Your Story, My Story

by Connie Palmen

Friends, like family, want you to remain unchanged, while love has the indecent capacity to transform you, to enrich you with a new take on everything you were once familiar with.

All literature stems from a wounded soul, from the spiritual exertion of the human defense mechanism to heal our pain and conquer death. The search for the highest knowledge—that of the self—brings you to a character whose prototype can be found in a hero or a coward, a god or a rebel. And sometimes we have to learn to read our myth in order to make a timely escape from the narrative cage of an ancient script, from the prescribed fate which a character appears to obey without free will.

In daily life we try to make ourselves comprehensible by speaking the language of others in the hope that we will be understood, but at night, when rationality and social adaptation have shuffled off to sleep, an unbound self speaks to us in a language that is completely our own.

“I must get out of myself,” she said.

Memory is literary by nature. It takes factual events and gives them a metaphorical charge, lending what really happened a symbolic weight, persistently in search of the security of a story.

Dismembered by an explosion of pain, I once again needed a few years to find my way back to poetry, but even then I wrote about everything except the thing I needed to face in order to heal and to rediscover my real self.