All my life I’ve dealt with words. I live in a world of stories. Stories are not replicable because our lives are unique, which gives us value and meaning. Yet, as each story is told, we also learn what makes us similar, what connects us all, what helps us transcend that isolation—which authors say, separates us from others and ourselves—conquer loneliness, the hidden wound of our time.
Real stories take time. They take that sort of time called, pausing time, reflecting time, wondering time. We listen to other people’s stories and try to remember how the real world is made of such stories and perhaps how life is teaching us to live.
In my work, I find that there are soul stories, where you find hope and wisdom to live a life worth remembering. Sometimes we draw meaning from someone’s story. Facts will bring us to knowledge, but stories lead us to wisdom.
Storytellers have the gift to see beyond the veil of our beliefs, expectations and judgment of ourselves and others.
Most of the stories we are told are written by novelists and screenwriters in the movies, acted out by actors. These are stories that have beginnings and endings, and stories that are not real.
When we tell our own stories to one another they have no beginnings and endings, but front row seats to real experience. They may have happened in a different time or place, and have a familiar tone because they are about us.
Real stories take time—to pause, reflect and wonder—as life rushes along. Stories are about the same thing—of having and losing, of pain and wounding, of courage and hope, of healing and loneliness, and the end of loneliness.
Through the years, we cobble our stories and realize that in telling them, we are telling each other narratives that touch us, weaved through common humanness.
Sometimes during interviews, when I ask people to tell me their stories, they tell me about their achievements. What they’ve acquired or built over the years are their achievements. Our open story is about who we are, not what we have done. It is about what we are faced to build, not what we have built. It is what we’ve drawn open and rocked to do. It is what we have felt, thought, feared and delivered through the events of our lives.
All stories are equally genuine. It is about their experience of the event in their lives. They are not just the events themselves, but how they are seen, in our own unique ways. Truth becomes highly subjective.
As a crime reporter for years, I’ve learned that stories can sometimes be full of biases and uniqueness, mixing facts with meaning. Many times, the meaning we draw from someone’s story, may be different from the stories they have drawn for themselves.
We carry with us every story we have heard, filed at some deep place in our memory. The best stories have many meanings, their meanings change us. It requires having a personal response to life.
The best stories have many meanings, which change as our capacity to understand and appreciate grows. Is it possible to live life without experiencing it?
After 30 years of being a congenital unemployable in newspapering (to this day, I can’t write straight news) and 11 years of living my own life with threatening illness, I too, am a woman who is full of stories.
These are stories I have lived and stories I have been told—my stories about being a daughter, a granddaughter, an indomitable widow and a friend.
Every one of those stories has helped me to live.
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E-mail Mylah at [email protected]