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Reviewed: Stories (of Your Life and Others)


Stories (of Your Life and Others)

As a person, your biggest problem is usually other people. You are vulnerable to people, and also dependent on them. But imagine instead that you were a freshwater sardine, or rainforest. Your biggest problem is still people. You are still vulnerable to people, and dependent on them.

I think one of the biggest problems that we face as human beings is that we are stuck within ourselves. I will never know what it’s like to experience things in the way that they mean to you. I can only see you through the context of myself.

Stories, in that way, can serve as paths to empathy. It is only through stories that I can piece together and imagine the richness of your life, in the same way that I hope you may be able to glimpse mine. 

The school offers a graded module on storytelling. I’m mildly vexed at its credit-bearing structure, as it makes academic a personal pursuit that’s meant as a respite from that. But what it has also done is to make me more conceptually aware of stories. 

I don’t believe that every story requires a message or meaning behind it to be “worth” telling. What unsettles me about this convention is that it essentialises a person’s lived experience, and imagines it as merely a conduit for other motives or through which other people can learn lessons. Instead, the meaning of any lived experience is messy and complicated, and it’s more than just about learning lessons.

Stories don’t have to be grand and elaborate. They can just comprise the quiet human moments that we share in separately but together. Last week a friend called me because he knew that I was spiralling amid my work, and he said man I’m so sorry that things are this way and that sucks. Then he listened to me talk about it, and he believed me.

New York Times bestselling author John Green once said that stories can be a light in the way down darkness which is you. I can’t know what it’s like to have someone else’s pain, but I can listen to other people when they tell me of their pain. And I can believe them. In short, we validate each other. 

Stories help us feel unalone in our pain, and also share in our happiness. I give stories five stars. (Image by DALL•E 2)

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