Describe yourself in one word: Storyteller.
I have this obsession with stories. What is so interesting to me is the why. Why did this person do this? What led them there? What were they thinking in that moment?
To be fair, I was born into a family of comedic storytellers. My Aunt Mo is probably the most hilarious person I’ve ever come in contact with. My mother and her siblings aren’t far behind. There are 11 of them still walking this green earth, all raised dirt poor on a farm in the middle of nowhere Ohio. Twelve kids, no money, one shared life, and somehow an endless supply of stories.
I spent the best times of my childhood huddled in rusty lawn chair circles or around a crowded kitchen listening to their hilarious tales of growing up dirt poor on that farm. The legendary stories involve pterodactyl beatings, glow in the dark footprints on the ceiling, endless summer baseball games, the end of a cigarette being shot off while driving, sheriffs chasing monkeys, cars ending up in the crick, my uncles being kidnapped, and so many more.
You’d think I’d tire of hearing them over and over again, but just this past Christmas I was once again entranced, along with 30 other family members, in a crowded kitchen. Aunt Mo has this hypnotic presence about her. She can quiet a room of hundreds with her stories. Her power is in her ability to take the most mundane or traumatic experiences and turn them into pure comedy.
From melting curling irons, to funerals in England, to wild tales about a sheriff who let prisoners out at 5pm only if they promised to return at 8am because he didn’t want to staff the jails overnight, she has millions of these stories stored up just waiting to be heard. The way she looks at the things that happen in her life, and how she teaches people through her stories, is magic.
The live advice she pulls from each of these stories should be written in the stars. Some of her pearls… in the life span of a marriage you only get 7 good years, and not all at once. And The point of pregnancy is to actually make you look forward to labor.
It’s therapy really. Comedic therapy.
It’s why I’m addicted to good storytelling. It can be life changing to hear a story from someone who has lived life. Because stories give us perspective, and perspective is not a dead idea. Through stories we gain perspective of others, how they think, how they justify things, how they survive, how they make sense of their circumstances. But only if we can hear them. Only if we are willing to slow down long enough to actually listen.
Here’s the problem I see. In this world of seeing everything through the lens of other people’s videos, who are the storytellers we are letting into our lives? Into our children’s lives?
You’ll have to forgive this middle aged mom who has the uncanny ability to make every teen she lives with cringe, but for the past 2 months I’ve immersed myself into social media in a way I’ve never done before. I’m following top creators and seeing videos that go viral and that my kids think are so cool. But I keep thinking to myself… what are these people actually doing? What are these people actually saying? And for the love of all things holy… how many video game videos and makeup tutorials can even exist?
What stories are we ingesting? Where are the life lessons here? For the most part social media feels fake and inauthentic. What are these people even saying?
But that’s through my life lens as a 46 year old who has been through the sh*t. I hate to say this but my 14 year old self would have been enamoured with this crap. My 20 year old self would have probably believed most of what is out there today. Not because I was stupid but because I lacked a pre frontal cortex and the life experience to be able to audit what is in front of me.
In your early years you are absorbing everything. You are influenced, shaped, and sometimes quietly coerced by whatever voices are loudest around you, and you don’t even realize it because you don’t yet have the distance or the experience to question it.
Probably one of the most challenging things for me to see right now is this enormous influential power that has been given to 20 and 30 year olds. I mean Jesus… had I been given a platform at that age what would I have even said? Talk about cringe. The thing is at that age you are so reliant on what other people tell you to believe. You aren’t old enough to have actually lived through enough scenarios to have any kind of real belief system.
And before you get all hot in the pants hear me out. There are things I wish I could go back and tell myself. Things that would have made me more aware of my surroundings and the influences I was ingesting. There is no shade here, just perspective. Your own life experiences and the life experiences of others will shape you in ways your 20 or 30 year old self can’t even comprehend.
That’s what makes you smart. Not your age, not your confidence, not how loud your voice is. It’s how many stories you’ve lived and how many stories you’ve truly heard.
Now I really sound like an old lady, lol. But I’m asking you… do you think we are robbing ourselves of those critical life changing stories and experiences that shape us as humans by consuming so much online? Or is it the opposite? The more we see, the more we understand what we want to do?
This weekend I saw a video of a guy who deleted all of his social media accounts after watching a guy post about summiting Mt Everest. He did it because it didn’t feel fair. The climber had to climb over dead bodies to get to the peak to take that video, and here he was seeing the same view from his couch.
That story, coupled with the hundreds of others I scrolled this weekend, got me thinking. In a world where everything is at our fingertips and AI is curating our digital experiences, are we about to lose the real stories that shape us?
Aunt Mo’s stories have so much to teach us because they actually happened. We can learn where people came from, how they lived, how they thought about their circumstances.
And I’m just having a moment here, but if stories are powerful, what is the point of the ones that are curated for content and clicks? Mind control? Zombie mobs just consuming poison for profit? Ekkkk.
I can’t help but think about that movie Wall-E. You know, the one with all the people floating around in chairs, glued to screens, living on a spaceship because they completely trashed the Earth and handed over control to an autopilot system run by an evil corporation.
They’re overweight, disconnected, and completely absorbed in consumption. They don’t talk to each other. They don’t even realize what they’ve lost.
And then there’s that moment when they start to wake up. They try to stand. They try to walk. They start to see what’s actually happening around them, and you realize they’ve been lied to for a long time about what it means to be human.
That part sticks with me.
Because it’s not really about robots or space. It’s about what happens when we trade real experiences for passive consumption. When we stop questioning what we’re being fed. When we confuse access with understanding.
And I know that sounds dramatic, but… is it?
Because if we are constantly consuming stories that are designed to keep our attention, sell us something, or shape how we think without us even realizing it… what are we actually becoming?
And more importantly… what are we losing?
Maybe that’s the difference. Maybe that’s the whole point.
Stories are powerful. But only when they are real.
~Christy
0 comments