Dreadless: The False Story

If you are new to this blog series, please start here: Dreadless: An Introduction.

The empty three gallon bucket challenged me from across the wide expanse of my living room. Beside me stood an identical bucket, full of bright green tennis balls. I gripped one ball in my hand and flung it across the room. It hit the inside of the distant bucket with a “plunk” that was both satisfying and at the same time a little infuriating. Even as my heart soared with the success, I frowned.

I picked up another ball and threw it, then another. When I was done, eight out of ten tennis balls had landed in the bucket. I gathered up the rest from off the floor. Then I turned, and began throwing balls into the now empty bucket. “Plunk.” “Plunk.” “Plunk.”

“Ok, I get it,” I called out after I had repeated the switch numerous times. I held a scrap of paper I had been using as a score card in my hand, a piece of evidence that changed everything I had known about myself. “You were right.”

“Of course I was right.” There was nothing of gloating in my boyfriend’s voice (we’ll call him Ace to protect his identity) as he answered me from the kitchen, where he was making dinner. “There’s nothing wrong with you physically, Selah. I’ve known that ever since I saw you handle a power drill.”

All my life, I’ve believed that I was “bad” at physical activities. I was always picked last for the kickball team. When our class ran the mile in laps around our field, I came in dead last, behind the girl with asthma. I’ve always been something of a klutz, always missing my target or dropping the ball. I’m in danger on my bike, and I’d be a danger to everyone else behind the wheel. This is not a problem of learning, but one of genetics. I was born physically inept, and physically inept I will always be.

This is the story I told myself for as long as I can recall. On the day of the Great Tennis Ball Revelation, Ace and I were having a discussion about why I couldn’t seem to learn how to drive, even though I’d tried many times, and I admitted to him that I didn’t really believe I would ever overcome what I had begun to think of as a disability, my inability to coordinate my hands and eyes as well as most people.

My statement made him angry. “There’s nothing wrong with you physically,” he said. “I’ll prove it to you.” And then he brought down the tennis balls from the attic, and set up the challenge.

“The only thing this is going to prove is that I can’t get a tennis ball in the bucket,” I muttered.

“Maybe not on the first try,” he offered. He was writing something on a scrap of paper. He handed it to me. He had divided it into a grid of little numbered squares. “I don’t care about how good you are at getting tennis balls into the bucket. I want you to see that your score goes up the more you do it.”

I balked, but in the end I agreed to try, mostly because I was thinking of how satisfying it would be when the exercise proved him wrong. At that moment, I didn’t dream that he could be right. I was too convinced that there was something intrinsically wrong with me on a physical level.

Forty-five minutes later, I stood holding the scorecard in my hand, looking at the evidence that would change my story about myself forever. On the first try, I had only gotten one ball in the bucket. The next few tries went little better. But after the fifth or sixth try, something had started to change. I consistently got a few more balls in with every try, until by the end of it, I was always hitting the target more often than not.

Here was proof, from a very simple exercise, that there was nothing wrong with me physically. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do physical activities. It was that I had always gotten discouraged and given up before I reached that shift in the curve from “I can’t do this” to “I am getting better at this.”

This changed the very way I thought of my identity. How many other stories about myself that I knew to be absolutely true were actually entirely false? I had always thought that I was simply a “bad driver,” and no amount of practice would make me a good driver. Was that false as well? Or the story that I knew to be absolutely irrational, but couldn’t help believing in some part of me: that I couldn’t learn how to drive because I was fated to die in a car wreck and by not driving, I was averting disaster.

The human mind has a difficult job: to create order from absolute chaos. From birth, the mind is assaulted with random sensory information, and from this plethora of information it has to make some kind of sense. The way it does this is by organizing the information into stories. Stories are what help us understand who and what we are, why the world is the way it is, and what our place in the world is relative to other objects, living things, and human beings.

I have a theory that when something is out of place, the mind weaves a story around that thing, much like a pearl around a grain of sand in an oyster. The story cushions the psyche from the troubling nature of a thing being out of place. For example, when I was a child and I was performing below the curve in physical education, my mind created a story around that anomaly: it decided that I simply wasn’t able to do physical things. This was more comfortable than realizing that I was being failed by the school system or my parents in being encouraged to excel physically.

For whatever reason, the story worked when I was a child. As a child, I had no control over my physical education, and this story protected my mind from being hurt by the failures of those who did. As an adult, I could now make my own choices about my body. But in order to do so, I first had to change my story.

If you are faced with an internal obstacle you can’t seem to overcome in order to achieve what you want in life, I urge you to examine the outdated stories you still hold to be true. False stories bolster emotional obstacles and give them more power. In order to overcome the emotion obstacles, you must begin to change the story you tell about yourself.

Often the stories we tell about ourselves have been initiated or reinforced by others. For example, maybe you’ve always wanted to be a singer. But because when you were young and untrained, you sounded terrible, people told you you were a bad singer. Over the years, this became your story. “I like to sing, but I’m terrible at it,” you tell people today when they ask why you don’t join in caroling at the office.

In all likelihood, your voice is no worse than any other untrained singer’s voice. True, there are some people for whom singing comes effortlessly. But most talented, famous singers got where they are through rigorous voice training. And you could learn to sing reasonably well with a few lessons. But if you believe the story others told you, and are perpetuating it yourself, you’ll never even try.

For that reason, it helps to have support. I’ll talk about forms of support later in this series, but it bears mentioning now. Without Ace’s belief that the story I was telling about myself was absolutely false, I don’t know that I would have examined it myself.

With his help, a few tennis balls and a score card, my story changed from “I can’t do physical things because I have a real physical limitation” to “Because physical things are difficult for me, I often choose to give up before I try enough to succeed.”

The Great Tennis Ball Revelation took place about seven years before I actually got my license. Separating the false stories from reality was only a beginning. I still had a long way to go, many more obstacles to overcome. But this was a significant step because it suddenly made the impossible possible. If you had told me before doing that exercise that I could throw tennis balls into a bucket and get nine out of ten into the bucket consistently, I would have said you were crazy. But now I know that I can do it, and I know what it takes to do it: nothing more than to try, and to keep trying.

If it wasn’t a real physical limitation preventing me from learning how to drive, then what was it? Was it merely that I hadn’t tried? And if that was the case, why hadn’t I? What was preventing me from just sticking with it? Find out in the next installment of Dreadless: The True Story.

In case you want to take something away from these posts other than just my story, here are a couple of activities you can use to apply the strategies I learned while overcoming my fear of driving. Please refer to the disclaimer in Dreadless: An Introduction.

Storytelling: Flaws are essential to creating complex characters and offer a great opportunity for interior obstacles. False stories can be a good place to look for flaws. What are the false stories your characters operate under? What beliefs about their own shortcomings might hinder them in their quest to overcome obstacles and achieve their goals? Make a list of any false beliefs or assumptions your character is operating under, regarding their own abilities.

Personal Growth: Make a list of any beliefs you have about yourself that are value judgements rather than proven truths. A value judgement would be “I am a terrible singer because my voice always cracks when I sing.” A proven truth might be “with my current level of training and practice, my voice cracks when I sing a high note.” Try to rewrite your value judgements as proven truth statements.

Consider how you might test one of your value judgements in a low-stakes environment to determine whether it is true. Try to find something that doesn’t trigger your largest emotional obstacles. For example, while driving was terrifying for me, throwing tennis balls into a bucket was only awkward and maybe a little embarrassing. The test you use may not even have anything to do with the thing that you ultimately want to change. The important thing is to prove to yourself that your beliefs about your own limitations are just beliefs.