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15d (edited) • 💎 Gems
🥉 It wasn't my story to tell ... 😅
So…
I need to walk something back.
The other day I wrote you about my daughter’s gymnastics competition.
The bronze medal… the tears… the whole “she couldn’t see her own progress” thing.
“Nice” email. People liked it. Good lesson.
One problem.
I got it wrong.
The very next day I’m talking to my daughter and she’s…fine.
Like, better than fine. She’s proud. She’s happy.
She’s wearing her medal to the park and her gymnastics sweater on a hot spring day.
She literally looked at me and said, “Dad, I never said I was the worst.”
(Ooooff.)
And she was right.
What actually happened was this:
It was the end of a long day. She was tired. Frustrated with her sister. It was past bedtime.
And all those feelings kind of came out at once.
Like they do when you’re a kid.
(Or an adult, honestly.)
I took one moment and turned it into a story. My story. About her.
And honestly… it had way more to do with my own junk around sports and comparing myself to others than it had to do with her. I projected my stuff onto a tired kid at bedtime and then wrote an email about it.
Cool.
I also just pulled on the thread that translated into the best lesson for an audience. The athletics-to-entrepreneurship parallel was right there… so I grabbed it.
But the truth is, she’s actually really great at playing in her own lane.
Her tears that night weren’t all about the medal.
They were about being a kid who was exhausted and overwhelmed at the end of a big day.
I flattened all of that into a character for my email.
Cuz... you know ... content.
But here’s the part that really got me…
My wife and I have been super intentional about not putting our daughters’ faces on the internet.
We want them to grow up and define who they are on their own terms.
Not be shaped by dad’s content calendar. 😬
Noble, yeah?
But then I realized… I’m doing the same thing every time I tell their stories with my spin on them.
For my audience. No faces, sure. But I’m still shaping how people see my kid.
And I painted a pretty inaccurate picture of a really resilient one.
This girl handles her emotions better than most adults I know.
She bounces back fast.
She’s tough in a way that’s quiet and natural and not performed.
I used her worst five minutes to make a point…
and missed sharing who she actually is in the process.
(Not awesome, Dad.)
After sitting with it…
something’s gotta shift...
I don’t want to turn my kids’ lives into content.
So. I’m not going to share their stories anymore.
Which is a bit unfortunate for me.
Because if I’m not telling their stories…
it means I’ll need to get some of my own.
Which means I might actually need to live a more interesting life so I have things to talk about.
Maybe that’s the real lesson here.
Go do things worth writing about…
Instead of borrowing stories from the people you love.
Anyway.
I wanted to set the record straight.
My daughter is doing great. She’s proud of her medal.
She had a huge day full of all the things a big day holds for a kid.
The way she tells the story is pretty different than the way I told it.
And it’s her story to tell.
So I guess I better get a motorcycle or a boat or something?
Dan “retired child-narrative writer” Harrison
44
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🥉 It wasn't my story to tell ... 😅
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