
It was the first time I can remember feeling ashamed.
The camp kitchen had a warped screen door that squealed on a creaky hinge every time the kitchen lady went in or out to have a smoke, take out the trash, or feed stale bread to the birds. It was coated with years of airborne bacon grease. She didn’t bother to use the door handle anymore—she just pushed, kicked, or hip checked the door, which would swing wide and then draw shut with a convincing thwack, sounding like a movie clapboard at the start of a Hollywood take.
In this scene I was standing 100 feet away from the kitchen door in the shadow of the enormous Douglas Fir trees that towered over me. I was five years old, hungry, and in love.
The love wasn’t aimed at any individual person. It was everywhere I turned in the forest where we lived, at the edge of the University of Oregon campus in Eugene where my father was completing his master’s degree.
I was in love with the luxurious green boughs of the kingly wood, the tiger salamanders that my father and I would find and collect on hiking excursions, the sweet smell of the eternally composting forest floor mixed with pine, and whatever was cooking on the grill in the camp kitchen.
The midday sun had broken through the high tops of the trees and was throwing a beam of warmth onto the back deck of the cantina. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be welcome there, or anywhere on god’s green earth.
I walked up onto the steaming deck where the morning moisture was now rising in waves of ascending mist. Parking myself next to the door on the cedar planks I gave my full weight to the hot wood siding of the kitchen, the sun turning my closed eyelids bright red as I tilted back to receive its full regard.
I wasn’t just hungry for food. I had an endless appetite for this pure communion with nature, sensory pleasure, and leisure that was abundantly available to me at age five.
There was not a moment of hesitation or consideration or pause when the idea of asking for food appeared in my mind.
The kitchen lady was a bushy-headed matron with a hair net she never took off, wrinkles on her chin and elbows, and kind, puffy eyes. She had once waved me and another boy in from the edge of the woods with an offer of raisins that we happily devoured before returning to play.
So there I was—the sun ripening a hunger in me that declared its stated wish without fear, fully trusting in the abundance of the universe.
“I sure wish I had some raisins,” I sang out brightly, and then waited for that generous woman to glide out bearing the gift in her hands.
But no one came.
Perhaps she hadn’t heard me over the drone of the exhaust fan for the grill.
I repeated my wish, but louder.
“I sure wish I had some raisins!” I yelled, with unbridled self-confidence and expectation of a sweet reward.
Then, like sudden inclement weather, she thundered to the door, kicked it open, and bellowed, “Go away, we’re busy, it’s lunchtime!”
The experience scrambled the organic systems of my clueless innocence. I had no idea how the world worked, how to politely ask for things, how to be prepared for a scolding, how to protect myself from rejection, or test the waters of social safety before diving headlong in.
Nothing about the experience corresponded with my view of the bountiful, generous, and responsive world I existed in.
The odd burning sensation in my cheeks confused me. It was my first memory of feeling that I was somehow bad, really bad, like there was something fundamentally wrong with me—but I didn’t know how I got there, or what I had done.
So, I did what all kids do in the face of rejection or hurt. I made up a story about how it happened and what I needed to do to make absolutely sure that it never happened again.
“You should never ask for help,” was the story.
Fast-forward six decades.
I’m 63, sitting at my desk, suddenly overcome by dizziness, nausea, and my arms are tingling. I was a week away from starting a new business, a dream job that I had invented for myself to start a writing community of people who long to express themselves fully in the world.
My wife rushed me to the hospital because all the signs pointed to the potential of a heart attack. Seven hours later I was sent home with a clean bill of health.
So what happened?
I had taken the risk of stating my highest wish in public, and it was working. I filled every spot in the community, people were happy and joyous to be part of it, and the vision for our success and connection over the course of the next year was laid out and clear.
Now I just had to deliver.
But there was no way I could do all this without asking for help, and the idea of doing so induced sheer panic in me.
My wife, my friends, professional colleagues, even the members of the course, all had the same thing to say to me when I described the fear that was arising around following through with this business.
“You’ve got this,” they said. “This will work. You’re the perfect person for this. How can we help?”
But all the external voices were no match for the inner story, the practiced tale of self-protection I’ve been nurturing and reinforcing for so long, the story that kept repeating, “You’ll be okay as long as you do it yourself and don’t ask anybody for help.”
Re-writing a survival story is no small deal. It’s an invisible process that no one else can see, but the experience internally is stepping onto a raging battlefield where death is just one wrong move away.
In spite of the old story voices screaming “Don’t do it!” — little by little I’m trusting others, asking for help, communicating my needs and what matters most. And every day I unravel another visceral thread of tension in my belly, of constriction in my breath, of retreat in my heart. I’m letting a new story form by moving toward the thing that scares me the most, and letting it sink in that no one is telling me to go away. In fact, just the opposite.
That same innocent, bright, open spirit that said “I sure wish I had some raisins” out loud—under the open sky of life—is still here. He still feels that abundance is the natural state of existence, and he’s slowly trusting that he can not only ask for it, but that he can support others to come out of hiding, trust in their own nature, and ask for what they want in their heart of hearts, and live a new story.
Words, language, memories—these are the domain of our old stories. And they’re the same playing field where we get to tell new ones.
But changing a survival story is not for the faint of heart. Story review is courageous work, especially when we attempt a re-write, because you have to re-live the original story on the way to making the new one.
What’s the old story that you’re still living?
And what’s the new one you want to tell?
I’m sitting on your back porch, right outside your door—hungry to hear the answers to those questions. I’ve spent too many years of my life isolated, separating myself off from others out of fear of being rejected. But these days, it’s connection I’m longing for. It’s the lived experience and the perspective of others that feeds me. So I have to risk living a new story where I ask for what I want.
Somehow, I’m finding the courage to say it.
I sure wish I had some people.
Rick, you’re inspiring to us all. Rewriting and re-wiring is how we don’t suffocate from our prior existence. Much like a snake must shed its skin to survive, we must shed skins too. And many of our stories are old skins.
🙏👏🙏👏
With deep love and appreciation, I am blessed by the way you share this principle. I am blessed by your story. I wish I could write as well as you! (Though I know it's nonsense to think that way...you just got a glimpse of my mind!)
Yes. We all live in our stories all of the time, and some, which have gone underground, must surface, thank God, or else they will run our lives. Thank you, thank you, thank you, for all of us who benefit from your being and your writing and your heart for being so willing to be "honestly human."
May we all ferret out those debilitating decisions we made when we were young that still, unbeknownst to us, have their grip on us, particularly those that somehow keep us from making the contribution we are here to make.
When I shifted my own story (when I was twenty-seven years old) from "My father is out to control me, dominate me, and manipulate me" to "All my father wants to do is contribute to my happiness," I gave myself a new life, a life worth living. And a Future of my own choosing was born.