Telling Stories

I don’t know about you but I have a habit of retelling stories. For the most part, my friends and loved ones tolerate me but they’re not always thrilled by the repetition and pressure to listen as if for the first time. This can bring up feelings of disappointment, embarrassment and even cause you to want to stay quiet. The experience got me thinking about what makes us tell the same stories over and over again. What do we get out of it?

Story-telling is an innate human need. Since the beginning of time, humans have told stories to warn of danger, celebrate victories and preserve important traditions and customs. We can even recall information better when it’s told as a story. 

We may tell stories to entertain each other, relive the emotions and thrill of a recent adventure or reconnect with feelings of tenderness when recalling moments spent with loved ones. 

A story I’ve had on repeat lately was a time in my senior year of high school when a beloved teacher accused me of plagiarism. When I shared a series of poems I wrote, she didn’t believe they were mine. She said they were too complex and mature to be written by a person my age. When she found out the poems were mine - well, you can imagine how surprised she was!

I thought about why I had been repeating this story lately and realized it helps me to remember something I used to enjoy doing; writing poetry. It’s also something others in my life told me I was good at. As a young person forming an identity, I desperately needed to know that I was good at something, anything. 

I haven’t written poetry in a long time. Mostly because I’m busy with other projects. But remembering the joy of writing and feeling reassured that I was good at something were reasons enough to retell this story. 

And that’s what we can do with the stories we tell. We can see what makes us want to revisit them time and time again. Do You have a favorite story that You retell often? Why do you enjoy telling this story? These questions can help you to learn more about yourself.

One way to flex your story-telling muscles is to carve out time for self-reflective writing or sharing regularly. 

Something to keep in mind when doing this is crafting what researcher Brady Jones calls competence-building narratives, where we recount both the successes and failures of our life through the lens of resilience and grit. We can think about how our inner resources like courage and compassion were strengthened by the way we handled failures and how we used these resources during important moments of our lives.  

You can do this with your stories. Think of a time you overcame an obstacle. What did you learn from the people around you? How did their example show you what to do or what NOT to do later in life? What do you want others to take away from your story? 

And finally, part of telling your stories is remembering the good times and the not-so-good-times. It’s okay to feel things like sadness, regret and loss when you recount certain things. And if those feelings are overwhelming, sometimes it helps to pause, take a few deep breaths, and even do a short meditation. I recommend the loving kindness practice in the Headspace app. Of course, if you need help processing difficult stories and memories, please don’t hesitate to reach out to a mental health provider.