I’ve Been Living Inside My Story For 4 Years
By: Samantha Hodder
Tags: Writers Life, Advice Looking Back, Writers On Writing, Creativity Hack, Podcasting

I dove into this story back in 2016. But from the moment I got on my my 24-hour flight, from Toronto to the Southernmost town in Argentina, Ushuaia, back in early February of 2018, I was lost at sea.

I hadn’t really be able to foresee this part: I was now actually inside this story. I wasn’t imagining it from the outside, cultivating the shape, size and texture by my own devices. Things were different now.

Here’s the first 3 things I had to learn

First lesson

When you are living inside the story, you see that reality moves remarkably slowly. Hour-to-hour, things happen…but when you are there to try and compute that as a thing, you realize that the thing people grab onto is only one small portion of that day. And your job, now that you’ve had the privilege to be there, is to distill it down to that thing.

Sound easy? Not so much.

Because now you’re too caught up in all those boring details. Suddenly what you had for lunch is a big part of your day, but frankly, no one else cares. No one else needs to know that vegetarians received poached onions for the lunch as the main, for a third time.

Second lesson

Going to living on a ship and roam around Antartica for 21 days means that you will have almost no connection with the outside world. I called home about five times, each for a three minute call, one for a birthday wish for my husband. Each time I had to buy a phone card, and dial about 50 numbers, hope that I did them in the right order…be connected via a strange routing number with a European country number exchange and hope that someone answered this call, which was not selling duct cleaning. Antarctica is remote beyond remote. And that’s sort of the point….but wow is that actually challenging.

This remoteness also means that you don’t have any anchors to attach these new experiences to. All those touch points of your own help you gauge the value, the import, the relative importance of and connection to….things. If it sounds vague, that’s because it is. When you are just yourself, alone in a new place, surrounded by all new people, it’s an interesting challenge to find yourself amid all this newness. And that makes it difficult to draw conclusions about things — to determine how this part connects to that part, and what came first, the realization or the revelation. You are all new here. And so is everyone else. And that can get complicated.

Third lesson

After all of these incredible experiences, you still have to come home again. You have ended that experience, and you now need to figure out how to incorporate that into your everyday life. And when I say this is not immediate, I’m only massively exaggerating.

At first coming home is a novelty. It feels great to change your clothes, see your family and friends, bask in that happy glow of having gone far away. The quietness of being at home alone, with all the creature comforts, makes your ears ring, and you feel relaxed. At first. But then at goes away.

Because life marches on. And while these events are still playing over and over in your mind, now that you’ve shared a few photos and your Top Three Memories with friends and family, they’ve moved on, but you haven’t. Because you’re still stuck inside this all-consuming storyline, where you are the person imparted with the vessel of the story of this epic, and you are entrusted to carry it forward. But that was there, and now I’m corrupted by the here, and I need to parse those two things apart.

But you still need to march on with this story. It’s your job to sort it all out…to decide what to do with the hundreds of hours of audio that you taped. It’s your job to stay connected with these women, who live in all six corners of the planet, so that you stay abreast of the changing stories, and you are able to think of what the relevance of this story is to the wider world.