narratives_reading_listening_fmri/stimuli/story_10.txt

In all honesty I'm gonna start out by admitting I sometimes lie. {BR} {LG} Occasionally I'll include a lie in the story I'm telling if I think it'll make the story better. {BR} {LS} I don't do it to protect the innocent, because I don't know any stories where the people in them are innocent. {LG} And I don't do it to be shocking either. {BR} Though I admit to {BR} to once telling a story where I exaggerated the length of my penis. {LG} In my own defense I exaggerated down and not up. {LG} And I did it for the laugh, you {BR}. {LG} The story I'm telling you tonight does not have a lie in it. {BR} Or many laughs for that matter.  When I'm done telling you this story you may think it's nothing but a lie {BR}. But I'd ask you to trust me on this. {LS} 

At the age of nineteen, {LS} I fell prey to a powerful and deeply corrupting influence. It dogged me for six years, {LS} costing me many a friend, and in process bringing my family to ruin. {LS} It crippled me to such an extent that I have spent the intervening fifteen years recovering from it. The influence I speak of is hope {LG}. Now you should know at the get go there's nothing in my childhood to suggest I might find myself on such a wayward path as that. My parents loved me terribly. They taught be right from wrong, {BR} they taught me to be courageous in the face of bullies, they taught me patience and forgiveness, they taught me that love would see you through any misfortune. 

{LS} {BR} My trouble began on independence day. Not the independence day but my independence day. {BR} My independence day occurred on memorial day, nineteen eighty two. {BR} That was the day I told my family I was gay. {LS} {BR} The act itself "mom, dad, I'm gay"  {LG} {BR} was relatively unexceptional. In fact it should have been more exceptional, and I've always sort of wished that it had been. {BR} {LS} However subsequent events overshadowed it and it pales by comparison. {LS} {BR} The subsequent events occurred in my absence, after the fact, as I was in my car {BR} driving back to college to take my final freshman exams. {BR} I remember being on the highway and thinking how, you know I kind of expected my parents to freak out a little {LG} and, you know  to my surprise they had not freaked out, they'd been calm and cool and collected {BR}  oddly calm and cool and collected, but still I was really happy as I drove back to school. {LS} Meanwhile subsequent events were busy unfolding back home. {BR} My mother was going through the house where I grew up and was gathering together things I'd made for her. Um a jewelry box when I was in four H, {BR}  and a painting when I was sixteen. Um a box of letters or a box containing the letters that I'd written them from school, which I used to do every week. {LS} She was removing photographs from the walls and placing them in little piles around the house {BR} and she was directing my father who never dared not follow her direction {BR} to take the bed and the desk and the chair and the lamp and the Smith Corona, {BR} my smith corona even {BR} , and to put them all in the front yard, {BR} next to the rock garden not too close to the maple tree. {BR} {LS} My clothes, my books, my bookcases, {CG} my report cards, my Farah Fawcett posters, my shoes, {BR} three years worth of interview magazines, the good ones with the Andy Warhol covers, {LG} everything. {LS} Then with my brother and my sister and my grandparents watching, {BR} my mother removed a cigarette from this tiny crocheted case she always kept them in. {BR} And she lit the cigarette, and then she took the match and put it to the pile of things there in the front yard that contained the soul and complete record of my existence in my family. 

{LS} It burned for seven and a half hours {BR} thanks in part to the addition of some lighter fluid to help get the larger pieces of furniture going. {LS} All of it all that was me prior to that memorable memorial day, {BR} {NS} up in flames. {LS} According to my sister who years later recounted these details to me {BR} it was a {BR} mighty impressive blaze {BR} {CG}. In their eagerness to feed it, {BR} and due to an unexpected wind off the fields around the house, {BR} the sugar maple that was older than my great grandfather caught a spark in its branches, {LS} and was sacrificed. {BR} {LS} They {BR} cut off all communication with me. {BR} They emptied and closed our joint bank account {BR} there goes college, {BR} they barred the door, they stopped talking, stopped answering my letters, stopped taking my calls. They stopped anything with me. They just stopped. {LS} I was {BR} completely disbelieving. I mean this didn't make any sense. Uh All of my friends had you know stories about telling their families they were gay, and they all ended the same way. Sooner or later everything worked out fine. So {BR} . I even had a friend named Neil whose parents had done the same thing, you know, and first they'd stopped talking to him. {BR} But one year later they were inviting his new boyfriend to come home with him for the holidays. {LS} Everyone counseled me to "have a little patience" and "have a little hope." 

And this is how it starts. Slowly, just a little hope, just enough to get you through. {BR}  But hope is cumulative. {BR} A little bit here and a little bit there, it builds up in the system until it becomes something toxic. Denial. {BR} I mean, their reaction had been, yes, extreme, but not the worst that could happen. The thing to do was to be a good son, to make them proud, to earn back their love. {BR} {LS} So I got a job. And then another and then a third. Three shifts, three restaurants. {BR} Six days a week. {BR} That would show them. {LS} But they weren't watching. {BR} I wrote them letters, lots of letters. {BR} About nothing you know. It's uh  Tuesday and it's hot, {BR}  or my new roommate is named Kathy. Or my friends took me out for my birthday yesterday. They didn't write back. {BR} Living for me sort of came to a halt. {BR} Um despite the fact that my life just went on and on. {BR} I didn't think about my future, I didn't think about my needs, I didn't think about my sadness, I didn't think about any of it, I didn't have to because I had hope, everyday, whispering in my ear {BR}  "don't give up, don't walk away. {BR}  You're almost there. Don't stop, don't grow, don't develop. Don't, don't worry. Just don't make any sudden movements or you'll blow it." 

{SL} {BR} Uh so six years went on like this without a word from them. {BR} {LS} So finally, {BR} hurt and confused beyond my ability to hold it in, and frankly finding it really difficult to maintain the illusion that this was temporary {BR}  I {LG} decided to kind of make one more attempt, to force the issue. {LS} so I I flew home and showed up unannounced at my mother's office. {LS} It was an amazing visit. Excuse me. {SL} {LS} I asked the receptionist to {LS} to page my mother and tell her she had a surprise visitor {LG} And I stood there in the lobby, and I remember seeing my mother come down this long hallway toward me. {LS} And she was walking and then she sort of looked up, and she saw me, and then she recognized who it was, {LS} and she turned and walked away again. {BR} It was a really amazing ninety second visit. {LS} {BR} Two and a half weeks later, a black {BR} funeral wreath was delivered to me at my office, with a note that said "in memory of our son."  

{NS} {LS} Clearly it was time to give up hope and take up therapy. {BR} {LG} So I uh {BR} I talked to a counselor who asked me why I had invited this turmoil into my life?  {BR} I uh I talked to a minister who suggested a Christian youth camp, {LS} {LG} I {LG} I talked to a lesbian who offered to slash my mother's tires if I'd pay for her flight there {LG} I signed up for scream therapy where I beat pillows with tennis rackets and screamed obscenities {BR} and you know pulled a muscle in my shoulder {BR} . Mostly I talked to friends {BR} and mostly the pain persisted. {BR} The sheer weight of it nearly crushed me, or at least that's how it felt at the time. {BR} Since it was my constant companion I spent {BR} most of my time turning it over in my mind {BR} fingering it like some sort of psychological worry stone. {LS} Over the years, it's been eroded by so much handling. All that remains now is a small, {BR} hard, {BR}  nearly weightless pebble really. Worn away is most of the anger, and much of the hurt. But one question remains: {BR} how was it possible that they taught me love and loyalty in excess of that which they themselves possessed? 

{LS} I have {BR} come to believe that it's not possible to understand {BR} what they did, not possible for me anyway. {LS} To understand it would seem to {BR} indicate that there was some justification for it. And I know for certain that there is not. {LS} Still {BR} there's no escaping my parents, this um this thing they did, this extreme {BR} and unfathomable and many layered thing they did tore a hole in the middle of my life. {LS} I have spent years and a lot of money {BR} darning that hole while trying to keep the rest of my world from unraveling. And yet their influence on me is enduring. {BR} {LS} My parents loved me terribly. {BR} {LS} I have been courageous in the face of bullies. {BR} There is such a thing as too much patience, but no such thing as too much forgiveness. {BR} And love has {BR} seen me through every misfortune. {NS} thank you {NS}