I went to a comedy night, and on the seat there was a little flyer that said something like: ‘Storytelling: the art and craft of narrative. Come to a workshop.’. At that point I was searching for meaningful diversion outside of work, so I went. They did a lot of exercises that were pretty interesting, and at the end, we were asked to go to the mic and tell the story that we had been working on. There were only about seven of us, so there was not a huge sense of risk. I told a story about a crazy altercation I got pulled into. And at the end the workshop, the leader asks me: “Can you come to this week’s show and tell that?”
“You mean, exactly what I just did now?”
And he says: “Yeah, just like that.”
My reaction was: well, I just did it. How hard could it be to do it again, right? So I went, and yeah, it was fun and curious. People had a good time. Somehow, it made a painful trauma that I was struggling with turn into something shared, lighter with humorous notes—more open to interpretation. Getting up there in front of an audience was nerve racking, and even though I’ve now done this many times, I still often felt before going on that I didn’t know why I was doing it. I would often feel nauseous and just want to bolt.
The only thing that would settle my mind was to not think about it as performance, but rather remind myself that if I felt that I had anything worth sharing, I had to do that now as directly as possible for this group of people: somehow communicate this experience– and then even if it comes out in a confusing or awkward way, as long as the authenticity of that situation comes through, it will connect with the audience.
That was another unexpected thing about storytelling. It’s not as if I had really worked out grasp of the experiences I was describing. It’s like, okay, you have a few minutes to tell these people what happened and why it is even worth remembering? So often there are things that happen in life we don’t get. Telling it as a story gives our memories form and sometimes meaning.
Here’s a story from Austin