{"id":809,"date":"2026-10-14T07:39:57","date_gmt":"2026-10-14T12:39:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/?p=809"},"modified":"2026-10-14T07:39:58","modified_gmt":"2026-10-14T12:39:58","slug":"a-story-she-tells-well","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/2026\/10\/14\/a-story-she-tells-well\/","title":{"rendered":"A Story She Tells Well"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<!-- POST TITLE: A Story She Tells Well -->\n<style>@import url('https:\/\/fonts.googleapis.com\/css2?family=Oswald:wght@400;500;700&family=Newsreader:ital,wght@0,400;0,500;1,400&display=swap');\n.ohands{--bg:#F5ECCC;--darkest:#17343B;--mid:#275C65;--heading:#C04B42;--cool:#2F83A3;--light:#FFD279;--surface-verse:#FFF6E3;--surface-deep:#DCE8DE;font-family:'Newsreader',Georgia,serif;color:var(--darkest);background:var(--bg);max-width:720px;margin:2em auto;padding:2.5em 2em;line-height:1.7;font-size:1.05em}\n.ohands .eyebrow{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-size:.85em;letter-spacing:.18em;text-transform:uppercase;color:var(--mid);font-weight:500;margin:0 0 .4em}\n.ohands h2{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.3em;letter-spacing:.08em;text-transform:uppercase;color:var(--mid);margin:2em 0 .7em;border-bottom:1px solid var(--heading);padding-bottom:.3em}\n.ohands .verse{font-family:'Newsreader',Georgia,serif;font-style:italic;font-size:1.08em;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:normal;background:var(--surface-verse);border-left:4px solid var(--heading);padding:1.1em 1.4em;margin:1.4em 0;color:var(--darkest)}\n.ohands .verse-cite{display:block;font-style:normal;font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-size:.82em;letter-spacing:.1em;color:var(--mid);margin-top:.6em;text-transform:uppercase}\n.ohands .divider{border:none;border-top:1px solid var(--heading);margin:2em auto;width:80px}\n.ohands p{margin:0 0 1.1em}\n.ohands .pull{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.15em;letter-spacing:.04em;color:var(--darkest);border-top:1px solid var(--heading);border-bottom:1px solid var(--heading);padding:1em 0;margin:1.6em 0;text-align:center;line-height:1.4}\n.ohands .ohands-deep{background:var(--surface-deep);border-left:4px solid var(--cool);padding:1.1em 1.4em;margin:1.4em 0}\n@media (max-width:600px){.ohands{padding:1.6em 1.2em}}<\/style>\n<div class=\"ohands\">\n<p class=\"eyebrow\">Open Hands &middot; Week 4 &middot; Wednesday &middot; HURT<\/p>\n<p>She tells it well, and that is most of the problem.<\/p>\n<p>About six years ago a woman she had been close to for a long time did something to her. I am not going to lay it out, partly because it is hers and partly because it does not matter for this; what matters is that it was real, it was deliberate, and nobody who has heard the account has ever come away thinking she is overreacting.<\/p>\n<p>She has told it to new coworkers. She told it to a small group at a church she has since stopped attending. She has told it twice at a table with coffee going cold in front of her. And over six years the account has acquired a shape. It has a beginning that sets the scene efficiently, and it has two or three lines in it that land every single time, because she has found out which ones do.<\/p>\n<h2>Bear With<\/h2>\n<p class=\"verse\">Bear with one another and forgive any complaint you may have against someone else. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.<span class=\"verse-cite\">Colossians 3:13 (BSB)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Bear with is an interesting phrase to put right next to forgive. It is not settle, and it is not adjudicate, and it is very much not establish once and for all in front of witnesses that you were right about what happened. It is closer to carry. Carry this, with the other person still in the picture.<\/p>\n<p>And then the line after it, which I think is the harder one.<\/p>\n<p class=\"verse\">And over all these virtues put on love, which is the bond of perfect unity.<span class=\"verse-cite\">Colossians 3:14 (BSB)<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>What the Telling Does<\/h2>\n<p>What concerns me about the retelling is not honesty. She is not exaggerating. If anything she undersells one part of it, because that part makes her look naive and she has quietly trimmed it.<\/p>\n<p>It is that a story you tell a hundred times stops being a thing that happened to you and starts being a thing you are. Each telling writes the groove a little deeper. And the account improves as a piece of storytelling, which means the better she gets at telling it, the more permanent it becomes.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pull\">She was never going to be defined by what that woman did. She is well on her way to being defined by having told everyone about it.<\/p>\n<p>There is a cruel arithmetic in that. The woman who hurt her does not have to do anything else, ever, to keep hurting her. The ongoing damage is now being done by someone else entirely, with the best intentions, for six years and counting.<\/p>\n<h2>What It Cost<\/h2>\n<p>She met somebody new in August, through work, and they went for lunch, and she did not tell it.<\/p>\n<p>She said afterward that she had caught herself reaching for it twice. Not planning to tell it; reaching for it, the way you reach for a phone that is not in your pocket. There was a natural opening about halfway through, a question about why she left her last place, and she gave the short true answer instead of the long one.<\/p>\n<div class=\"ohands-deep\">\n<p>And then she said the thing that made me think she was actually onto something, which is that the conversation afterward felt thin. Like she had not really introduced herself. She had been handing people that story as her introduction for six years, and without it she was not sure what she had told this woman about who she was.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>She has not told it since. She is not sure she will not. I asked her whether she had forgiven the woman and she said she thought she probably had, years ago, and that it clearly had not been the thing standing in the way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Open Hands &middot; Week 4 &middot; Wednesday &middot; HURT She tells it well, and that is most of the problem. About six years ago a woman she had been close to for a long time did something to her. I&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":810,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-open-hands"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/SU_20261014_BLOG.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=809"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":811,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809\/revisions\/811"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}