And Then What Happened? Reclaiming Your Stories

By Kevin Wood

I scoffed at my writer friend’s suggestion that I reframe a particularly dark story in “a more hopeful light.”  I’ve written a number of stories from my life. Some are published; others languish as variously completed drafts. My friend’s advice felt Pollyanna-ish, but this friend had recently had some breakthroughs in her own writing, so I indulged the idea. With that shift, the story was picked up by a widely read publication within a month. Huh.

Still dubious, I decided to turn to another story, one I’d labored over quite a while. This time, I would read all of the story’s many drafts. I do this sometimes and recommend it. You become an archivist into your own writing. And, as it happens, your mind. Stacked by date, in reverse order—that handy, on-screen filtering tool—I could easily review its iterations as they changed over time. Once I started reading, I sat there for hours. What I found struck me.

I tell the story of being a preteen and saving up money earned from chores to buy a bike. I’d immediately known which would be mine when I saw it in the cramped strip-mall bike shop. It had nearly shouted—a pink so electric it looked like a Pepto-Bismol bottle plugged into a socket. I can’t say what strikes me more now—my naivete about the amount of attention a boy on a hot-pink bike would draw in the 80s South, or that I once lived a life joyfully unaffected by the impressions of others. But so it was. I bought the bike on layaway and rode it home just in time for summer.

The heat of bullying builds gradually, until it becomes too hot to bear. After merciless taunts and threats for riding a pink bike, I was scorched to the point that late one Saturday night I hid away in a dank garage with the door closed and painted my hard-earned bike black—thick clouds of spray paint clumping my nose hairs. Afterward, in the shower, I would shove soap into my nose to loosen the paint clumps and frantically scrape with steel wool the black specks covering my body until my skin was stinging and raw.

The story goes no further than that one desperate night. After many submissions and rejections, I’d put it aside. Now, as I read through drafts, I could see how the story got bleaker in each successive telling. Blackness literally seeped into every line. It was as if every time I crawled into that dark memory, as I wrote, my memory of it darkened. I even came across one weak attempt at fictionalizing the story—that clever delusion we nonfiction writers sometimes indulge in—as if de-personalizing would feel less humiliating than owning a painful truth. It didn’t work. Meanwhile, my shoulders hung and my body curled over as I read on and observed the narrowing focus on the heaviness of that night.

The thing about storytelling—personal or otherwise—is that a million decisions factor into the telling. And like other decisions in life, not all are born of conscious reason. Because in this pile of insufferable drafts there was also this: a reminder that this story already did offer hope. I had cut it out.

The complete story is that, once I painted my hot-pink bike black, I used it for years. No longer attracting bullies, I rode liberated from the degradation plaguing an activity I’d loved. I again felt the energizing wind in my face as I flew down the street, insisting to enjoy what I’d worked hard to buy, refusing to grant those who’d taunted me the pleasure derived from my indignity.

That ending was only in the earliest drafts; then, it disappeared. I don’t recall making that decision, but make it I had. In reading draft after weighty draft, I watched myself reinhabit a victimhood I clearly still connected to that difficult time—so completely redemption no longer existed. This wasn’t just reframing. It was an omission of life.

What started as a friend’s questionable exercise has led me to reclaim this life story—in full. Would I have preferred to grow up in a time and place in which a boy on a hot-pink bike didn’t attract relentless bullying? Sure. But that’s not my story. What is mine is that I took action to smooth life during a really rocky period, made life a little more worth living. Isn’t that what we do? I now see a story of agency at a time I’d have said I had none. And with that, the cloud hanging over this sad experience has lifted. That’s no small thing.

It matters little if this particular story is ever published. My decision to leave it incomplete spoke something to me. So, now, does completing it. By omitting my triumph, I’d extended power to those bullies, let them write my story for me. But my power already existed. In fact, it was there from the start.
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Kevin Wood is a Cajun-born, Texas-raised, New York-adopted, queer writer, editor and writing coach now living in Barcelona, Spain. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Fast Company, Litro Magazine, The TODAY Show, Witness Magazine, and American Chordata, among others, with work forthcoming in RUBY Literary Magazine. He has been a finalist or shortlisted for numerous writing contests. A former educator, Kevin has taught at the elementary and university levels and presented nationally on social justice teaching. He is currently working on a prose collection and earnestly practicing to become fluent in Spanish. More information can be found on his website.