Telling stories

It's a peculiar thing this plundering of my own back pages.

This seeking out of the stories that lie in the past 13 years and searching for helpful or positive or humorous or honest threads to stitch all the pieces together.

The patchwork notion of storytelling has been on my mind a lot lately, sparked partly by the more blogs I write and partly by my current reading material.

As absolutely no one has failed to notice, we're living in turbulent times and today, on International Women's Day, strikes are being carried out in 40 countries in an attempt to highlight women's power within global economies.

This movement was kick-started with the women's march carried out in the US the day after the recent presidential inauguration.

Hundreds of thousands of women and men took to the streets, many of them brandishing placards which quote from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. 

Margaret Atwood is one of my absolute favourite writers – if you've never read her, you really, really should* – and the current referencing of her work has lead me back to The Handmaid's Tale.

I was re-reading it on the train home yesterday, propped up by a scrum of commuters in the less-than-fragrant rush hour carriage, when I came across this potent little sentence: “If it's only a story, it becomes less frightening.”

If you've ever read The Handmaid's Tale you'll know this is not necessarily true, but the whole notion of the 'story' and the process, power and possession of the narrative is one of the key themes of the novel.

It is also one of the key themes in our own lives – what are the stories of our selves? And, as the quote posits, if they are less than palatable, does the telling of them really make them less frightening?

Maybe. Storytelling is as old as speech itself and over time the healing power of it has become recognised in the field of narrative psychology and is a central tool in addiction and trauma recovery.

Being able to reclaim a story through painting or talking or writing is integral to rebuilding, reconstructing and recovering a sense of self.

So with this in mind, I am writing.

If my speech once slurred when I was trying to run training on alcohol misuse, if my spasms kick the cats off the bed or if my Tecfidera-induced hot flashes cause random stripping, they do at least make an entertaining mass of stories.

And they are my stories. And I am in control of the telling. 
Because in the end, as the great Margaret herself said, "A word after a word after a word is power.”

:: Telling stories by Tracy Chapman 

*At-a-glance quotes from Margaret Atwood, but really, I recommend shutting yourself away now with a blanket and one of her novels. Your soul will thank you.