The Importance of Telling Your Story
Why would you tell your story when those around you aren’t interested in hearing it or are actively against you even being interested in it?
Imagine a little kid who saw a man come into the house one night and steal the family dog. Imagine that the family builds a story that the dog ran away, and the family puts signs all over town saying lost dog. Imagine telling your family about the man, about his red hair, the tattoo of a snake across his face. Imagine the family handing you a stack of fliers, telling you that nightmares happen, and that it’s time for you to focus on what’s going on in reality and help recover the dog. Imagine the little kid draws a picture of the man picking up Spot and gives it to his mother. Imagine the mother crying, saying “Please don’t do this to me. This is too sad.” Imagine the little kid at school, unable to focus on his work because he keeps thinking about the snake, about Spot being with a stranger. Imagine the little boy crying. Imagine the little boy in the nurses office, telling the nurse about the strange man and Spot. Imagine the nurse calling the boy’s parents. Imagine the nurse nodding on the phone. Imagine the nurse explaining to the boy that sometimes pets run away and that it doesn’t mean Spot didn’t love the boy. It just means Spot was doing what dogs do.
The boy thinks he might die. His most favorite pet is with a man who didn’t smile. The boy stops smiling. The boy becomes a robot.
Twenty-five years later, the boy sees a man with a snake tattooed on his arm. The boy who is now a man himself starts to shake. The boy who is now a man is a tough guy, a trouble-maker. He doesn’t have many friends; he burns through girlfriends. People tell him he is made of ice. But all of a sudden the ice is cracking and, yet again, the boy who feels like a man feels like he is going to die.
He is sitting on a bus, crying, and the woman sitting next to him touches him on the arm and says, “Are you okay?” The boy who is now a man normally wouldn’t even answer, but this time words come out of his body without his control. “When I was a little boy a man came into our house and stole my dog and no one believed me. They say he ran away. But I saw the man. And they didn’t believe me and I never saw my dog again.”
The woman has tears in her eyes. The boy who is now a man looks at the woman’s eyes, her tears and he feels like a fist that opens too fast, too all of a sudden to hold whatever it was gripping. This does not feel safe yet it also feels like what his body is supposed to do. He starts to sob. “I’m sorry,” he whispers to the woman through his teary mouth.
“I’m sorry they didn’t listen to you,” she said. “You must miss your dog so much.”
“He was mine. He was my dog,” the boy who is now a man cried. “They should have listened to me. We could have told the police.”
The woman has tears running down her face, too. “Yes,” she says. “They should have listened. What happened was real.”
The woman dug into her purse and pulled out her wallet. “Here’s my card,” she said. “You could really use someone to hear the whole story.”
The man read the card. He read the word “therapist”.
“Do you take insurance?” he asked.
“I don’t,” she said. “The paperwork is a nightmare. But you are worth the money. Get another job if you have to, but come see me if you can.”
If you and I were a magic fairy in this story, more than likely we’d be whispering in the boy’s ear, “Tell one more person. Go to the police station yourself. Ask to talk to the principal at your school. Go to your grandparents. Keep talking. Keep drawing. Insist on your story.” Without the support, our stories can easily knot inside of us, pulling us into our selves, making us less flexible, less free, and increasingly uncomfortable as time goes on. In some ways, our stories are like our breath. Hold them in for too long, and you die.
The key word is circulation. Life is about movement. Stagnation leads to boredom and then death. You tell your story because our stories need witnesses. A story held in the body is a form of stagnation. A story shared is life circulating. You owe it to yourself to keep moving, to keep the stories that are inside you connecting you to others. If the people you know don’t like your stories, find new people and/or take a storytelling class to find out if you are an unskilled storyteller and need to brush up on your techniques. Maybe you tell stories the way your father did even though he bored you to tears. There is a craft to storytelling after all—to being aware of your audience, to engaging them instead of putting them to sleep.
The boy who was now a man could have just as easily sat next to an old friend or a kind stranger who did not earn a living by listening to people’s stories, but our hero stumbled on an amazing opportunity for growth and healing, and I’m happy to tell you that he cut out drinking two lattes a day at Starbucks and used the money to buy himself some therapy.
And he got a dog.
(Later, the boy who was now a man would read about the hero’s adventure, and he’d see that when a hero is called and begins to follow his journey, invisible (or not so invisible) hands appear to help. Just because they don’t give away their work for free doesn’t mean magic still isn’t involved.)
