Allow yourself a story that holds your complexity

“Whenever you are telling a story, that story is completely trans contextual. That story is holding all these contexts that we live within, that story holds the complexity and the complexity you live within.”

Nora Bateson

I remember one of the first times I went to a psychologist to talk about my eating disorders. I remember feeling numb when, afterwards, I was processing the fact that she never asked me one question about the family situation I was growing up in. It felt like I was plucked, once more, out of my living context. An experience painfully like some of the processes leading to self-destructive behavior. I felt lonely, disillusioned, and even more convinced I should search for perspective and belonging in a world far away from the one inhabited by the cultural norms.

A lot has changed over the years, our cultural default to place things, ideas and even people(‘s experience) out of context has been intensely criticized since, and we have found many different ways of understanding ourselves and the world we inhabit and co-create in a more systemic, fluid, interconnected, complex way. Nonetheless, separating ourselves from lived experience is a challenge we will continue struggling with for a while; not in the least place because it remains a trauma response and because it has a huge and devastating impact on the planet's ecosystem. Reductionism, it is a tendency I struggle with myself to this day, at times hardly going beyond the internalization of ‘there must be something wrong with me’ (or the system, for that matter).

You see, it is only half the story, it comes with an interpretative neglect reflecting the emotional neglect many grew up in.

How grateful I feel to have studied literature and to get more insight into the art of context. How grateful I feel to accompany others ‘journeys into their lived contexts, both past and present. How my work as, amongst others, a writing coach comes with the most enlivening travels into the minds and textual landscapes of writers; doorways into authentic complexities. How grateful I feel to recognize that this is also my path, that we are sharing contexts here, that we are not confined by our roles (writes versus reader or writing coach) but connected through a deep seeded need for our stories to reflect the complexity we live within, which we are. How grateful I feel to sense a direction in a radical acceptance of complexity. Something my mind can only begin to understand when it surrenders to a sparky aliveness and allows the transcontextual dance to unfold bodily and associatively, to withold any emotional neglect characterized by misplaced reductionism.

Writers of deeply personal stories reflect interconnection with such evocative evidence that we might start to question how we ever got lost in the social dream of disconnection. Allow yourself a story that holds the, your, complexity. Really, it is how love is structured.