Groom Me
A story is a gateway drug to empathy.
To read is to inhabit
The experiences of another,
And in so doing
Become them,
If even for but a moment,
And in so doing,
To understand,
To experience their struggles,
Their points of view,
To love what they love,
Or at least
See why
An idea has captured their desires,
Or inspired them to care.
A story
Is an invitation to see,
To feel,
To know,
To relate,
And to somehow take on
Even the internal senses
Of another being,
And in so doing,
Come to recognize
The dignity of their existence,
To know
A truth beyond our own,
And in so doing,
Expand what we thought
A life could contain.
Grooming
Used to be a loving word.
A groom was once beloved and betrothed,
And to groom
Was to lavish care
And tenderness,
To make clean and kempt
And more beautiful,
To train someone in readiness,
Like a firstborn son
Being groomed by his parents
To step into his birthright.
I have been groomed like this
In the stories I’ve read
Or listened to with compassionate ears:
Each story
Combing out the lice of intolerance
And braiding ribbons of understanding
Into the soft undulations of my soul.
I have been prepared
For right relationship
With those I thought were different,
With those I had been taught to fear.
And this has been disastrous
To my sense of self,
To entitlement,
To my fantasy of individuality,
Of caring only for my own wellbeing
And for those I can easily claim
As my own.
These stories
Have conditioned me
To the acceptance of other truths,
And to question
What I once assumed were facts.
Yes,
I have been groomed
By salacious empathy,
By X-rated renderings
Of another person’s struggle,
And by the dangerous lurkings
Of other points of view.
And I have been ravaged
By the stalking predator
Of expansion
That roams in the written word
Waiting to eviscerate my ignorance.
And I am better for it.
No wonder books are burned
And banned.
No wonder a beautiful word of care
Has been turned into an accusation.
For there is untold power
In stories told,
In experiences shared,
In the quivering and naked truth
Of someone else’s biography.
So tell me your story,
And in so doing,
Groom me
To be a better man.
And in so doing,
Open me
To dangerous,
Expansive,
Connecting,
Intimate,
Lie-destroying
Grace.
I was born jaundiced and spent the first weeks of my life in a hospital. When I went home, I did not want to be held by anyone except my grandfather, and my mom didn’t breastfeed me, so she and I never bonded. She felt guilty for not having any maternal feelings toward me, to every day she prayed that God would make her love me. In an answer to her prayers, in December of 1975 I was run over in the median strip of Highway 19 by a drunk driver when I was 16 months old, and was pronounced dead. Although my skull was crushed, my lungs and spleen ruptured, and nearly every bone in my body was broken, somehow I was resuscitated a few moments later, coming back to life in a genuine Christmas miracle. Immediately after the accident, my personality changed completely, and I became a much more affectionate baby. To my mom, this was the answer to her prayers, and so she was finally able to love me for the first time.
This was my origin story that I heard repeated over and over again my entire life, and hundreds of people said it was true. Everyone I trusted recounted the same events, and people in my small town often knew me as “the miracle baby.”
Although I do have very vivid memories of an out-of-body experience, hovering over the scene of the grisly accident, I am fairly certain those were planted there by my imagination as I was retold this story over the years, my brain filling in details lost to time. But they sure felt true.
Because everyone knew my story, I never felt the need to defend it as true. Nearly everyone in my high school knew that this story was the reason I didn’t drink alcohol and was always the designated driver for parties and concerts. The people at my church all believed that this was the reason I felt like I had a calling. It was just as much a part of what made me who I was as my parents, my brother, or the fact that I’d grown up in Crystal River. It was just true.
Then, forty years later, my mom sent me the legal paperwork from the accident. I was shocked to discover that a few key details were completely wrong. I wasn’t 16 months old, but rather 23 months old, which meant it happened right before my birthday in the middle of summer — not at Christmas as I’d imagined for all my life. So much for a Christmas miracle…
Even more shocking was the discovery that it had not been a drunk driver at all, but rather an elderly driver who fell asleep at the wheel and overcorrected. There in the legal files was letter after letter from the driver’s son pleading with my parents to open my case records. They were sealed because I was an infant, so his father never got any updates about whether or not I had survived. He went to his own death believing he had caused mine.
This story has profoundly shaped my relationship to the truth, as well as the idea of trust.
To this day, at the age of 49, I have still never been drunk a single time in my life, largely because I am afraid of losing control. I grew up in a family of alcoholics, but the thing that kept me sober was the idea that a drunk had so profoundly affected my life. I had to sleep with painful leg braces until I was six years old, I had scars, and I suffered myriad other health issues related to the accident, and the specter of drunken consequences loomed over my entire existence. Due to this, I simply couldn’t understand how my family continued to let my aunts and uncles drive completely blitzed out of their minds after what had happened to me. I felt a deep sense of disbelief and internal outrage every time they let a drunk family member take the keys and put someone else’s life at risk knowing what had happened to me. How could they take such risks, knowing the potential consequences? And how could I trust that they even cared about my experience or anyone else’s safety?
In my late teens I was kicked out of the house for being gay, and I moved to Tampa. For the first time in my life I was surrounded by people who didn’t believe my (admittedly) implausible story. When I told people why I didn’t drink alcohol, they balked at my reasoning, thinking I was a pathological liar or something. I’d lost my community of witnesses and found myself defending my history to people who simply couldn’t believe it. And because I was estranged from my family and my small hometown, for probably the first time in my life I didn’t have anyone to back me up.
This further eroded my trust in others and in myself. I discovered that people found it easier to believe that I was deluded, deranged, or dishonest than believe that my story was true.
To compensate, I became overly concerned with proving myself and over-explaining, with telling my truth only when I had a means of verifying it or backing it up with some kind of evidence. It’s also led to a deep feeling of being generally mistrusted. These repeated experiences taught me that nobody will believe me, that my entire life is implausible, that I can’t trust others to take me seriously or give me the benefit of the doubt.
And the implausibilities certainly didn’t end with surviving being run over by a car as a baby. Add being born intersex, growing up so poor we couldn’t afford groceries even though my grandparents had been rich and powerful, that my dad had been taught to surf by Duke Kahanamoku, that my mother burned all of our records because of a fear of satanic messages, that Liberace stole my grandmother’s parakeet on a train while they toured together, that a friend in high school was attacked by an alligator, that I got a perfect score on the English portion of the ACT and graduated high school with a full scholarship that I didn’t know about until it was too late…you can see how my life has been a series of incredible stories.
Put together, it does sound like a lot of bullshit from a grade-B liar. And during those years when I was estranged from my family and from the community who knew these things to be true, no one could vouch for me…well, that taught me to just assume that other people wouldn’t trust me. (The irony is not lost on me that I’ve become a poet and essayist whose vocation is to tell my own stories from this utterly implausible life.)
Somehow, despite all of this, I’ve learned that my stories are some of the most important things I can share, because it is the only way people can really get to know me. And isn’t this true for everyone? Our stories are direct channels to connection, empathy, compassion, and understanding. Whether or not people believe them, there is still value in sharing them.
Nearly everything in the world points to the fact that we are in an absolute global crisis of trust. We can all sense a massive series of societal changes eroding trust in institutions like education, government, medical care, commerce, and police. We can all feel a loss of humanity as we spin toward a global economy in which decisions about our lives and wellbeing are being made by people who only see us as numbers in an algorithm. For many of us, the promises that our parents, institutions, and societies made are no longer valid, and so we are left wondering who and what we can trust at all.
When I got my first corporate job during college, I was ecstatic. It was for a big insurance company, and they promised that as long as I finished my degree and worked reliably, I could work my way up in the company and retire comfortably with full benefits after a long and stable career. Just three years later, the company spun off from its parent company, and it changed its entire model of employment.
They brought in corporate advisors to ease us into the fact that our jobs were no longer secure, and they even gave us free copies of Who Moved My Cheese to help us come to terms with the fact that change was inevitable. They started hiring temps instead of employees, cutting benefits, rolling layoffs, consolidating jobs, and gutting certain positions. They told us how natural disasters and climate change affected the bottom line of an insurance company and how that would affect our own pay. (This was almost thirty years ago — it’s far worse now). They introduced new metrics for measuring success and eliminated of certain perks, and they told ua that they would close our big office too if we didn’t keep performing under these new rules and policies.
It was shocking back then, because up until that point, the American dream was to work for a good, stable company and work there until you could retire. And now we were being told that a new model had arrived. Instead of a promise of Allstate providing our retirement and benefits at the end of a long career, the retirement I had accrued in those short years was transferred to profit sharing and 401(k) accounts that I, myself, had to opt into or out of. What’s more, I had to manage those accounts on my own, and they were no longer a benefit but something I could choose to have deducted from my paycheck.
And yet my workload increased. Plus there were corporate-mandated performance metrics that didn’t even apply to my department, caps on sick days, stricter policies about schedule changes, etc., and they completely eliminated part-time work, leaving hundreds of elderly workers with a choice of either working full time or quitting their jobs. That was when I and so many of my colleagues knew we would never trust corporate America again.
Looking back on that time, it’s hard to believe how much we took for granted — and how far uncertainty has become entrenched throughout corporate culture on a global scale. Does anyone truly trust corporations anymore? Do we really believe that our good work and faithfulness will be recognized, or have we bought into the new idea that we constantly have to “build our personal brand” in order to thrive? It just isn’t enough to show up and clock in faithfully, being a dutiful and productive employee. In fact, that’s downright old fashioned. And to some, it amounts to actively participating in and supporting part of the very system we know in our hearts we need to dismantle. Striving to be a “model employee” has, in a single generation, morphed into being complicit in corporate corruption, being a “corporate shill.” And it would not even be reciprocated, because corporations and institutions, in the end, have no loyalty to their employees.
Mirroring this is a growing distrust of our fellow citizens, both locally and nationally. Does anyone trust the government anymore? Or even the political process? Even before the September 11th attacks in the US, many Americans lost faith in our nation’s ability to protect itself when the Supreme Court intervened to install a president who lost the popular vote. And before that we saw once-revered ideals of bipartisan leadership turn into a political bloodbath in episodes like the Clinton impeachment and frenzied cries about the “moral majority.”
And this is not just here in the US. Just one look at the world news shows us that people generally don’t trust in the world’s basic institutions anymore — and largely because they have earned our wariness.
That only grew during the pandemic, when our neighbors became actual disease vectors that could kill us with their non-compliance, and we saw that the world had become a place full of people who really didn’t care about the wellbeing of others — people who honestly didn’t care whether we or our loved ones had basic necessities like toilet paper or reliable income, much less lived or died from the raging virus. Community became competition for scarce resources, which pitted us against each other at a time when we should have relied on each other.
Meanwhile, terrorism kept flaring, and war kept erupting, sending millions of refugees into a global diaspora our generation had never seen before, forcing people to deal with ever-shifting demographics, confrontation with new cultures, grappling with a new global connection and exposure to humanitarian crises. We see ridiculous political stunts happen daily, beloved books are being banned right and left and human rights are being stripped away in the blink of an eye as political corruption weasels its way into the very fabric of our lives…
The world had changed, and in many ways, it seems like it is getting worse and worse for almost everyone.
I say all of this because I want to take a moment to stop and face it, to feel it, to acknowledge that the world has changed in ways no human society has ever faced before. The future we thought we were going to have is gone, and we have to let it go. To move forward, we need to bravely face the truth, grieve what we have lost, learn to lean on each other again, and to build trust in each other and in ourselves, so we can come back together to create the future we want.
As I’ve mentioned the past couple of weeks, for this year’s Lenten practice I am participating in a happiness masterclass called “Find Your Inner Finn.” The class is offered by the nation of Finland because it has been ranked as the happiest country on earth six years in a row.
One of the teachers in the masterclass is April Rinne, who speaks about how Finnish culture generates happiness through “sisu,” a Finnish concept of reliance, determination, and hardiness. It is considered to be the most treasured word in the Finnish language and one of the most important concepts in Finnish culture. It also cannot be accurately translated, except perhaps, “the Finnish spirit.”
It is often described as guts, grit, or tenacity, but it goes much deeper than that, and includes both personal and national resilience. It is both individual and collective, and it relies on an interdependence of the citizen and the community to which the citizen belongs. April Rinne declares in her class on Finnish happiness that it boils down to trust: trust in yourself and trust in society.
In Finland, there is a baked-in sense of trust. This idea of sisu, of an indefatigable personal and cultural rigor, is rooted in trusting oneself and one’s neighbors even in the face of severe adversity, like brutal weather, war, and occupation.
One of the ways she teaches us to facilitate this is to examine where our general sense of mistrust comes from — and then to share it with someone we do trust. It is not enough to just identify our feeling of being unmoored in an uncontrollable sea of change. We also need to share those feelings with someone else, and in so doing, be seen, be heard, be understood.
I found Rinne’s module to be astonishing and encouraging, especially in the way that it dovetailed with what I’d already been focusing on during my Everyday Divinas practice this week. Every single day I was reminded about the importance of trust and empathy, of telling my stories, and of holding a sacred space to listen to other peoples’ stories as well.
Early in the week I was part of a writer’s group where one of the other participants emotionally recounted her own frustration of watching the American education system dismantle nearly all efforts of instilling a love for reading into its students. She talked about how reading puts the reader into the life of another person and how important that is, and how reading is such a powerful tool for developing empathy. And yet the American education system is more focused on making books inaccessible than they are in fostering a love of literature.
As I listened to her, I realized that so many of these banned books have been targeted exactly for that — because they tell a story that challenges the dominant white, middle-class, Christian narrative — and in so doing they generate empathy for “the other,” or at least force acknowledgement of their existence. They also give minority groups a sense of being represented, of seeing themselves in literature, and in so doing, show them that they also have a right to exist.
And then I realized that this is why people are so afraid of these books! We are so entrenched in a culture of fear that we see attempts at building empathy as a threat. In fact, the word I see used most often when people decry these banned books is “grooming.”
Several days later I am still shocked and angry at the realization that we have taken the idea of generating empathy and compassion for someone else’s story and have turned it into a sleazy, scary idea of perverts lurking in the shadows waiting to steal our children away into deviance.
But as I’ve meditated on that this week, I’ve realized that despite these attempts to marginalize these voices, there is also far more representation than there used to be. As an intersex person, my own story is one that has been silenced, and people like me are effectively erased from existence every time we have to choose male or female on an intake form. But I have surrounded myself with scores of trustworthy people who also trust me, who trust me with their stories and who I can trust with mine. And I can use these same ideas to generate empathy and understanding even for the people who want to ban stories like mine.
As part of my Divinas practice this week, I decided to devote myself to listening to several people’s stories. One of these instances was with my mom, with whom I had a two-hour phone conversation. The more I listened, the more I realized that I had more in common with her than I’d ever thought. I had painted her with the MAGA religious fundamentalist brush, reducing her to a single identity, but as I set my intention on hearing more of her story, I knew she couldn’t be distilled down into a single tagline. Just like my own complicated sense of self, she too was full of nuance, of contradiction, of tenderness and pain and untold influences that led to who she is today.
Even though she is still very much a MAGA Republican Christian nationalist, she is also a kind and caring person who has really worked hard to love me despite my own story, which flies in the face of everything she thinks is right and righteous.
And we agree on a lot! Even on things we absolutely disagree on, I have more compassion and understanding toward her now that I know more of her story. This is not pity. This is not condescension. It is genuine empathy, understanding her own grief, her own morality, and how her navigation through those things is the only thing that helps her make sense of the same chaos, change, and mistrust that we are ALL dealing with.
She recounted how unsettling it is to come to grips with the fact that things we once took for granted will never be that way again. She has witnessed Florida go from an unspoiled paradise to an asphalt maze of one strip mall after the next, and I was surprised to learn that she is just as distraught at the environmental damage there as I am. She mourned the predictability of seasons and weather patterns. She bemoaned the crush of people and devices and apps constantly vying for attention. She lamented the racism her Black pastor faces in a small rural town.
She talked about how hard it has been to adjust to a hyper-connected world, and how she had to stop watching the news because she just couldn’t handle the way things are in the world right now, including the antics of her beloved Republican Party. The world she knew and loved — and thought was here to stay — is now gone forever. She finds herself struggling to come to grips with the loss of the future she had envisioned.
I think that’s the same struggle we all have right now. For millennia, society and innovation seemed to move at a relatively predictable pace, and the earth seemed like an inexhaustible resource. And now in a generation we have had to wake up to the reality that none of that is true anymore.
No wonder we all feel so stressed out! And what happens when we are stressed? We go into fight, flight, or freeze.
I think that explains a lot of what is happening right now. No wonder people are hoarding, obsessed with accumulation and stocking up for some unforeseen but inevitable future apocalypse. No wonder people are suspicious of their neighbors. Now wonder people feel hopeless and give up on even trying. No wonder people feel the need to fight to either preserve or dismantle existing power struggles. I believe that all of these are symptoms of humanity’s stress response to the chaos of a rapidly changing world that we just can’t control. We’ve lost our basic trust in the way things work. We’ve lost our trust in a shared and safe future. We lost our trust in the systems and institutions we thought would protect us.
Later this week I got to attend an event with First Lady Jill Biden and Maya Harris. Both of them talked about how women have been devalued, and how American women have far fewer rights than they had just a few years ago. A key component of both of their speeches was storytelling — bringing the facts down to a human level by constantly reminding us that these policies and laws and decisions are affecting real people.
We all listened with both horror and compassion as we heard a story about woman in Ohio who almost died from a miscarriage because she waited for two days in an emergency room while the hospital’s ethics panel debated whether or not they could give her care in light of the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Bleeding, in severe pain, and having sat in the waiting room for two days of legal deliberations, the young woman finally just went home, where she had the miscarriage and nearly died from it. Afterward, the hospital did treat her once she was no longer pregnant — and then they reported her to the police! Officers then came and handcuffed her, took her to jail, and charged her with “abuse of a corpse,” which is a felony in Ohio.
Can you imagine?
Yes, actually, you probably can! And you can probably see why this happened and how necessary it is to enact legislation to keep it from happening in the future. That is why stories like this mean more than facts and figures. We live in a post-truth world where people can somehow come up with “alternative facts” with a straight face. But when we tell a human story we expand our heart’s ability to see things in a new way. We build empathy, and in so doing, we recenter ourselves on what is true, what is meaningful, what is relatable, what is real.
In April Rinne’s happiness module, she explains that there are two types of trust: cognitive trust and emotional trust — and we need both in order to be happy. She uses an example we all know, of an organization that has excellent cognitive trust, like an excellent reputation and track record of success, but internally they have low emotional trust where employees don’t trust their colleagues or the internal systems. That’s exactly what happened to that insurance company when I worked there. They were one of the best insurance companies out there, but when we went through that transition, our employee morale completely tanked. And sure enough, I was eventually laid off with no warning whatsoever.
We see this same pattern in all sorts of relationships. One partner reliably goes to work and supports the family, coming home at the same time every day and doing their part of the household chores, but never opens up emotionally to their partner or listens to the partner’s emotional needs. This week I heard a man in anguish because this is what he had done, giving all of his energy at work so that he came home empty and depleted, with nothing left for his wife or children. Chillingly, he said, “When I came home with nothing left, I was teaching my wife and kids how to live without me.”
We’ve seen the same scenario in our governments and politics, in organizations, in schools, in entire societies. Heck, much of the “great America” fantasy that people find so seductive is high in cognitive trust (markets, economies, stability) but very low in emotional trust (racism, classism, homophobia, xenophobia, conformism).
We inherently crave intimacy, authenticity, and trust, but so many of us don’t realize that we need both cognitive and emotional trust in order to feel secure, to foster empathy, to feel truly seen and understood, to feel like we belong.
What might a society look like where there is both a strong sense of cognitive trust and a vibrant emotional trust? Finland. People trust the government, the police, the society, the culture, industry…Finns value interdependence and trust far more than most Western cultures. And because of that, they are happy.
So what can the rest of us do?
I sincerely believe that we can all find and cultivate this combination of cognitive and emotional trust within some form of community. I have found it in my Twelve Step group for codependents, as well as in writing groups, my tea groups, and in the constellation of friends who make up my chosen family. And I’ve even — after nearly fifty years — been able to start cultivating it in my family of origin, even though we had never developed this trust before.
My husband and I are continually working to foster both types of trust in our marriage, and even here on Substack I’ve been plugged in to people’s stories that expand me, increase my empathy, and foster hope that there are lots and lots of other people in the world who really are working toward a better future. Listening to the stories of my friends, reading the stories of those who publish their own experiences, and being present to people in other communities, like the BIPOC community and refugee communities — all of these things expand my world and generate trust and empathy. And it goes both ways, as I learn to trust and have empathy and also hold space as a trustworthy witness to their stories.
My Everyday Divinas practice also helps me trust, because it trains me to trust in my own internal wisdom and my ability to discern wisdom from the world around me — part of that Finnish concept of sisu. Plus, it helps me trust in a higher power as I get answers, comfort, direction, and inspiration in everything from sacred texts to flowers and works of art.
Also, I am sharing my own story in the hopes of engendering this trust for my readers too. Sometimes this takes courage, but I hope my story, as implausible as it is, helps you have compassion for other people who don’t fit so neatly into the boxes society clings to. I hope I help other readers who face similar issues around gender, or health, or imposter syndrome, or poverty, or any of the other things I’ve struggled with and learned to accept (or overcome), and that my story helps cultivate sisu in them. Most of all, perhaps, I hope that my sharing helps expand empathy and kindness in the little community of people who read what I write — and in the writing of it, I also know that I’m continuing to deepen my own kindness and empathy toward myself.
It all comes down to trust — and that’s something we all need, but trust has been in short supply lately. It doesn’t have to be. Trust is not a finite resource — it just needs to be cultivated in the right places and with the right people. And sharing our stories and being worthy recipients of the stories of others is one of the best ways we can build this emotional and cognitive trust, this empathy, this sisu we all need in order to thrive regardless of the chaos around us.
I’ve definitely found my people. I hope you find yours too.
Groom Me
A story is a gateway drug to empathy.
To read is to inhabit
The experiences of another,
And in so doing
Become them,
If even for but a moment,
And in so doing,
To understand,
To experience their struggles,
Their points of view,
To love what they love,
Or at least
See why
An idea has captured their desires,
Or inspired them to care.
A story
Is an invitation to see,
To feel,
To know,
To relate,
And to somehow take on
Even the internal senses
Of another being,
And in so doing,
Come to recognize
The dignity of their existence,
To know
A truth beyond our own,
And in so doing,
Expand what we thought
A life could contain.
Grooming
Used to be a loving word.
A groom was once beloved and betrothed,
And to groom
Was to lavish care
And tenderness,
To make clean and kempt
And more beautiful,
To train someone in readiness,
Like a firstborn son
Being groomed by his parents
To step into his birthright.
I have been groomed like this
In the stories I’ve read
Or listened to with compassionate ears:
Each story
Combing out the lice of intolerance
And braiding ribbons of understanding
Into the soft undulations of my soul.
I have been prepared
For right relationship
With those I thought were different,
With those I had been taught to fear.
And this has been disastrous
To my sense of self,
To entitlement,
To my fantasy of individuality,
Of caring only for my own wellbeing
And for those I can easily claim
As my own.
These stories
Have conditioned me
To the acceptance of other truths,
And to question
What I once assumed were facts.
Yes,
I have been groomed
By salacious empathy,
By X-rated renderings
Of another person’s struggle,
And by the dangerous lurkings
Of other points of view.
And I have been ravaged
By the stalking predator
Of expansion
That roams in the written word
Waiting to eviscerate my ignorance.
And I am better for it.
No wonder books are burned
And banned.
No wonder a beautiful word of care
Has been turned into an accusation.
For there is untold power
In stories told,
In experiences shared,
In the quivering and naked truth
Of someone else’s biography.
So tell me your story,
And in so doing,
Groom me
To be a better man.
And in so doing,
Open me
To dangerous,
Expansive,
Connecting,
Intimate,
Lie-destroying
Grace.
I love you,
Eric