The Storyteller

“Same Walk, Different Shoes” is a Substack community writing project that Ben Wakeman organized as a practical exercise in empathy. The premise is simple. A group of writers anonymously contribute a personal story of an experience that changed their life. Each participating writer is randomly assigned one of these story prompts to turn into a short story. The story you are about to read is one from this collection. You can find all the stories from the participating writers at Catch & Release. Enjoy the walk with us.

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Author note: The length of this got away from me, despite “killing [a few] darlings,” so consider this your warning that this might be a longer read than the rest of the stories in this collection. Brevity, while delicious, is not my strong suit.

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I closed my laptop and leaned back in my chair, staring out the window past the rain on the windowpane to the gray November sky and the once-colorful autumn leaves slowly being ground into dull compost under pedestrian traffic, waiting for the words to stop ringing in my ears. They didn’t. Instead, they spun on repeat, clanging through my brain like a repeated slamming of prison bars. Is that what they were? If so, the “trial” seemed to have lasted seconds. Was that long enough to pass judgment? Whether it was or not, he had.

What had he seen, this telehealth psychiatrist, that made him so sure?

With a sigh, I reopened the laptop and clicked: File> New Document> Blank Document. Writing always helped me make sense of my world and share that with others. Words were magic, limitless, boundless. They could create anything. I was good with words. I placed my fingers over the keyboard and stared at the blinking cursor, waiting for lexical magic to make sense of what had just happened.

I waited. And stared. And waited.

Nothing.

Just that clanging sentence beating its fist against my skull.

And then a memory surfaced.

There was this kid I went to elementary school with, Sam. He was always in trouble with the teachers — constantly sent to the principal’s office for disrupting class. He’d act like the classroom was his stage, responding to questions with jokes or making comments out of turn. And while I sometimes thought he was funny, mostly I was annoyed with him for taking up all the space in the room, like he thought he was more important than everyone else. Until one day, he stopped. Just sat there quietly all day like the rest of us. The change was a relief, if a bit jarring. Classes became predictable and I almost missed the disruption to the routine.

Then one day he was back to cracking jokes. But this time was different. Instead of being sent to the principal’s office, he was sent to the nurse, which confused me. He was sick? He didn’t act sick. Later, when I asked him why he went to the nurse, he told me he forgot to take his medicine. I asked him what made him sick and he said, “I have ADHD. My medicine helps me stop telling jokes and talking or getting up when I’m not supposed to.”

ADHD.

There it was. The clanging. That’s what the psychiatrist had said. “You have a classic case of ADHD.” Seven words. Five minutes to diagnosis. One drag on the vape pen. “Questions?” Zero.

Except that I did have questions. But the questions didn’t come with language. Just a crack to my identity that reverberated through my being, reducing my magic, my words, to rubble. If I could have articulated it, I might have asked so many things. Had I, unknowingly, been like Sam? Speaking out of turn, dominating spaces with my perceived cleverness, and generally making a nuisance of myself? Was everyone around me just waiting for the day when I would finally get over myself, sit down, and shut up? And how could I have gone this long without knowing? How can I fix this? How can I fix…me?

But I couldn’t ask. I needed to process the implications before I could bring myself to voice the questions I had; the identity crisis I was undergoing. Not just to the P-Doc, it turned out. I couldn’t bring myself to say much of anything to anyone.

My friends noticed. They asked if I was OK. They asked if I was back on lithium – the only other time they’d ever known me to stop telling stories. I shrugged. Didn’t tell them. Didn’t know what to say. I ignored their questions until they stopped asking. Ignored their invitations until they stopped coming. They even showed up at my apartment on my birthday with a cake but I sat in silence, behind the closed door, and waited for them to leave. I didn’t want to deal with them. I had no words to make sense of anything for them. Too habituated, at this point, to my own silence.

My words had disappeared as quickly and thoroughly as the psychiatrist’s vape cloud.

If I could have, I might’ve told them that this was different from the chemically-induced numbness and nihilism I experienced with lithium, when words and stories vanished along with my emotions, making those two years (or was it five?) seem like endless monotony – a blur of days, weeks, months going through the motions of a life I no longer felt connected to. No, this hell was a distorted mirror of that time – a funhouse mockery of exaggerated differences that retained just enough similarities to recall the previous instance. It held the same sense of disconnection from reality. But instead of the words vanishing, they had become my betrayers. I could feel them there, piling up behind my teeth, cutting off the oxygen as they accumulated, the lump in my throat a constant discomfort. And yet, I couldn’t let them out. I wouldn’t let them out.

I wouldn’t betray my deficits. My defectiveness. Not to the so-called friends who betrayed me by never telling me the truth about how I was perceived – about who I am. Could I even call them friends, if they only kept me around out of pity or as unwitting entertainment, laughed about behind closed doors? I wouldn’t accept that from them.

It hurt when they stopped reaching out but I told myself they weren’t real friends anyway so it made no difference. I almost believed it, too.

I filled my days with work and my empty social calendar with podcasts, binge-watching shows, and going to the gym. I spent a lot of time at the gym. All the words trapped within me had built up, creating an unfamiliar, restless energy that demanded an outlet. I began doing long treadmill runs, then switched to spin classes, HIIT, and finally found my sweet spot at an MMA gym. There were enough different classes that I always had something new to learn and the self-discipline and control required was grounding. Plus, it felt good to grunt and punch people.

While it was a friendly enough place, I wasn’t there to make friends and they respected that. No one there had known me before, when I had stories to share, so they assumed I was taciturn by nature and talked around me without making it awkward. I sometimes felt a tug in my gut when I saw the camaraderie the others had with each other, but I didn’t want to open that door. I told myself I was better off alone.

Not to say that I existed solely in silence. You can’t learn or spar without being able to work with others. I just didn’t volunteer anything about my work or life outside of the gym or attend any social events when invited. The workouts helped regulate my nervous system enough that the fog of depression and anger no longer threatened to overwhelm me as often, though I still had bad days. But I worked through enough of my angst around the diagnosis that I allowed myself to create a throwaway TikTok account where I followed a few therapists and content creators who talked about ways to cope with ADHD. I didn’t spend much time on it. When I did, all I had were more questions I didn’t want to think about.

A new guy arrived at the gym. He started coming to most of the classes I frequented, which was saying something — I went to a lot of classes. His name, I learned, was Leo. I overheard him telling some of the other guys that he had just moved into town from out of state. One night, we were the last to leave the gym after a particularly intense Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class and, after some small talk about how we felt we performed that night, he asked if I knew a good coffee shop in the area that stayed open late. I gave him the name of my favorite late-night haunt and a recommendation for what to order to get the most caffeine for your buck (and taste buds) and we went our separate ways.

I wasn’t surprised, then, a few weeks later, when I ran into him at the coffee shop at 11 pm. I was surprised, and a little uncomfortable, when he motioned me over to where he was sitting. He had papers and books spread out all over the table and three cups of coffee in front of him.

“Hey,” I said, awkwardly. “What are you working on?”

“What, this?” he gestured to the table, “I’m studying for the bar exam. I have to take it here before I can practice in this state. I wanted to thank you for the coffee rec. This stuff is amazing, how did you discover it?”

“I used to write. This was the stuff that got me through when inspiration waited until 2 am to strike.” I glanced at the door, wondering how quickly I could escape this conversation.

“Nice. What did you write?” he asked, lifting papers and books, searching for something on the table.

Get me out of here, I begged any gods or powers that might be listening. “Just stories,” I said.

“Is that what brings you here tonight?” He was still searching.

“What? No.” I was getting nervous. This was not a conversation I wanted to have. “No, I don’t write anymore, it was just a phase. I’m just grabbing a coffee because it helps me sleep.”

“Oh, I get that,” he said. ADHD?”

“I… What?” I couldn’t keep the panic out of my voice now.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, finally looking up. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I have ADHD,” he gestured again to the messy table, “and coffee helps me calm down, so I just wondered.”

“Oh,” was all I could say. The silence went on a bit too long before I was saved by the barista calling out my order. “Hey, that’s me. I gotta go. See you around!” I grabbed my coffee and all but ran out the door

I dodged Leo as best I could for the next several weeks. I even went so far as to change which classes I went to at the gym so I wouldn’t end up sparring with him. I had said too much and was irrationally afraid he’d tell other people about the stories. The gym was my safe place because no one knew about…before. Not that I really thought they’d turn on me if they did. I just preferred my privacy. And I wasn’t sure I could look Leo in the eyes again. But it turned out that the classes I needed were the ones he was in and my need to be challenged outweighed my need to avoid him.

I’m not sure if I believe in Divine intervention now, but I definitely didn’t believe in it then. So when I arrived at the gym to find it locked, a sign on the door saying something about a plumbing issue and “sorry for the inconvenience,” I was not expecting that to be more than a passing frustration.

As I turned to leave, Leo was arriving. Just my luck. “Closed,” I said with a shrug, as I continued to walk past him. I heard him curse but I kept walking and kept my head down, trying not to encourage conversation.

“Hey, wait!” he called. “I have something for you.”

Of course, he did. I stopped but didn’t turn around, taking a deep breath and trying to arrange my features into anything besides a scowl. He reached me as I finally managed something resembling an expression of neutral curiosity.

“I wanted to give this to you at the coffee shop, but it got shuffled in with some papers I had and I couldn’t find it,” he said, handing me a gift card to the coffee shop.

“Oh,” I said, “Thanks but you didn’t need to do this.”

“Hey, you earned it. A good coffee shop is invaluable. There’s another one in it for you when I get my exam results, assuming I passed. I felt good about it, anyway.

“OK, well. Thanks.”

“Sure. Hey, since we aren’t getting in a class tonight, do you want to do a rage room with me? They usually have same-day bookings during the week and I don’t feel like going alone. It’s a great way to let off steam and build up a sweat. And it’s a different vibe to class.”

“I…uh…” I couldn’t think of an excuse not to. Too many unexpected things had happened in a very few minutes without me having a chance to process them, so I heard myself saying, “OK,” before I had consciously decided to do it.

“Great!” he tapped his phone a few times. “We’re booked for 6:30 which will just give us time to get there if we leave now.”

Leo drove and I left my car in the gym parking lot, wondering what possessed me to accept this bizarre invitation. Meanwhile, he was going on about what to expect while I gazed out the window only half-listening. We got to the place, signed the forms, bought a few extra things to wreck, put on our safety gear, and entered the room. Leo paused and turned to me. “This is so much better if you have something specific you want to rage about. You can pick anything, people, politics, fate, health, whatever. And then each thing you wreck becomes that.” I probably looked as skeptical as I felt because he grinned and said, “Trust me, you’ll see.” Then he turned around, grabbed a baseball bat, and got to it.

I picked up a bat of my own and half-heartedly decided the first few bottles would represent Leo for cornering me into coming to this thing. Cornering me into talking. Smash. That felt good. How dare he make me reveal something of myself that I wasn’t ready to talk about? Smash. How dare he act like it was no big deal to talk about it? Smash. SmashSmash. How dare he not know? Smash. How dare he act like my friend? Smash. Smash. Smash. I didn’t have friends. Smash. Who needed friends anyway? Smash.

I moved to the stack of dinner plates and dropped the bat, picking up a plate in each hand.

Friends were fake. ThrowCrash. They lied. ThrowCrash. They let you believe you were good at things when it was clear that you weren’t. ThrowThrowCrashCrash. They let you embarrass yourself for years and never said a word. CrashCrashCrashCrashCrash.

I threw the rest of the plates on the floor and found the bat again, heading for the old-fashioned TV.

Bang. Friends let you believe you were worth something. Bang. That you could be somebody. BangBam. That you had something of value to offer the world BamBangBam. What did they know? BamBamBamBamBangBang.

They didn’t know anything. I didn’t know anything. The doctor didn’t know anything. Nothing fucking mattered. Nothing was… I was nothing. IWasNothing. IWASNOTHING!

I was shaking. Panting. Drenched in sweat. Not sure how much time had passed. My throat was raw from screaming, my hands clenched so tightly around the baseball bat that I couldn’t let go even though I was out of things to smash. I had tears running down my face. And then someone was gently prying the bat from my hands. It was Leo, looking at me with so much understanding. “I know a place,” he said. “Come on.”

An hour later, we sat in a clearing in the woods. I felt drained physically, emotionally, and mentally, yet something had eased in my chest and I felt lighter than I had in what felt like millennia. We hadn’t spoken since we left the rage room, but the silence wasn’t awkward. Or maybe I was too fatigued to notice.  

“I did that once,” he said. “Like you did tonight at the rage room. Only I was at home, so it was much worse. I didn’t hurt anyone. Not physically, anyway. But it’s why I train so hard, why I knew where the rage room was, why I hike at weekends which is how I found this place. It’s why I thought you might have needed to go tonight. So… you don’t have to talk about it unless you want to. But the talking helps when you’re ready.”

I was so tired. Tired of hiding, of holding back, of loneliness, and fear. And so I told him everything. I told him about the diagnosis and the stuck words and Sam and my friends and what all of it meant about who I am and why I shouldn’t tell stories.

When I finished, he didn’t say anything for a while. And then… it took me a long time to understand the full impact of what he said to me. But here’s how I remember it:

He said, “It seems to me that you’re still telling stories. You’re just telling them to yourself. Maybe you’re afraid of telling them to others because you don’t want them to challenge your worldview. I couldn’t say; only you know. But I think it’s time you start listening to yourself again. Listen, but don’t believe yourself. Listen, and cross-examine. Challenge the stories you hear. No one else gets to tell you who you are. And no diagnosis has that power either. Before your diagnosis, you were a storyteller, a writer, a speaker. The diagnosis didn’t take that away from you, you denied it to yourself because… I don’t know maybe you decided you didn’t deserve it — that you were unworthy of the fulfillment it brought you. But… there’s this quote from an episode of Doctor Who (I know, I’m a big nerd). Anyway, the 11th Doctor says, ‘We’re all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?’ I’ve always taken that to mean that we all get to decide how we shape the narrative around the challenges we face. We don’t get to choose the challenges. But we can choose whether to use them to tell a story of triumph or defeat.

“I’ve seen you. You go to that gym every day, sometimes twice a day, and you learn what it takes to fight. You learn how to get yourself out of situations where you’re pinned when someone else has the upper hand. You learn how to take back your power, physically. You learn that you’re only defeated when you give up. Don’t leave those lessons on the mat or in the cage. They work best when they become your way of being. Use them. Your opponent is the stories you tell yourself of how you’re ‘trapped,’ how you ‘can’t,’ or ‘shouldn’t,’ or ‘how shameful.’ Your opponent is every story of defeat you’ve ever believed.

“You’re a writer,” he said. “Write yourself a new story.”

And I did. It wasn’t easy and it didn’t happen overnight. I had to confront a lot of things I’d learned about what it meant to have ADHD and get treatment for it. I had to learn to work with my neurological differences instead of fighting or ignoring them, which meant I had to go through lots of frustrating trial and error to create systems that worked for me. I still have to audit them and make adjustments. ADHD brains love variety so I have to change things up to keep myself engaged with the process. But I’ve found ways to manage so that I thrive. I was able to repair relationships with some, but not all, of the friends that I lost during that time, and I forged new friendships with other neurodivergent people. Leo and I are still in touch, and I thank him at the top of the acknowledgments page of each novel, short story, and screenplay I publish.

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Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All the names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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