“What are you doing?!” my thoughts spin as I sit in the back row at a MOTH Story Slam. I just put my name in a hat to my most personal story in public. Like maybe two hundred people public.
My name is called to a microphone on an empty stage. The story I’d been working on for five years in writing, speaking, and filming was calling. All of it unexpressed. Just. Like. Me. Until this moment.
I had five minutes.
My legs wobble as I walk up on stage. With hands clenched behind my back and a shaky voice, I begin to tell my story.
“It’s the summer of 1995 and I’m standing in the Seoul Olympic Stadium holding the hand of a man I met just a month before, and am about to marry,” I hear my voice trembling through the microphone.
I was always the shy girl growing up. Waited to be asked questions. Never raised my hand. Never talked back. Never wanted to make anyone uncomfortable.
But this story was about to make me and others, including my family, just that.
I can barely breathe as I continue explaining my upbringing in the Unification Church including my participation in a mass wedding and arranged marriage when I was 20. How there, on the Astro Turf floor of the Seoul, Olympic Stadium, I committed to marrying a man I had met just a month before. How Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church I was raised in, officiated the wedding and had matched me and my then husband using 8×10 photographs. How I ultimately left the marriage and broke from my parents and the church.
This story is one that, in the past, I could only tell in dark corners of bars.
Stay quiet, stay small, stay perfect I’d tell the story.
Speak it, get it out of you, TELL YOUR F&^&@# STORY it would yell back.
It took me years of pillow bashing and talk therapy and countless storytelling workshops to become the woman who could finally stand in its truth.
