I have written about my theory of probability before, so some of you may know my optimistic approach.
When I’m considering doing something, I list every possible outcome. Then I sort them into good and bad. Whatever share of them are good, those are my odds. All have equal probability. So, 3 good outcomes out of 4 means 75%. And I’m always looking to add good outcomes to increase my odds.
Last time I walked you through this, I had just emailed Matthew McConaughey to ask if he’d sit by a fire with me. Initially, I saw 3 outcomes and only 1 of them was good. Then a sunset walk on a beach in Costa Rica turned up a 4th, and then a 5th, and by the time we got back I was at 60%.
My wife Becca runs a different system. Hers involves actual probability. We have agreed to disagree.
That email is still out there, but I am 99.9% certain someday I will sit by a fire with Matthew.
I recently ran the math again. This time on Sara Bareilles.
Since July I’ve wanted to reach out to Sara. And for 2 months I couldn’t figure out how. Not because I couldn’t find an address. Because every approach I thought of felt like I wanted something. I’d start with the thing I actually wanted to say, and somehow it would turn into a pitch. I have a book. I have a podcast. I have a nonprofit.
All true. All beside the point of me reaching out.
That’s the part I kept getting stuck on. I had something real to tell her and no honest way to say it. So, I didn’t do anything.
Let me take a step back to where the idea to reach out to her was birthed.
In July, I was camping. It was dusk and I was enjoying some solitude looking out over a lake. I was listening to music, and She Used To Be Mine came on. It’s a song Sara wrote for the musical Waitress.
I’ve loved that song since the first time I heard it. I have listened to it a lot. This time, I heard something in it I hadn’t heard before. It isn’t just a song about a waitress who doesn’t like where she ended up. It’s about grieving the loss of who she was. The parts of herself she put away somewhere along the line.
She looks back at the girl she used to be and wishes she could rewrite an ending or two.
Since February, I have been working on a children’s book about exactly that. Sara and I wrote similar stories. Hers in a song, mine in a book.
I wanted to reach out to share that. I just didn’t have a plan for how to do it in a way that felt honest. That didn’t feel like I was trying to sell her an idea.
That changed on September 9 when I went to the first night of her Good Grief tour in Boston.
Partway through the show, she started playing voicemails.
Not her voice. Everyday people. A woman talking about losing her father to pancreatic cancer and what her grief has been like since. A man in his 80s sharing how lonely he is since losing his wife of 50 years.
I realized this was an initiative connected to her new album, Good Grief. A phone number people could call to share their story. As Sara writes in the song Home, “Tell me your story, I’ll tell you mine.”
And with that my problem of how to reach out went away. I wasn’t going to reach out to Sara Bareilles. I was going to answer her invitation to share my story.
Here’s the message I left her. I recorded myself as I was leaving it.
So, here is my math on this one.
There are a few outcomes I can see happening.
Nobody ever hears it. It sits in a queue with thousands of others and that’s the end of it.
Somebody on her team listens, decides it’s not what they’re looking for, and moves on.
It (or parts of it) gets played at a show. Which means a few thousand strangers in an arena hear a guy from Maine talk about the boy he put away.
Sara hears it herself.
Sara hears it and reaches out.
5 outcomes. 3 of them are good. That’s 60%, which has the odds favoring a positive outcome.
And then there’s the move I pulled last time. I’m writing this post. Which creates a 6th outcome, where the post finds its way to her and she reaches out.
4 out of 6. 66%.
But this one is already at 100%, and it has nothing to do with whether she ever hears it.
It took me 2 weeks and a lot of walking to figure out what I was going to say in the message. I’m a verbal processor. I talk it out, transcribe it, read it, and then write.
Somewhere in that messy process, the thing I’d been circling for months finally connected.
Back in June, I sat with Jonathan, the father of a friend of mine going back to high school. He spent years as a minister. I asked him how he defines suffering.
I told him I wasn’t sure I’d really suffered. I’m a tall white man born in the United States. Next to what other people carry, my life looks easy.
He didn’t let me off the hook. He pointed at the 40 years I spent with parts of myself put away, hiding the sensitive side of me because guys aren’t supposed to be soft. And he said that’s suffering too.
I sat with that for a long time. I wrote a story about it.
What I didn’t see until I had to tell the whole story in one sitting is that it’s also grief.
Grief is the response to losing something that matters. Those parts of me I put away mattered. I lost access to them for 4 decades.
And once I saw it there, I saw it everywhere.
When Jonathan read the book, he told me it made him remember how much he missed being that boy, and how hard it was to hold onto him. He told me he liked my book. And I think by saying that he was also telling me that he saw his own grieving in it.
Becca read it and it cracked her open. She started asking about the parts of herself she’d put away. Then she started writing her own story.
An executive coach told me he wants every CEO he works with to read it. He sees it as a powerful tool for helping people heal.
I had been collecting these reactions for months and filing them under “people like the book.” That’s true and it’s also more. Every single one of them was a person recognizing their own grief and finally having somewhere to put it.
That’s why the book works. Not because it’s a good story. Because it gives people’s grief a witness.
There is a song called Home on Sara’s new album. It’s about a podcast conversation she heard between Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert. Colbert says something in the conversation about what happens when you keep grief to yourself. On your own, it’s a cave. Shared through story, it becomes a tunnel. Something with another side to it.
That’s also what Rob Reider meant when he told me grief needs a witness during our Campfire Conversation. It’s what Sara built with a phone number. And I think it’s what can happen when we write our stories through a different lens. Through the eyes of our curious younger selves. In a children’s book.
And that’s what Project Little You is for.
I have been describing it as a way to help people hold onto, or find their way back to, the courage to be fully themselves. That’s still true. But I understand the mechanism now in a way I didn’t 3 weeks ago.
You don’t find your way back to those parts by deciding to. You find your way back by grieving them out loud, where somebody can hear you.
And it isn’t only children’s books. That’s where it started, because that’s the form my story took. But a little you story could be a novel. A short story. A poem. A song.
The form doesn’t matter much. Finding the right way to tell your story does.
When I wrote about the McConaughey email, I stuck a line in near the end that I didn’t think much about at the time. So many great ideas never leave the room they were born in.
Here’s the version of that in this story.
So many stories never leave the room they were born in.
We carry them around for decades. We decide they’re not big enough or not sad enough or not the kind of thing anyone wants to hear. So, they stay in the room. And a story that never leaves the room can’t do anything for anybody, including the person carrying it.
I left a specific ask of Sara out of the voicemail. It felt like the wrong place for it. She asked for a story, so I gave her a story.
But this is my Substack, so I’ll say it here.
Sara, if this ever finds you. I’d like to sit with you around a fire and have a Campfire Conversation about love and fear and grief and what it takes to hold onto who you are. No script. No agenda. Just two people and a fire.
Tell me your story. I’ll tell you mine.
That’s your line. I’m just taking you up on it.
The previous line was the original end to this story.
Then a few days later, I was driving and I got to thinking. And that can be dangerous. Not the driving. The thinking…
And I realized the story wasn’t finished.
What if this post makes its way to Sara.
What if she sees the connection between what we’re doing and the work she’s doing around mental health. She knows what storytelling does for a person carrying something heavy. She built her whole tour around it.
What if she reaches back and says I love what you’re doing, I’d love to get involved, how can I help.
And what if I said, funny you should mention that.
We’re launching Project Little You with a crowdfunding campaign. What if one of the rewards was a chance to work with you to help someone turn their story into a song.
What if?
That’s another good outcome. Which puts me at 125%.
I’m aware that isn’t how percentages work. But it’s my math and I’ll calculate it how I want to.
This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. We have an open invite for anyone curious about what that world could look like. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org.