“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it to yourself or to someone else.”-Margaret Atwood
* * *
Dear Storytellers,
That’s you. That’s everyone. It’s the man you hurriedly passed on Front Street and the woman next to you in the line at the Post Office. It’s that student in your class who doesn’t say a word and that customer who keeps you talking an hour after they’ve made their purchase. Those storytellers.
And now is when you begin to think:
Me? A storyteller? But what story do I have to tell?
You go a step further and think what many people have said to me:
But I haven’t lived anything special. I’ve lived an ordinary life.
Well, then.
Tell what it’s like to fall on the ice, to fall in love, to fall to rock bottom. What about that time you lost your wallet? Or that other time you lost yourself? What happened on the day you’ll never forget and on the day you’d do anything to forget? Tell what it felt like to catch your first fish or to catch up with an old friend.
I will not beg you to tell your story, it is yours, after all.There may be memories too painful to relive, secrets you’re taking to the grave. Maybe you enjoy the peacefulness of privacy and revel in the power of silence. I can understand that.
Even I, a sharer of too many things and a keeper of very few of my own secrets, know when to hold a story for myself. How magical it is to revisit a memory in my mind and my mind alone, free of the twists and distortions of retelling and re-creation.
So, for those reasons, and certainly more, I will not beg you to tell your story. But I will beg you to remember this:
Your life is extraordinary solely because you are the only one in this entire world who has lived it exactly as you have.
So let’s say you share it. And you’re speaking the words aloud and you begin to realize things about yourself and your life that you’ve never noticed before. And maybe someone will hear your story because you were brave enough to share it, and your words will reverberate in their ears and resonate deeply within them. Maybe they live next door, or maybe they live across the globe, but they see a piece of their existence wound and woven into yours, and suddenly they don’t feel so alone.
It could be that your story makes people think in ways they never have before, maybe it inspires them, maybe it answers some long-standing questions they’ve been pondering. Or maybe it just makes them laugh on a really bad day. That’s a good enough story for me.
So I ask you, not as a story collector but as a fellow human being:
Share the stories you can. Keep the stories you’re not ready to release yet. Share the stories that have been waiting timidly on the tip of your tongue. Share the stories you may not know you have. Shout them from the rooftops, across the frozen sea. Write them down and give them to a loved one. Tell a really bad story. Tell it again. Okay, maybe try it with a different crowd. Share what you have learned and what you still want to learn. Tell what you want the world to know, the story you want to outlive you.
Here’s to a world of greater understanding and compassion built by storytellers. That’s you. That’s everyone.
Sincerely, Kristin
P.S. And if you feel like sharing a story with me, any story at all, email story49@knom.org
