Withdrawal Play
Through song and dance, drama and comedy, Paul Performs his true story about being wrongly prescribed anti-psychotics, bouncing him from being a threat to society to fantasied of flying with sparrows.
Marching Orders
Recreating his links with Blacks from when he was a toddler and into his 30s, Paul then acts out scenes of his reuniting much later in life with the Black community—through marching to get jail time for the racist cop who assassinated 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.
Thank You For My Bus Ride, Rosa Parks
If not for Rosa Parks, I wouldn’t have had such feelings for my fellow man.
Paul Meyer
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3–5 minutes
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December 22, 2025
Eyelids half closed, a wiry man in his sixties angles toward me. Dropping into the aisle seat at my side, his landing seeming to slam shut his lids, he leans into my shoulder.
Absorbing Race, Religion, and Politics at Three
I realize Grampa had to walk a fine line in a Jim Crow Houston
Paul Meyer
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1-2 minutes
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December 12, 2025
“Today he cut up with scissors the sleeves on Gammy’s dress and got into the habit of breaking Coca Cola bottles,” writes my single working mom in her diary.
On strengthening your inner stories: from jumping in to reading up
to just observing
If you’d like to dive right into discovering your own inner stories, consider the path I took that landed me in a room full of strangers for a rollicking fun time in Improv Comedy.
While empathy and self-exploration are not the stated goals of improv, these emotions are the foundations of high-speed exchanges between two or more students based on varied scenes the instructor throws to you.
At the end of my final improv class at The Second City, a photographer told us to gather for a shot that took us a mere four seconds to move into position as per these two photos. That’s how quickly collaborative we were.
Many people take improv not only for the fun of it, but for professional growth. Companies send employees for a full complement of improv classes to think better on their feet with clients. (One of my classmates took all five levels of improv to help her sell a major hospital on putting their systems on the Cloud.)
Classes can be found throughout the world by Googling Improv Classes + where you live—be it a major city or small town.
And if you can’t work classes into your schedule, Amy Poehler to your rescue. Her online MasterClass in improv is “to deal with the everyday humanness of life,” as she puts it. Which you can take at home, during your lunch break, any time.
Not your comfort zone?
Then read all about it. Inner stories are the subjects of countless recent articles like Christina Wong’s The Transformative Power of Rewriting Our Inner Stories;
Psychology Today’s The two kinds of stories we tell about ourselves, How Inner Monologues Work, and Who Has them and The 3 Stories of You: The Personal, Hidden, and Unknown Self.
Then there is Counseling Today’s Yes, and … improv can be therapeutic. The “Yes, and” is incidentally the mainstay of Improv comedy classes.
Plus Kindra Hall’s Choose Your Story, Change Your Life: Silence Your Inner Critic and Rewrite Your Life from the Inside; or What are the inner stories that you tell yourself when you are faced with a difficult decision? by Amanda Sloan and Leonie Corcoran; and Carla Rieger’s REWRITE YOUR INNER STORY: Using Narrative to Reimagine Your Life.
And if you’re feeling bookish, check out the Elton John-endorsed book, Inner Story: Understand your mind. Change your world by award-winning psychologist Dr. Tim O’Brien,
Also David Brooks’s How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing a Person Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, which delves into one’s “inner voice”; and Kindra Hall’s Choose Your Story, Change Your Life: Silence Your Inner Critic and Rewrite Your Life from the Inside.
Like to just observe for now?
Inner stories have long been the subject of movies, from the 1946 classic The Best Years of Our Lives to the Inside Out and Inside Out 2 blockbusters that inspect the emotional “inner workings of the mind” say Harvard Brain Science Researchers. The list is infinite.
Inner stories are the driving forces of songs like Taylor Swift’s Mirror Ball, Dashboard Confessional’s Again I Go Unnoticed, Sir Paul McCartney’s Black Bird; and are the mainstays of Blues, Country, Opera.
Their popularity is borne of their touching our inner stories, bringing them to the surface so that we may inspect them. Own them. And be strengthened by them.
Recognition and Range of Paul’s Inner Stories
Paul Meyer is the recipient of United Nations Women’s Gender Equality Award for his Chicago Memoir Theater; and is a member of UN Women’s Global HeForShe Solidarity Movement.
The nonprofit Step Up for Mental Health has lauded Paul’s Withdrawal Play about his 15-year battle with misdiagnosed anti-psychotics.
His body of inner-story plays have been staged before sellout audiences, and seen by thousands throughout the U.S. and abroad through Paul’s live performances and YouTube.
He is a contributing essayist for Medium Magazine, which draws 80 million monthly readers worldwide; and The Good Men Project, a magazine hailed by Ms. Magazine as “what enlightened masculinity might look like in the 21st century.”
Paul’s PBS primetime special Satellite on the Sea, revealing the inner stories of blue collar workers on an oil rig in the Atlantic Ocean, initiated his writing and producing biographical documentaries. Which additionally include The life and Times of O. Henry; The Nolan Ryan Story; and four Building of a Nation multimedia films celebrating Singapore’s quarter century as a democracy, seen by 2.4 million Singaporeans.
Degrees in Journalism and Radio-TV-Film from the University of Texas at Austin led him to use wide-ranging media to disseminate his inner stories. Paul’s training at The Second City, Chicago Dramatists, and iO Theater in 2015 led him in 2016 to his first professional inner-story staging; and in 2018 to founding his Chicago Memoir Theater company. He is a member of the International Association of Creative and Performing Artists (IACPA), and the Authors Guild.
Paul and his wife live in Chicago.