Nobody Remembers It the Same Way

Why your story is more interesting than you think

When I was younger, I naively assumed other people’s lives looked much like mine. It took years to see how wrong I was.

Last night, I attended an event where several of my friends served on a panel on emergency communications. We had worked together in various situations representing public agencies in our county, and I listened to each of their stories with fondness and a little leftover adrenaline. In many cases, I had been part of the emergency response, but looking at it from a different seat in the room.

During the presentation, Jackie talked about assembling a team in January 2020 because of this “thing” that was brewing. I recalled being on the other end of those briefings, sharing this “thing” with our management team as something the County’s emergency management group was watching. I took it to our leadership team and said, “Heads up, this might be a thing,” and it turned out to be one, one that none of us could have anticipated.

Camie, the woman hired to replace me at my last job spoke from the school perspective, and I was back in that conference room with our leadership team, furiously banging out the messaging announcing that we were shutting the doors for over 65,000 students in 120 schools. The memory is vivid: animated dialogue, thoughtful conversation, then a heaviness as the weight of that decision fell on us.

Another colleague talked about surviving a mass casualty event in a neighboring state. Many of us had watched that same event unfold on television and were horrified at the sights and sounds. I had no idea she was there, and yet I remember acutely what we were seeing on this side of the screen.

I sat there thinking about my own version of this: two people experiencing things completely differently.

During my daughter’s high school years, I worked with Lauren, an incredibly talented school district staff member, to find the right residential treatment facility for Katie. During those same years, I worked in emergency communications and helped manage public information for incidents in our county. One was a significant oil spill off our coast, which kept me in the emergency operations center for six weeks. I did the same for the Thomas Fire, California’s third-largest wildfire at the time, and then the 1/9 debris flow took the lives of 23 people in our community, including my hand surgeon.

In these moments, I was trying to get the right information to the right people at the right time, and that took everything I had. I wasn’t thinking about how, afterward, each of us would carry those experiences differently, depending on where we stood: on the couch watching the news, visiting a disaster site, or answering media calls in the emergency operations center.

These two lives never touched. The people I worked with on those incidents didn’t know what was happening with Katie. And Lauren didn’t know the other hat I wore. She just saw the mom and the school board member.

Each room saw one half of me, and each half was accurate but incomplete.

That is what I missed when I was younger. Being part of the same event doesn’t mean sharing the same experience. Two siblings can grow up in the same house and describe different childhoods. Two colleagues can work the same incident side by side and take away different memories. The facts may be the same, but each of us is left with a unique imprint.

And that’s why your perspective matters.

I regularly hear some version of “I don’t think my story is interesting enough” when I’m talking with people about writing a book. They often assume the reader already knows the world they are describing, because it all seems so ordinary from where they stand. And I get that. I made the same assumption about my own life for a long time.

But the reader is always sitting in a different room from the writer, and what feels obvious to you because you lived it may be invisible to the reader. If you didn’t grow up in an Irish Catholic family and attend Catholic school in a particular era, you wouldn’t know what was expected of you there, or what events were shaping the adults around you, unless the writer told you.

A reader who has never stood in an emergency operations center needs a picture of what that experience is like to grasp some of what goes on. And a reader who has never sat in a school meeting about a child in crisis needs the same explanation.

So when someone tells me her story isn’t interesting enough, I ask what someone who was nowhere near it would need in order to see and understand it. Her perspective, the who, the why, the how, the motivation, the transformation, belongs to her alone. No one else was standing where she was.

---

P.S. Lauren has written about this from her side, in a post called On being a helper. She was a school psychologist working with families in some of the hardest situations, and she says she was struggling behind the scenes in those same years. She also wrote about reading Off-Script, and about one line from my book that she has been thinking about ever since: “I was grateful this person was leading the way, and I didn’t have to be in charge.”

---

This was originally posted on my Substack.