A minute later my arms start to shake. I’m struggling to keep her aloft. My right foot, which has a torn ligament, begins to throb. I decide to put her down.
At that very moment, Clara pushes her face into the crook of my neck and whispers, “It’s just so nice to be held this close.”
Then it occurs to me: I’m the only person in the world who picks up my daughter like this anymore. She’s become too big for my wife or her grandparents to lift. I’m the last person who will ever hold her like this. I’m the last person who will hold her like a little girl.
I tighten my hold on her. I ignore my throbbing foot and tiring muscles. I whisper back, “Let’s just stay like this for a little bit. Okay?”
“Sounds great, Daddy,” she whispers back.
We hold each other in the growing light of a spring morning until she sighs and whispers, “Okay, let’s eat.”
If I hadn’t been doing my Homework for Life, this moment would have been lost to me. Even if I had recognized its importance (which is doubtful), I would have been hard-pressed to recall it years later.
If you’re a parent, you know this is true. Our lives are filled with beautiful, unforgettable moments with our children that turn out to be entirely and tragically forgettable.
But now I will own that moment for the rest of my life. I can close my eyes today and return to that room, with the morning light streaming through the windows, my daughter pressed close to me, whispering words that I will never forget.
Someday that moment may find its way into a story.
Nowadays, Homework for Life doesn’t even take me five minutes. Today I can see most of the moments while in the midst of them. I recognize them in real time. I have often inputted them into my spreadsheet long before the end of the day. This will eventually happen for you too. If you have commitment and faith.
I give this to you: Homework for Life.
Five minutes a day is all I’m asking. At the end of every day, take a moment and sit down. Reflect upon your day. Find your most storyworthy moment, even if it doesn’t feel very storyworthy. Write it down. Not the whole story, but a few sentences at most. Something that will keep you moving, and will make it feel doable. That will allow you to do it the next day. If you have commitment and faith, you will find stories. So many stories.
There are meaningful, life-changing moments happening in your life all the time. That dander in the wind will blow by you for the rest of your life unless you learn to see it, capture it, hold on to it, and find a way to keep it in your heart forever.
If you want to be a storyteller, this is your first step. Find your stories. Collect them. Save them forever.
In addition to my many other jobs, I’m an elementary-school teacher, so I feel like I have the right to assign homework to anyone I choose.
I choose you.
I’m telling stories to an audience of about seven hundred high-school students at an American school in São Paulo, Brazil, in the summer of 2015. When I finish performing, I open the session to questions. They come fast and furious.
I love Q&A. Ask me a question, and I’ll tell you a story.
I’ve been answering questions for about fifteen minutes, handing out prizes to students who ask me especially challenging questions, when a student asks me:
“You write novels. You blog every day. You write musicals and magazine articles. You tell stories on stages. Why? Why do you share so much of yourself?”
I stop. I think for a moment. I’ve never been asked this question before.
An unexpected answer comes to mind. “I think . . .” I say slowly, wondering if the answer I’m about to give is correct. Trying it on for size. “I think,” I repeat, “that I’m trying to get the attention of a mother who never paid me any attention and is now dead and a father who left me as a boy and never came home.”
It’s a remarkable thing. I have been writing every single day of my life since I was seventeen years old, without exception. I have been blogging every single day of my life since 2003, sharing my thoughts, ideas, complaints, and moments from my life with thousands of readers. I’ve been publishing novels since 2009. And I’ve been standing on stages since 2011, spilling my guts, sharing my deepest, darkest secrets and most embarrassing, hilarious moments, and not once did I ever ask myself, “Why?”
“Why do you do it, Matt? Why do you share so much of yourself with the world?”
Now I know. Standing in the carpeted aisle of an auditorium five thousand miles from home, I have stumbled upon the answer to a question I never asked.
That is storytelling at its finest.
The auditorium goes silent. I go silent. Seven hundred teenagers stare at me, waiting for my next move.
After a moment, I say, “Okay, remember when we talked about finding those five-second moments in our lives? Those moments of transformation? Realization? I think I’m having one right now. Yup. I am. Definitely.”
I still stand by that answer today. I have yet to craft or tell the story about the time I discovered my primary reason for writing and telling so many stories (in front of seven hundred Brazilian teenagers), but I will someday.
The young lady who asked me that question received a prize that day.
Dreaming at the End of Your Pen
I don’t dream well.
When I was twenty-two years old, I was robbed at gunpoint while managing a McDonald’s restaurant in Brockton, Massachusetts. Guns were pressed to my head and triggers pulled in an attempt to force me to open a lockbox at the bottom of the safe.
I didn’t have the key to the lockbox, as a placard on the safe clearly indicated. The gunmen didn’t believe me or the placard and thought they could get me to open the lockbox by convincing me that I was about to die. Knowing that these men had killed a Taco Bell employee the week before, I was certain that they were serious. I was convinced that this was the end of my life.
It’s one of my big stories.
I first told this story at a Moth GrandSLAM in Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg in 2013, but I have no recollection of telling it. The performance isn’t a blur; it’s a perfect hole in my memory. A total loss of seven minutes of my life, even though those seven minutes were spent onstage in front of more than four hundred people.
More on this in a later chapter.
Two years later I told a more complete version of the story in a Moth Mainstage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music under the brilliant direction of The Moth’s artistic director, Catherine Burns. You can find a recording of that performance on the “Storyworthy the Book” YouTube channel. We will be looking at this story more closely in a later chapter as well.
As a result of the robbery and my failure to seek treatment, I suffered from untreated post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for more than twenty years. When Elysha