Our Stories Matter
Julie and Niles, May 24, 2023
I am fortunate. I can’t say that enough. I am lucky, charmed even. I get to listen to people’s stories almost every single day. Just last night, I was sitting on Zoom in a sacred Circle with 4 brave women listening as they told the stories of their past week. And something happened - something that happens a lot. One of these miraculous beings determined that something about her story of the past week wasn’t quite worth listening to. She rushed through, said something like, “anyway…”, and muted.
I wish this was uncommon, but like I said, it happens a lot.
So many people I meet, and I’ll be honest, most of them are women and minorities, squash their stories. They put a lid on their big, life stories, and they shove the smaller stories about their day, their lunch break, their romantic dinner, or their trip to the gynecologist into tiny jars that sit on a secret shelf like little fetal pigs in jars of fermaldehyde. These stories are just not enough; they’re not important. Or perhaps they’re not quite accurate or fair or right. Or maybe they’re too much, too big, or too damn breathtaking.
Whatever the reason, they, the stories, and the storyteller, get edited - paragraphs are cut out, words deleted, whole chapters burned. Sometimes entire stories are banned.
I feel so sad when I witness it.
And.
I do it myself. Often.
I am, right this very minute, fighting the urge to shelve a story. The strange thing is, I’ve told it before. I can SAY this story out loud, but I’ve been driven (for years) to find a way to really express this story. Saying it is easy, but something’s missing, and in my stronger, braver moments, I KNOW that it’s a story that deserves really sharing. I don’t want to set it back on that shelf in the cabinet of not-so-curiosities. And yet…
My memories are probably inaccurate.
It really doesn’t matter outside my own life.
It’s not that interesting.
I won’t get it right.
It’s not important in the grand scheme of things.
It’s really too big a thing. Too much.
It’s not enough of anything at all.
Here’s the thing. I have listened to thousands of stories over the years. Short stories, long stories, simple stories, complicated stories, happy stories, and brutally terrifying stories. I have witnessed people sputter, stutter, struggle, backpedal, edit, and burn their own stories right in the middle of the telling. And every story I’ve gotten to witness - whether they were told in full or cut down to a small, barely recognizable size, mattered.
And that’s where the little comic above comes from - my deep soul knowing that our stories matter.
This story that I’ve been laboring over matters. It deserves to be born into the world in a way that makes sense to me.
Your story. Your STORIES matter. Tell them. Let them be alive. Pull the stories that you’ve shelved out of the dusty cabinet and share them. Your stories are not crumbs to sweep under the carpet, and you, Storyteller, are not something to be shoved onto a cramped shelf with jars of murky liquid and other oddities. You are a wonder of Nature.
If you and I are fortunate enough to sit in space together, please grace me with your story. I want to witness it, and more than that, I want to witness you in the telling.