When we tell a story
When we tell a story
Learning to receive and carry the tales of others
“We all live in a network of stories. There isn’t a stronger connection between people than storytelling.” — Jimmy Neil Smith, Director of the International Storytelling Center
If you had asked me whether I come from storytellers, I would, at first blush, have said no, not really. My mom had an English degree but ended up in banking. My dad has always been in some form of sales. Neither is, technically, a writer or storyteller in any official sense.
But then, in a dozen other senses—come to think of it—yes, yes, I do come from storytellers, long lines of them I’m sure. And don’t we all?
What does a salesman do if not tell you a story? A good one spins a tale so sweeping that you get caught up inside of its cyclone, imagining how a new product or service will change your life or business for the better. A good salesman studies his client, perceiving and anticipating his needs before he’s even felt the sting of them. I could, actually, use a new truck bed, the landscaper thinks as my dad flicks through pictures of the glossy-painted ones in his shop. My dad is a studier of people, an excellent salesman. A storyteller.
And, the more I think about it, my mom was not just a storyteller; she was almost always the narrator. There wasn’t a vacation she couldn’t make sound more dramatic or more exciting in her retelling of it. To hear Mom talk about it, Wichita, Kansas had the world’s best zoo, Lebanese food and people, through and through. It’s hard to say whether the memories of my childhood are actually my memories or hers, so often did I hear her retelling the way they unfolded. “Have I told you how your mom couldn’t blow her nose until she was five years old?” she’d tell my kids, and I’d roll my eyes in anticipation of the skit that would unfold.
Whether we realize it or not, we are all living in and living on stories. They sustain us, they make sense of us—and we have an irresistible propensity to share them. Yet, I have often been conflicted about the way I tell stories, the way we all can or should use them to relate to one another.
If someone tells a story and I see a glimmer of my own in it, is it trumping them to follow up by telling it? Does it seem like I’m one-upping or overshadowing when I’m actually desperate to simply say, “Me too!”? Perhaps all I need to say is, in fact, “Me too,” and hold off on taking the stage. How often have I had this thought after a coffee date with a quiet friend. Should I have simply listened instead of letting my words fill every empty cranny of our conversation?
But I’m beginning to have some new perspective on this—or, at least, some new opportunities to grow in this area. The book I’ve written on how losing loved ones transforms us isn’t out yet, but already it’s doing the thing I anticipate it will do more of: inviting the stories of others.
When I tell people what the book’s about—and if they’ve experienced loss in their own life—they intuitively share their “me too” with me, their story of how its shaped them. This happens in the oddest of places, of course. Work meetings. Neighborhood walks. Haven’t-seen-you-in-a-while run-ins. And suddenly, here I am, in the middle of the grocery store or the street, receiving the weight of someone’s story—the brother who recently died, the mother who got the dreaded diagnosis, the baby who did not live outside the womb.
What weighty, precious stories. What gifts that I could—on my busiest, most distracted days—easily mistake for burdens. I don’t feel at all ready to carry them as well as I should. But this is something I am preparing to do, something that I want to learn to do better.
Abbey Wedgeworth, who wrote a beautiful book to help people navigate the loss of miscarriage, warned me when I met her at a conference last year that this might happen. Her book had been out for a while, and the stories were still pouring in. Readers wanted to encourage her by telling her how the book had encouraged them. But, to do that, they needed to share what they’d lost, what they’d witnessed, what her words had meant in their immediate context. It can be a lot to carry, Abbey said, and it shouldn’t be carried alone. She wisely encouraged me to find others who could pray for me and help me bear the burden in various ways as I also aim to tell a story of loss, and of redemption.
So, yes, I see the weight of this coming. I can feel it already, along with the need to carry it all to the only one who can bear it all.
“Even to your old age I am he,
and to gray hairs I will carry you.
I have made, and I will bear;
I will carry and will save.” — Isaiah 46:4
But I am also learning to see the gift of it, too.
I remember being desperate to tell my story, to bear witness to someone that this person was no longer here, and that I was no longer who I had been before. I wanted the world to hold still for a while, to stop moving so dizzyingly fast, to let me think and pause and process.
So what a mercy it was to me when a friend from church who had been there would hold still long enough to ask me a question and really hear the answer. “How are you doing?” she would say with earnestness in her eyes. She wasn’t checking a box; she was inviting me to make a story of my circumstances, even if I wasn’t sure what it was yet.
What if, by telling my story, I am automatically called to do this, too—to hold still and hold space for the stories of others?
I started praying a while back that God would make me less of a “Here I am” person and more of a “Here you are” one—someone who comes into a space and makes others feel seen, known, loved. Sometimes we do that by telling our stories. Yes, I long for someone to read my words and say, “me too,” to feel known, like Hagar, by the God who sees. But sometimes we make others feel seen and heard by, well, listening.
Here’s the problem: I am an extrovert who doesn’t like a lot of white space in a conversation. Listening well can be a duct-tape-my-mouth-please challenge for me. Often, I leave a conversation wondering if the other people might have said more if I had left a little more silence to be filled by someone else. I come from a line of storytellers, you see, and I love to tell them, too. But I’m almost always afraid that I’m simply talking too much, that my anxious filling of the air around me has taken up the room I should have reserved for others.
Herein is the gift and the challenge of writing and releasing a story: I have told mine already. I have written it down. If people want to read it or hear it, they can.
So, when someone comes up with a story of loss or of grief or of fear to tell in response to the one I’ve told, I don’t have to wonder if it’s my turn to talk. I don’t have to say “Me too.” I’ve already said enough. Now—Lord help me—I can simply listen.
Speaking of stories, I wrote a piece for Risen Motherhood to encourage those of us for whom Mother’s Day is a mixed bag—which is all of us, really. “Motherhood, after all, has always contained the capacity for great love alongside the prospect of great loss.” Read it here.
And, to all my fellow writers, extroverts and descendants of storytellers, tell me—do you ever struggle with being slow to speak and quick to listen? How do you know when it’s time to tell the story and when it’s time to receive the stories of others?
