Field Guide for Being Human
Story
Who are you without your story?
Who are you without the wound?
Without the abandonment?
Without the identity you’ve built around what happened to you?
When Brenda Littleton asked me those questions, I realized we weren’t just talking about writing. We were talking about how we become who we are.
As a writer and podcaster, I have found that stories are my creative motivator. I have spent part of my life believing that stories explain who we are. Later in life, I realized I was not my story. I was so much more. So how do stories heal us, define us, and create the world around us?
Brenda Littleton, a Jungian therapist, writer, and coach, has spent years helping people move beyond the familiar labels they use to explain themselves, listening instead for the deeper story the psyche is trying to tell.
The more we talked, the more we realized this couldn't be a single conversation. It became the beginning of a bimonthly series exploring story from different perspectives.
The lifelong question: Who are we? Has shaped our lives through the stories we tell ourselves. But how do we reconcile the positive and negative aspects of our internal storytelling? At some point in this conversation, another possibility emerged. Perhaps story isn’t something we’re meant to cling to or erase, either. Maybe it’s a living relationship.
As we talked about memoir, dreams, trauma, and writing, I realized something I hadn’t understood before. The events of our lives may never change, but our relationship to them does. New perspectives appear. Hidden patterns emerge. What once felt like the whole truth becomes only one chapter.
For me, that realization has become especially important as I write my memoir.
I thought I was documenting a life. Instead, the writing is revealing a life.
The deeper I go, the more I discover that writing isn’t simply remembering. It is also listening. Every draft asks another question. Every revision uncovers another layer. The page becomes less a record of the past and more a place where memory, imagination, body, and soul begin speaking to one another.
That may be the real gift of story. Not that it tells us who we have been. But that it keeps asking who we are becoming. This conversation is the first in what I hope will be a long exploration with Brenda. Neither of us is trying to reach final conclusions. We are far more interested in living inside the questions. Perhaps every worthwhile story begins there.
Thank you for reading. Listen to the conversation on Friday, the 31st. Listen on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify!
Gratefully,
Hilary
Photo by Nong - Unsplash
Sometimes I wonder if I do manage to understand and/or resolve it will I lose the edge my voice has?
Stories are everything to me. They were my bane and they rescued me.
Stories are living things. They evolve as they pass from one person to another, shaped by memory, experience, and the needs of the moment. I often think about the traveling bards who moved from village to village carrying the news. They told stories of battles, kings, harvests, births, and losses. Information wasn't delivered in song nd story. It was how communities understood the world around them. There was a responsibility to get the news to the next community.