Last week I took part in an international study on poverty and perception. By that I mean I attended the weeklong TED Summit in Banff where I rubbed elbows with CEOs, venture capitalists and young tech-savvy entrepreneurs wearing $300 jeans.

I wasn’t aware that I was participating in this study for the first couple of days. All I knew was that I felt very out of place for reasons I couldn’t identify. Was it the casual confidence of everyone around me that I was sensing? Was it connected to the wave of anxiety I felt every time someone asked me “what I did”? I thought maybe it had something to do with everyone’s impressive bio. What the hell is a digital visionary? And what exactly do you do if you’re on the board of Synthetic Genomics? I lived in LA for a year. Can I call myself a Megacities Expert? I tell you what, I have no idea what Innovation Strategist pays but I’m pretty sure it’s more than I make now so I’m going to look into it as soon as I find some free wifi.

It wasn’t until Wednesday that I finally figured it out what I was feeling. I was taking a workshop on Adverse Childhood Trauma when the teacher asked everyone in the class to stand in a circle and step forward if we had ever experienced certain types of trauma. She asked if anyone had had a parent die or go to prison. A few of us stepped forward. She asked if anyone had witnessed their mother suffer physical abuse from a husband or boyfriend. Seven or eight people stepped forward. Had anyone grown up with a parent who drank too much or used street drugs? A bunch of people stepped forward. Then she asked if anyone had experienced poverty. Only two people out of the twenty people there stepped forward. I was on of those people and to cover up my surprise and embarrassment I blurted out, “No way! Seriously? Just me and her?!?!” The other woman and I looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders, and stepped back into the outer circle.

And that was what I had been sensing all week. Almost no one at that conference had ever wondered how they were going to pay the rent. They never had to wash up in a Burger King bathroom. TANFF, WIC and Section 8 are terms they’ve never had attached to their identity. I’m not saying their lives were sunshine and stardust. Everyone in that class had lived through some rough stuff but because they had never felt the embarrassment of being homeless or standing in line to collect food stamps they all had that good-things-are-just-around-the-corner look in their eyes that I’ve never had. Each trauma you experience leaves its own special mark. Poverty’s gift is that you tend to believe that success is for other people, especially when it comes to money. Where they see possibilities I see consequences.

When you’ve spent the majority of your life hoping the tires hold out until your tax refund comes in you don’t hope that things get better. You hope things don’t get worse. When your kid has toys most people would consider garbage you don’t hope for a better day you just pray you can get through this day. After a while this seems normal. It seems foolish to believe anything else.

But here’s the thing. Deep down I want the hope those people have. I want the kind of confidence that encourages me to take risks. There’s no reason that I shouldn’t have it. In many ways I’ve been blessed. Neither of my parents went to prison or used street drugs. I was never sexually abused. My dad never laid a hand on my mom. I grew up in a low-income neighborhood but nothing compared to what I could have grown up in if we’d lived somewhere else.

So what’s the deal with my poverty mindset? (yeah, that’s a phrase I learned from one my of fellow students when she followed me outside after class to see how I was doing) Everyone at the TED conference treated me like the successful, upper-class white guy I look like. In one afternoon I talked to:

1. A doctor who owned a Tesla (at first I thought he was talking about the 80s hair-metal band)

2. A guy who minutes earlier just received $2.5 million from a venture capitalist for investment in his startup (I laughed and told him that just by sitting next to me his net worth dropped by 30%)

3. A former princess from the Middle East who works to bring technology to the field of mental health. (She and her husband look like they just stepped off a red carpet somewhere. If there’s such a thing as a TED power couple it’s them. The fact that they were both enrolled in a class called Tackling Trauma gives me hope for the human race)

Each one of those people treated me as a peer. They had no idea I had breakfast sausages from the buffet stuffed in my backpack for later. The Tesla guy asked me what kind of range I got with my own vehicle. I told him about 250 miles, carefully avoiding mentioning that I was talking about my 26-year-old Toyota Corolla. He didn’t need to know that the cruise control doesn’t work when the headlights are on or that I can turn up the radio by stepping on the gas.

The startup guy gave me his card when he found out I was a storyteller and might want to be listed in his database of professional speakers. I carefully avoided telling him that a lot of my stories have car thieves, prostitutes and corpses in them.

The former Middle East princess asked if I’d be interested in helping her on some upcoming speeches. I told her I’d be happy to help her and that I would do it for free because she was trying to help people with mental health issues. I don’t know why she chose that topic to focus on I’m just grateful she’s doing that instead of sipping cocktails on a yacht somewhere.

Every single person I met at the TED Summit treated me like I deserved to be there. Like my opinions mattered. The only person in the room who didn’t think I had anything to offer was me.

After my class, and an inspiring talk with a women from the UK who understood what I was going through, I decided to try to at least pretend like I belonged at this conference with these people. I spent most of my childhood sitting in empty auditoriums watching my mom rehearsing onstage so I channeled my inner Al Pacino and started acting like I belonged there.

Somehow, instead of getting caught up in my usual spiral of unworthiness I managed to steer conversations into areas that I had experience in. The next day at dinner I met a super cool entrepreneur from Australia who said he never got enough sleep because he couldn’t stop checking his iPhone in bed. Just like me! We bonded over our shared struggle against the digital undertow.

The next day I high-fived an amazing woman from Shanghai who admitted she had worked her way into the 1% but couldn’t enjoy it because she felt guilty. Irrational sense of guilt and shame? I totally get that! I wanted to chest bump her but she was pretty slight and I probably would have knocked her right out of the dining tent.

My journey to the Land of TED and back was longer than I planned. It was 700 miles as the crow flies but 30 years as the heart flies. I ended up going back over my life and searching for all the alleys and side streets I’d gone down on my way to where I am today. It forced me to question my perception of the world and my place in it.

My next journey is probably going to be a slow one. MapQuest isn’t very helpful when your destination is a state of grace. One thing I’m going to make sure I do is forgive myself when I veer off into spiritual dead-ends and emotional roundabouts. I’ve been to those places before and I’ve always made it out. There’s no reason to think I won’t be able to again.

And that’s the theme for this month show. Journeys – Stories of how you got here.

Remember to keep it clean, practice out loud on friends or pets, and keep it under 8 minutes.

The updated rules for stories are below but you know the kind we’re looking for: true stories that happened to you that still mean something to you days, months or years later.

Rules & Guidelines: https://freshgroundstories.wordpress.com/2013/01/22/storytelling-rules-and-guidelines/

I hope to see you at our next show on Thursday, July 28, 7:00pm at the Roy St Cafe.

Paul

freshgroundstories@gmail.com

Thank you everyone who came out to the show last Thursday. We had so many first-time tellers! My favorite part of each show is when someone who has never spoken in public gets up and learns how good it feels to share a story. Of course we couldn’t do it without such a patient and supportive audience so special thanks to them as well. You guys always bring the love to the storytellers and that’s why we’re able to keep doing this.

Every month at FGS we learn a little more about the world and this month was no different. This time we learned that pick-up artists are now calling themselves life coaches. We also learned that they like to hang out at The Gap. Most importantly, we learned that Kath will do almost anything for a story. Kath was one our first-timers and even though I never encourage people to do something crazy just for a story I’m secretly hoping something weird happens to her in the next couple of weeks so we can hear about.

We also learned that Nadia did her part to end the Cold War by disguising herself as a punk with a neon blue mohawk and sneaking up to the Czech border to share a smoke with a friendly Soviet border guard. We can only imagine how different the world would be today if Madeline Albright had walked into some of those peace talks wearing safety pin jeans and a Dead Kennedys t-shirt. Nadia was another first-timer and I’m still kicking myself that I didn’t hunt her down after the show and tell her how much I liked her story. Nadia, if you’re reading this, we’d love to have you back.

I also wish I could have told Hannah how jealous I am of her relationship with her mom. Hannah was home-schooled until college which means for the first 12 years of school she had to spend every hour of every class with her own mother. Can you imagine? I’m an only child and I know if my mom had home-schooled me she would have reminded me every year that once again I graduated at the bottom of my class. Hannah, whatever your mom did she did it right. You may think your story is about the time you met Obama but I think of it as the time Obama met you.

There were lots of other great stories that night but I gotta wrap this up so I can get ready to hop on a plane tomorrow morning. The recording turned out fine but since I’ll be in Canada for a week I won’t be able to get anyone’s recording to them until next weekend. Only the people who told a story can get a copy of it. Most people don’t want their personal stuff out there on the internet so I only give out recordings of single stories and only to the people who told them.

Next month’s theme is Journeys. Journeys, of course, can be physical, emotional, spiritual, almost anything. It can last a day or a decade. If you’ve ever been on a journey that changed your life somehow we’d love to hear it. Our next show will be July 28 at 7pm at Roy Street Coffee. I’ll write up the official invite when I get back in town but you can start thinking about it now. Rules for telling a story are below:

https://freshgroundstories.wordpress.com/2013/01/22/storytelling-rules-and-guidelines/

Thanks again to all our storytellers: Bill, Hannah, Elliot, David, Gaylin, Barb, Deborah, Jake, and first-timers Nadia, Arden, Kath, Ingrid, Katy.

See you on July 28!

Paul
freshgroundstories@gmail.com

Hi Everyone,

Just a quick reminder that our next show is this Thursday at Roy Street Coffee. The theme is “Saying Yes – Stories of Jumping in.”

If you’ve ever done something that didn’t turn out quite the way you planned here’s your chance to tell the story J

http://www.meetup.com/Fresh-Ground-Stories/events/231709491/

Here are the rules and guidelines if you want to tell a story:

https://freshgroundstories.wordpress.com/2013/01/22/storytelling-rules-and-guidelines/

Before I let you go back to enjoying the weather I want to remind you of a couple of amazing things our regulars are doing.

The first is Bill Bernat’s one-man show called “Becoming More Less Crazy.” It’s funny and touching and beautiful and definitely worth catching if you love personal storytelling. Click on either of the links below for the full description.

http://morelesscrazy.com

https://thepocket.vbotickets.com/event/Becoming_More_Less_Crazy_Storytelling/12789

I also want to let you know about of our tellers who was recently interviewed on KPLU’s Sound Effect. It’s a tough listen, and definitely not for kids, but it’s a pretty amazing 12 minutes. Tim spent two years healing himself through the stories he told at our show and now he’s able to finally share them in other places.

http://www.kplu.org/post/face-face-evil-former-investigator-remembers-time-front-lines-sex-trade

That’s all for now. Let me know if you have any questions. See you on Thursday!

Paul
freshgroundstories@gmail.com

I have this friend who’s a body language expert. She used to work for the government training agents on interrogation techniques and how to read non-verbal clues. Now she runs her own business and goes on cable news shows to explain what Putin’s funny posture means or what Jennifer Lawrence is really saying when she picks her nose and rolls her eyes. It’s a pretty sweet gig she’s got and it’s always fun to hang out with her in a bar and play, “What’s going on with them?” with couples I point out to her across the room.

Anyway, I was on the phone with her the other day and I was pestering her with questions like I always do about this stuff. Can you really tell when someone is lying? What should I do with my hands in a job interview? How does your husband feel about being married to a human lie detector?

At one point she tells me about this little move that often means someone is hyper-focused on consequences. And she perfectly described what I was doing right at that moment! In fact, it’s a thing I do all the time. And I’m totally over-focused on consequences! I’m not going to tell you what this move is because I don’t need people telling me every time I start tic-ing out. But I can say with absolute conviction that a large part of my life has been spent calculating all the possible consequences of every decision I make.

I’m sure if I wrote down a complete timeline of my life a good therapist could point out where every tic, twitch and habit began and how it helped me get through whatever weird event was happening at the time. I won’t go into how even after all these years I still I have to count the number of stairs to the parking lot to my front door (8 x 2 which is different than 16). And I’m not going to explain how sometimes I have to take a breath in just the right way before I can ask a stranger in the grocery store if I can reach around them to grab a turnip. In fourth grade I drove Mrs. Karabelnikov crazy because I had to make a secret high-pitched whine while she wrote on the blackboard. I never told her who was making that noise because I knew she wouldn’t understand that I would die if I couldn’t make that sound whenever she picked up a piece of chalk.

What I can tell you is that the King Daddy of all these annoying habits is my baseless conviction that doom is around every corner. Not a day goes by when I don’t convince myself that I’m going to lose my job, hurt my friends, or contract some sort of respiratory illness that puts me in an iron lung. In the coal mine of life my canary is always dead.

If these thoughts just stayed in my head and didn’t affect how I walked though the world I could handle it. But inevitably they manifest themselves in a single word that I’ve used more than any other in my life.

No.

No, I don’t think so. No, I can’t do that. No, I better not.

I’ve said no so many times I feel like I need some kind of physical therapy to learn how to say yes. I can tell you exactly how many times I’ve said said yes since 2010. Three. Once when I decided to keep Fresh Ground Stories running after the woman who started it had to move out of state for work. Another time was when I swallowed my fear and agreed to host TEDxOlympia and coach all the speakers. The most important yes I ever said was when I finally broke down and asked for help one night when all the fears I’d kept inside came roaring out of my head and pinned me to the floor of my apartment.

But that’s all I got. Three yes’s since 2010. I’m trying to teach myself to say yes more often but it’s hard to turn the emotional Titanic around once you’ve built up speed.

This is where you guys come in. I’d like to hear stories about what happened when you said yes. Come to FGS on June 23 and share some stories about how saying yes to something turned out for you. I don’t even care if it turned out bad. Just saying yes is powerful in its own way and even if everything went off the rails afterward you must have learned something if you’re still here to talk about it.

So that’s the theme of this month’s show: Saying Yes – Stories of jumping in.

Here are the updated Rules & Guidelines for telling a story at the show:

https://freshgroundstories.wordpress.com/2013/01/22/storytelling-rules-and-guidelines/

Remember to keep it clean, practice out loud on friends or pets, and make sure it’s under 8 minutes.

I hope to see you at our next show on Thursday, June 23, 7:00pm at the Roy St Cafe.

Paul
freshgroundstories@gmail.com.

Thanks to everyone who came out last Thursday to listen to some great stories at Roy Street! I know you could have been getting ready for the big campout or cookout on Memorial Day weekend and it means a lot that a bunch of you decided to spend a couple hours with me and some wonderful storytellers.

Every show I’m reminded of something that I should already know but for some reason I refuse to remember. This month I was reminded that our mothers actually do love us. Stephanie, one of our first-timers, told us about her mother holding her in a “ferocious and devastatingly intense hug” that tempered the guilt of driving home with a wrecked car. Each of us has so many stories of how we disappointed our parents at various times and it was great to hear Stephanie remind us that no matter what we do they still probably love us.

Timothy, our guest storyteller, told a story about cleaning out his mother’s apartment after she died. It was a story I heard him tell on The Moth and it was as powerful onstage at Roy Street as it was on the radio. When I first discovered him online I didn’t know who he was but a few minutes into his story I knew we had the same story inside us. The details are different but the story is the same. It’s why I asked him to come tell it at our show. I wanted to see him tell it in person. I guess I wanted to make sure he was real.

I never thought I would want to look back at certain people in my life and change how I felt about them. But after listening to Tim’s story I decided that maybe I did need to do that. So I started writing to people in my past and asking questions. I don’t know how this is all going to turn out but I’m willing to take it as far as I can. Thanks Tim.

Tim asked if I could let you guys know about some organizations he cares a lot about. I told him I’d be happy to.

The International Foster Care Alliance http://ifcaseattle.org/
FosterClub https://www.fosterclub.com/
Foster Care Alumni of America http://www.fostercarealumni.org/washington-chapter/

Super colossal thanks to everyone who told a story that night: Mike, Bill, Ginger, Terra Lea, Carin, Elliot, Scot, Timothy, and especially our first-timers, Deborah, Joe and Stephanie. (I hope I haven’t forgotten anyone! I don’t have all the slips from the show.)

Next month’s show is June 23 and the theme is “Saying Yes.” I’ll write up the invite as soon as I have time.

A few quick plugs for some of our regulars.

KPLU’s Sound Effects just aired Jenny’s story about trying to navigate the mental health system for her husband. She told this story for the first time in public last year at our show. I was three feet away watching her struggle to get through it. Now she’s trying to change things by sharing her story with a bigger audience.

http://www.kplu.org/post/fatal-consequences-broken-mental-health-system-and-woman-s-mission-change-it

Next week they’ll be airing another of our regulars. His name is Tim. He’s told stories at our show that I’ve never heard anywhere else. Like Jenny’s story it will probably be heartbreaking. That’s why you should listen next Saturday at 10am.

Lastly, Bill Bernat is reprising his “Becoming More Less Crazy” show. You’ve seen bits of it at FGS and now it’s time to see the whole thing in all its glory:

https://thepocket.vbotickets.com/event/Becoming_More_Less_Crazy_Storytelling/12789

The recording came out ok so send me an email if you want the audio of your story. (I only give out the audio to the people who told a story. Most of them don’t want their stories online so that’s why I only share them with the person who told them.)

See you on the 23rd!

Paul

freshgroundstories@gmail.com