External and Internal Currents

Note: As a head’s up, you can have external and internal helping currents as well as external and internal honing currents. I’m going to focus giving examples on the latter.

External Currents

External story currents are the ones that come from outside the character or the individual; this would include the death of the character/individual’s loved one or the reaction of other people to the character/individual’s grief.

In the first story, for example, the librarian stopped my younger self from finishing what I had to say about my grandfather’s death. That was a purely external current—without her intervention, I would have finished my story. It also underscores the point: a honing current feels personal, but it’s not.

It certainly felt personal when she stopped me from sharing a story, one that seemed completely normal in my world. As the only student she stopped, I was singled out. The actions she took were directed specifically at me, but what propelled her action—the cultural resistance around grief—is much larger than either of us. If she hadn’t stopped me, the other students might have returned home upset and told their parents about my story. Their parents, also driven by the same cultural resistance, might have called the principal to complain, causing problems for the school.

The librarian acted as the culture required her to act, and I learned that I was different, honed into self-awareness by an uncomfortable experience.

Internal Currents

Internal story currents come from inside the character/individual. This includes the grief a person feels as well as the love that the character/individual had for the person who passed away.

In other words, some honing currents exist inside you though they may have only existed outside you. Doubt is a great example. In Of Witches and Wind, I wrote, “Doubts can conquer a person more quickly than an army. If you know yours, you can conquer them instead.” This process of confronting your doubt so that you can move past it is an internal story current which hones the main character’s resilience throughout that book, and like that character and everyone else I know, I’ve lived that experience myself.

After the experience with the librarian, I internalized what my culture said about grief. I didn’t believe it completely, but I believed it enough to give me pause. That means that the honing current, which had first only existed outside of me in elementary school, had reached inside me and taken root there.

When you live inside a culture which reinforces the same idea over and over, you can start to believe it. You may not believe it 100%, but a part of you wonders, If I’m the only one in the room that believes differently, whose perception is right? Theirs or mine? When you start to answer, Theirs, we call this condition internalization. By the time I was a teenager, the librarian’s attitude existed inside me too, so that I also resisted talking about grief. I’d seen enough people (outside of my family, at least) react to the subject of grief that I changed myself to match.

This is one of many doubts you can internalize from our culture. Consider too what our culture says about intelligence, success, wealth, race, religion, beauty, and many other topics. Maybe you might have changed yourself to match what you saw around you, or maybe changing yourself was unavailable—you just started to feel like something was wrong with you instead.

We internalize cultural beliefs all the time. We doubt quite a bit. An action may be directed at an individual, but what drives those actions is often collective, influenced by our entire culture. Because each collective is made of individuals, a person contributes to our culture through the way they participate in it. If you go with the flow, matching what you see around you, you participate in your culture the same as most people do. If you move against it, if you challenge it, treating it as a honing current, you strengthen your ability to change your culture by changing your individual contribution to it.

 That day in Sunday School, I confronted what I’d internalized, specifically the way my culture resists grief: I knew that no one was saying anything to Mark, and no one expected me to say anything either. I had the option to opt out of approaching him—going with the flow, like the other teens in the room—and I was tempted.

This internal current, pushing against me, honed my commitment. I reached out to Mark that day, and the same way you strengthen a muscle by exercising it, this made it easier to speak up again later when I saw grief in others I encountered.