stage we’d be on wouldn’t be an option.

All I could do was keep talking and find other strategies to move enough to remember. By Friday night, I was standing behind my sons, who alternated between checking whatever they had been doing on their computers and staring at me, telling them my story without any cards. I’m sure there were a few hidden eye rolls before they turned back to me from their devices, but they at least gave me the time and audience that I needed.

My renditions weren’t perfect, and I kept forgetting one line over and again, but that was more than I had been able to do in the eight years since my surgeries. On Saturday morning, in the hours when I couldn’t sleep but wasn’t fully awake (known as subliminal dreaming), I rehearsed my words over and over, more certain each time of the order of events. I decided the lack of sleep was worth the gain in memorisation.

By Saturday afternoon, I had told the story to my Storytelling mentor over Zoom with only one significant hesitation in remembering the order of events. On Sunday night, my sons were each treated to another ‘sit there and pretend to be my audience’ session. Each time, my pacing lessened in area. This morning, I went through my story in front of my psych in a tiny room that didn’t allow for much movement. That’s when my hands came into play instead. And this afternoon I stood in the amphitheatre where I will perform tomorrow evening (pictured) and told the story to the grass, the sky and a few bemused dog walkers.

The practising and pacing appear to be paying off. I think the pattern is well set in my head, with only occasional substitutions of words that don’t change the story. I have noticed this past week, though, that I have been forgetting other things.

As a consequence of my surgery, or perhaps even the tumour itself, I struggle with remembering the names of people I know well when I get tired and overwhelmed, and that tendency is back in full force. I have also been unable to find the words I’ve needed to name random things. On Friday afternoon, I even left the chocolates I had bought for my workmates at the checkout without noticing until I was back in the office. But I know that is because I am using everything I have to be able to deliver my story without any prompts.

I’m sure there will be some cleaning up to do after the presentation, particularly at work, where I know I’ve been a bit distracted. But I am willing to pay that cost to once again be able to do something that used to come naturally.

I will also buy more chocolates, make sure they go in my trolley after paying for them and take them to work to celebrate a successful presentation and my triumph over previous limitations.