sharing stories
My best asset as an educator is the desire I possess to guiding my students to discovering their voice so that they are in the best position possible to share not only their story, but anyone's. I find myself most attracted to the story of something - kind of like that one Friends episode where Phoebe hates Pottery Barn (wth?!) and only wants pieces of furniture that have a story, so Rachel goes and makes up fake stories for their new furniture. Yeah, I'm like that but not like that about my furniture.
I prefer TV shows where you hear people's authentic story: America's Got Talent, World of Dance, America Ninja Warrior, The Voice. In addition to hearing individual story after story, you get to be a part of their journey as you watch and support them.
My boyfriend and I recently touched on the topic of the "great American story", and how that concept has driven some writers mad, how he once dreamt of crafting such a tale (me too, but I didn't tell him during that conversation), and how now the great American novel would have to incorporate every single culture that exists as that what the root of our country truly is. Which means that there is no way it is even possible to craft such a tale. But that led me to the question: is it the specific cultural influences that define our story or is it greater than that?
The value of a story is that the impact is immeasurable. Yeah, that's right. I'm saying that the more you lose the ability to measure the influence a story has on a person, a group of people, a school, a city, a nation, the world, a generation, human civilization, the higher the importance of the story. Therefore, we must share our stories.
But before we can share, we must understand ourself at our core in order to properly articulate our own experiences to the masses. We must not take for granted the way I rode to school with a parent every day from Kindergarten to ninth grade, that my mom would drop me off in the back of the school house when I was in pre-K because we lived in a safe small town, that I attended and graduated high school for free in America, that I grew up with divorced parents, that my step-father was more than his brain tumor he was and is my hero, that I am more my mom than I think my mom ever imagined I could be, that I lost my spiritual footing after my step-dad passed but I never quit asking questions and God never stopped answering them, that my biological father is mesmorized by only materialism, that people I trusted in my adolescents disappointed me, but that I knew I was always loved deep down inside.
Time spent with yourself in a reflective place and state is an activity getting lost in the shuffle of progression. When without self-reflection, all the gains we make as a society can be lost. Sitting with intentional breath on the rug of my den tonight, way late after Chili's and half a milkshake, I focused my everything on my breath, on grounding myself down, on feeling the support of the earth underneath me, and releasing the tension while acknowledging it's potential power to have lived within me and disrupted my efforts on this journey forward.
Every story matters.