You Actually Are Your Story

How The Monkey Story Helped Me Understand That a Story Can Change Without Changing

There's a popular so-called spiritual belief that
You are not your story.
It's an idea that’s supposed to free us.
But I have a kind of allergic reaction to it.
I find it confounding, frustrating, and well, wrong.

I know some people mean
We can’t be defined by how we understand the events of our pasts.
Well sure.
But find another way of saying it.
Because what are we if not our stories?

Stories are the invisible thread.
The magic.
Plus physical reality?
Turning out to be not that real.
So that’s not what we are.
And yes we are stardust.
But stars become stars
By stories becoming legends.

Stories change.
In fact a story can change
Without changing.

My friend Taylor Negron showed me this.
He was a brilliant storyteller.
In the early days of UnCab he told a story
About a monkey his family had adopted.
I hear him in my mind’s ear right now
Saying we adopted it from Circus Vargas.

In this early version of The Monkey Story
There’s a hilarious scene where
The monkey jerks off on guests’ fur coats.
Escapes up a telephone pole.
And there’s some funny business
with Taylor’s cousin, Chuck Negron - he of the band 3 Dog Night.
It’s slapstick, and naughty.
Very Marx Brothers.

Years pass.
Time did its thing.
His story, my story.
Both changed.

Then he was on stage another Sunday night at UnCab.
He started to tell The Monkey Story.
As a rule UnCab is about not repeating material.
But I didn’t pop onto the back mic
To steer him in another direction.
Taylor was at the end of his life.
He knew it. I knew it.
The audience did not know.

Taylor was at the end of his story.
So of course, he was free to do whatever he wanted.

And even if that intensity had not been present
Hearing a master storyteller retell a story
From the vantage point of a different decade
Is always interesting.
Like climbing a mountain and looking down an hour later.
The same view.
But a different view.
A different version of the same story.

Hearing a master storyteller revisit a story
Is not the same as watching a comedian
Repeat the same half hour they’ve been dragging around
Ad infinitum from club to club.

So The Monkey Story began.
Many of the beats were similar.
And still hilarious.
Somehow even fresher.
Somehow more tender.
But at the end of the story
When the monkey has been brought back home
The part where in the first version he was simply captured.
In this later version.
Taylor pauses.
Then he says.
I held the monkey in my arms.
And I looked him in the eyes
And I knew unconditional love
For the first time.
I just got chills as I typed it out.

And did he?
Had he left it out all those years ago?
Had he just remembered it?
Was unconditional love the thing on his mind
As he planned to leave earth?
Maybe he needed to figure out
how to talk about unconditional love on stage.
And he found that The Monkey Story
could contain it.

In a way our great stories
Those singular crown jewels
And our big stories
Are containers for whatever we want to pour into them.

We make meaning out of the stories.
By pouring ourselves into them.
The stories shape us.
But we shape them as well.

And the more we come to understand our stories
The more we can shape them
By living differently.
Are there things we can’t change?
Yes - except for in the most elastic understanding of not changing.

But Your Story
Is made up of lots of stories.
And the thread that connects them.
If you think of every story as a bead
The thread is what yiu string it on to make something
Useful. Beautiful.
Maybe both.

The thread is the thing you get to chose.

We are always free to have a different perspective.
To look at things differently.
Even when we are not able to yet.
We can try.
Even trying to see it differently can change the story.
It’s one of the secrets of manifestation.
Life is poetry.
It wants to rhyme.

And I mean if we are not our stories
What are we?
Matter is mostly space snd movement
As we keep learning.
Maybe it s only the stories that give our word form.

In the beginning was The Word.
Abracadabra.
As I speak so I create.

We are our stories.
And the heart of a story?
What changes.

The story of how a story changes
Is part of the story too.
Not to get all meta.
But the story of how
the monkey goes from being a criminal
To a messenger of love.
That is the story.
How did that happen exactly?
I have some idea
but I’ll never be able to ask Taylor.

Taylor big tip before my first tv appearance
Remember you have a secret.
I never asked what the secret was -
he never said -
but now I think it was this.
I have a story.
And it’s mine to love and be loved by.

A story can look at you with unconditional love
And you can look at a story that way too.

That’s what makes it your story.

With infinite love and gratitude,
Beth

PS we do happen to have an UnCabaret on Friday night. With some very brilliant story tellers. If you are on LA come be in our room. Tickets and info here.