The Stories We Tell To Ourselves

Writing Prompts from Along The Seam

For longer than I like I’ve been talking in trauma. My stories are grounded in grief; they are wrapped up in being widowed young or in my family’s Holocaust survival story. Everything about me is coated in this context and I find confirmation that this is my fated identity nearly every day. I don’t know if other people see me this way, but this is how I know my story. I’m the girl who can’t help but bring up world war at a party.

The first three episodes of the second season of Along The Seam podcast are about personal storytelling, and my guests—Micaela, Kenny, and Derrick—have been snapping me in and out of certain narratives of self.

Northport, Maine. April 2021. © Rachael Cerrotti

In episode one, Micaela Blei, a masterful live storyteller, makes the compelling case that we find connection with others in the small moments of life. She says that entertainment has taught us wrong. “We end up thinking that we have to earn the attention of someone else with our most sensational story. Either our best day or our worst day. That we owe it to people, that that's the rent we pay for their attention. And it's not true. It's not. That's not how human connection works.”

In episode two, community builder Kenny Andejeski illustrates how the stories we tell ourselves can perpetuate in a negative way. He says, “One of the framings or mantras that I hold for myself is that we become the stories we tell ourselves. And that is something that I’ve had a reckoning with lately.”

And on episode three, Reverend Derrick McQueen demands of us to dream: “Part of the reason why having dreams is important is because it helps you not to get bogged down in the craziness and the shit of this world. Because that will zap the dream out of you and you can't let it do it.”

Each of these conversations have left their mark, but the three of them echoing off of one another have put me in a healthy confrontation with myself. I’ve felt encouraged over the past few months to note the ordinary happenings in my life that make me feel close to others. And I’ve been reimagining and reframing the stories that aren’t serving me. Like, maybe I’m a more joyful addition to a group gathering than I think. And I’ve been trying to let myself dream freely because the world is exhausting and sometimes the best part of the day is imagining what good could lie ahead.

To get myself thinking deeper, I’ve pulled a piece of each of these conversations and developed a writing prompt from them. I hope you find them as compelling as I do, and if you feel inspired please share any responses in the comments. The full episodes are linked below. You can stream the show wherever you get your podcasts or find them on www.alongtheseam.com.

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Micaela Blei, PhD, has been teaching, studying and performing true, personal storytelling worldwide since 2012. She is a two-time Moth GrandSLAM winner and former founding Director of Education at The Moth. She’s currently the visiting professor of Storytelling at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine.

Rachael: Let's dig into the idea of true storytelling. It's something that we're all doing every day in every conversation we have… You've taught so many students from young third graders through adult education spaces. I'm wondering what you've experienced from a practical space of people mining their own stories. What do people struggle with in this process? And how do people succeed in doing that in a healthy, safe and also a community-driven way?

Micaela: A big job that I have when I first meet a group of storytellers… is undoing a lot of pretty damaging assumptions that we have about what is a story worth telling… Because we end up thinking that we have to earn the attention of someone else with our most sensational story. Either our best day or our worst day. That we owe it to people. That that's the rent we pay for their attention. And it's not true. It's not. That's not how human connection works. That's how entertainment works. But that's not how human connection works. And so one of the things that I hear most commonly from new storytellers is, well nothing's ever happened to me. Like, I don't know what I would tell about because nothing interesting has ever happened to me. Number one, that's actually objectively not true. But number two, what you think is your most interesting thing is not necessarily the thing that's going to connect you to the people listening to you. It's not necessarily going to be the thing that creates that thread and that bond… By telling our stories, we learn new things about ourselves. We construct. I think that we don't only discover our identities through story, but we construct our identities through story. That by telling ourselves stories, we are able to be braver and kinder and more connected… And framing it that way and coming at it from who am I and what do I want to connect over, rather than what's the craziest thing that ever happened to you, can really shift what does it even mean to mine our life for stories… Under that for me is a value that I hold very dear which is, we don't owe anyone our trauma. We don't owe anyone the story that they assume of us. We get to choose it…

PROMPT: What is the sensational story in your life that you gravitate to in hopes of feeling connected? Has it worked or has it resulted in the feeling of distance? Can you choose an ordinary moment in this past week that would be a story you’d enjoy telling to others?

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Kenny Andejeski currently runs ‘why [here] matters,’ a social enterprise that supports clients in building community to foster social cohesion, belonging and civic health towards the practice of everyday democracy at a national, regional and local scale.

Rachael: You say that not only do the stories we tell ourselves define us and the way we walk through the world, but it's also what we focus on that grows. If we're telling negative stories about ourselves, we're going to grow those negative thoughts in different ways… There are the stories we have ingrained and then there are the stories that we're trying to get out of the habit of telling ourselves. So, I'm curious what your practice is? Which story you're working on?

Kenny: There's a lot that I'm working through. First and foremost, a big challenge I see for my peers that are advocating for different cultural changes and different ways of relating with each other is that many of us struggle with our most immediate relationships in this regard. We haven't solved it ourselves. In confidence, there's so many conversations we had where it's like my uncle and I don't get along or I can't talk to my mom anymore or my daughter won't pick up the phone. And so the stories around the closest relationships in my life, I think, are ones that I'm practicing. My relationships with my own parents—I do hold a lot of my childhood experience against them and doing it in a way that is, I guess in integrity yet not in resentment, or doesn't grow that resentment within me, is something that I'm really practicing…

PROMPT: Is there a story that you’re holding onto that isn’t serving you anymore? How is this impacting your relationships with people you love? How does that story affect how you show up for them and how you show up for yourself?

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Rev. Dr. Derrick McQueen is a pastor, a theologian, a singer, a gifted storyteller and someone whose life is full of intercultural and interfaith dialogue and relationship. He earned his Ph. D. in Homiletics and New Testament at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York.

Rachael: I want to end with the topic of dreams and dreaming. This curiosity and this desire to talk about this with you comes from another sermon that I watched of yours from 2012. And specifically, you highlight the story of Zachariah and Elizabeth… and you talk about the idea of dreaming and how we are all born with the right to dream… and you were encouraging the congregants to look to the person next to you, look to the person on the subway, look to the person you're watching on TV, and everybody is an ordinary person with dreams…

Derrick: Zechariah and Elizabeth are the older aunt and uncle of Mary… And this couple are an older couple, much like Abraham and Sarah, who have never had children. He's a priest in the High Holy Temple. She is this upright, righteous woman and they've lived their life together. And some say that they may have stopped dreaming. But then Elizabeth is told that she's going to have a baby. And Zechariah is like, no way… and because he laughed. Because he sort of didn't believe it. His voice is silenced… and his voice comes back and he gives this beautiful speech about dreams and this whole idea of what it's like to now know that it's bigger than him… And it just speaks to the text in Joel where Joel says,
’your old men will dream dreams. And your young men will have visions,’ and it's usually the other way around… But Joel says ‘your old will dream dreams.’ So here we have this text that the dream is for everybody. We are all capable of dreams whether we know it or not. Everybody has some sort of a dream in them. And we look at people and we take them for granted just because we don't know who they are or what they are. But even if you just look at someone across the crowded street and say, ‘I wonder what their dreams are,’ it brings a smile to your face because you know that that person has dreams. Everybody has a dream and everybody has a right to have a dream. And to have this hope for this dream to come true. And we can dream for the world to be a better place. And part of the reason why having dreams is important is because it helps you not to get bogged down in the craziness and the shit of this world. Because that will zap the dream out of you and you can't let it do it…

PROMPT: What is a dream that you dream? Write about a dream that you have for your community and a dream that you have for yourself.

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