How to Kill a Zombie

I recently joined a storyteller’s circle, which as a writer, I thought would be a piece of cake. A lot of the same rules apply whether you are writing a story or telling it orally. The end has to kiss the beginning. The middle has plenty of wiggle room, and you need a takeaway which is best if embedded and not didactic.

What’s different is how you rehearse. As a writer, I start with a rough draft, spilling all my thoughts on paper. Then I edit and add until I find the kernel of truth I have to share and weed out everything else.

This week I tried to orally rehearse the story of why I wrote my book, Teacher Dropout: Finding Grace in an Unjust School for my next story circle. While speaking into a voice recorder, I took a long walk up and down the hills surrounding my house. The result was eleven attempts, each one with a slightly different emphasis, breathy with pauses, and too many words like so, um, and then.   

Even now writing this, what freedom I feel to take back words that have escaped onto the page and replace them with something better. A more perfect, phrase. A more powerful verb. More precise vocabulary.

But every word that leaves my lips as a storyteller is free for all eternity, never to be retrieved or reformed in anyway. Every thought loosed into the outside world floats into the listener’s ear never to be pulled back out. All my sentences must build on each other no matter how sloppily they exit my brain. There is no chance to clarify logic or crystallize an image except more words which runs completely counter to my writer’s instinct to cut, trim, and refine.

Oral storytelling’s vulnerability is both exhilarating and full of stage fright. Even on a country road, with no one listening, I was tongue tied when I couldn’t remember or connect my next thought. It reminds me of a recurring dream I have where I am in a play I didn’t know I was supposed to be in and can’t find my script. No one else can find it. No one knows my lines, yet I’m semi-confident that if I could just figure out where I’m supposed to come in, I could improvise.  

But I don’t want to tell a story half-baked. I want to nail it like I can on the page.

So how to tell the story of an almost two-hundred-page book in ten minutes of improvised sentences? What kernel of truth can I confidently grow in such a short season?

Teacher Dropout was my attempt to articulate the freedom God granted by letting me fail.

I went to an “under-performing” school at the top of my game, hoping to be a hero like teachers in the movies faced with challenging students and unsupportive administrators. One of my students saw her mother bleed to death from a bullet meant for her gang-banger brother. Another saw a bullet fly across his kitchen from his father’s pistol into his mother’s arm causing a wound like a meteor crater. These kids had bigger fish to fry than improving their test scores, and I could not save them academically or otherwise. When one student sexually harassed me and called me a puta, Spanish for whore, I resigned at the end of the year, far less than a hero, broken in a way I couldn’t explain even to myself.

Even after I’d physically left the building, my experiences there continued to torture me. And where was God? Why didn’t he help me? Help the students? Why didn’t he protect me from horrible administrators who seemed to hate me and my students?

Looking back, God let me go to the dead end of my own efforts.

In a world where the wages of sin is death, and sin is anything toxic or damaging, I was trying to earn my worth in an abusive school. Perhaps I was a puta—for approval.

That’s when I accepted, deep in my bones, the crucifixion as physical proof that God loved me even when I screwed up like any other under-performer. Even when I prostituted my gifts to gain acclaim instead of trusting him for my worth.

God didn’t change my circumstances, but he changed the way I saw my circumstances. Jesus was the door out of a prison I’d created myself, a prison I’ll call professional co-dependence, trying to prove I was worth loving by my professional achievements and success.

So, I was free from competition, free to be myself, free to relax in a perfect love that would never fade. Nothing left to prove.

That’s the didactic end of my story.

But a full-throated narrative where you see and feel what I went through is so much more. That’s what’s embedded in Teacher Dropout and what I hope to portray in the story I’ll tell my new story circle friends.    

Still, I confess, whenever I try something new or take a risk, I’m afraid I’ll flub up, and behind my fear, leers the zombie lie that raises its head from the grave over and over again, who are you if you fail?

Now I know why they always hold up a cross to keep away vampires

that try to suck the life out of you.

Trusting that Jesus took death’s bullet meant for me, meant for you, is the only antidote to keep the lie that we’re worthless nailed in its coffin where it belongs. We as believers are the holy, chosen, and beloved of God even when we fail.

Thanks to Yohann Libot for the cover photo on Unsplash