Your story is your journey
My painting of Jo March walking through a field wearing a brown coat and green dress with her hair still short. Written on the white background is a quotation from Little Women: “I like adventures and I’m going to find some.” (credit Lena Hunsicker, réve & Bloom)
Then shall we so easily let the children hear just any tales fashioned by just anyone and take into their souls opinions for the most part opposite to those we'll suppose they must have when they are grown up?"
"In no event will we permit it."
"First, as it seems, we must supervise the makers of tales; and if they make a fine tale, it must be approved, but if it's not, it must be rejected. We'll persuade nurses and mothers to tell the approved tales to their children and to shape their souls with tales more than their bodies with hands. Most of those they now tell must be thrown out."
Plato, The Republic, Book II, 377b-c
Plato’s Republic is, among other things, a debate on how to structure a government that works and makes people their best selves. The passage above concludes that storytelling is only beneficial when it tells approved tales, tales approved by politicians as the truth.
Basically, Plato’s Republic is an endorsement of government propaganda, if you read it straightforwardly.*
And yet, this attitude toward storytelling persists 2400 years later. Stories are gossip. They’re old-wives tales. They’re told in frivolous chick-lit, not in serious nonfiction or useful business tomes. Sure, a useful story creates customers, helps promote a side-hustle, gets you dates. But even on prestige networks, storytelling is secondary to capitalism (HBO is a good example here—or is it Max? HBOMax? Bad brand storytelling all-around there).
So the question is: can a story be worthy for its own sake, as more than entertainment and fluff?
Absolutely.
Plato wasn’t totally wrong. Stories can be dangerous. Hearing a story of injustice enrages us, and #MeToo threatened the political order. Falling deeply in love rewrites our priorities in ways that scare loved ones. Hell, the entire brouhaha around Zoltan Mamdani’s successful political storytelling and victory over corrupt establishment politician Andrew Cuomo has the pundit class raving incoherently in the Times daily!
Without these passionate reactions to stories, we might be in less danger. But without powerful storytelling, we can’t fully live.
Every day we’re surrounded by stories. You tell yourself stories about what to expect at work, what the person looking at you in a coffeeshop is thinking, what the future of your relationship is, what your cat has been doing in the house alone all day. (I can tell you the answer to the last one is either sleeping or mischief.)
You tell stories when you meet up with friends, when you explain a broken appliance to your landlord, when you apply for a new job. We even tell stories about stories—talking about the latest tv show, movie, book in book club, or familial drama. We live in a environment of constant story.
What story we tell ourselves we live in matters. There’s no one true story about our lives. A set-back can be the start of a comeback or a declaration of failure. A missed train can be a disaster or the beginning of a love story like Before Sunrise. A breakup can be tragic or comedic, or both at the same time (see Bridget Jones). I think the dinosaur scientist sadly gazing upon the park at the end of Jurassic Park is a dangerous asshat, and yet the story John Williams’ music tells makes me cry every time.
We shape our future when we tell ourselves what our past meant. If we think we failed then, we might not try now.
We shape our present when we tell ourselves what our past meant and what our future will mean. If we think what we’re doing won’t matter in the long-run, maybe we don’t follow through on a long-held dream.
You might mostly be familiar with fairytales from Disney, but long before the mouse, fairytales and folktales were told orally as entertainment, as lessons, as propaganda, and as social commentaries. They, like all storytelling, were told aloud (back further even than our Greek friend/Plato’s Republic’s nemesis Homer). Folktales and fairytales were changed by the teller to suit the mood, the audience, the storyteller’s preference. We know the French version of Cinderella (The Little Glass Slipper), but there’s a Cinderella in China (Ye Xian), a version from Ireland (Ashey Pelt), a version from Norway (Katie Woodencloak)—the list goes on and on. Scholars estimate there are somewhere between 500-3000 Cinderella stories from different cultures worldwide (though of course some are lost to time). And that’s just Cinderella!
These days in Western cultures, we mostly rely on written stories. Literacy is the benchmark of knowledge in the West, not the ability to improvise spoken stories for a variety of audiences.
Nevertheless, as folklore scholar Maria Tatar explains
Today, many women writers seem to be looking backward, resurrecting figures from times past to reveal that those who are socially marginalized were not as weak and powerless as they may at first blush seem. Finding dignity, value, and significance in the lives of those who were sidelined in one way or another, these writers give us new angles, new perspectives, and new stories […] these narratives challenge us to make an effort to get our stories right, to recognize that no single protagonist has a hotline to the truth, and to understand how justice is a hard-won social good that requires us to listen to more than one voice and to be open to listening both to individual testimony and to choruses of lamentation and complaint.
Maria Tatar, The Heroine with 1001 Faces, page 39
Tatar, a renowned folktale scholar, writes often of the cultural heritage and baggage encoded in folktales and fairytales. Family structures, gender roles, domestic violence, political systems, even who counts as a person—all that lives in these stories. It is near-impossible to live a story you’ve never encountered. Seeing yourself as harmed and marginalized in a system while believing you have a right to triumph is much easier when you have role-models.
But role models don’t need to exist in the real world to be powerful. Mythic characters teach us what we can be.
So how do we learn to use these stories as fuel for our lives? Turn storytelling into something we do in our individual lives, instead of just something we’re fed by others? See stories as more than words on a page or characters on screen?
We practice by paying attention.
We practice by taking stories we tell seriously.
Give it a shot: tell the same story five times this week. once to yourself, and then to other people in different situations. Does it sound the same? Feel the same to tell? Probably not!
Heraclitus wrote “You cannot step into the same river twice.” This is true of living life. It’s also true about telling your stories. We tailor our stories to our audiences when we tell them to others.
We also tailor our stories we tell ourselves, whether we know it or not.
We craft them around fear and resentment, hopes and dreams, buried trauma and unconscious biases. But the more we think about our stories, the more we can understand why we tell them one way or another.
The stories we tell ourselves about our lives aren’t set in stone. That’s one of the hardest lessons to learn about stories, because it’s really scary to reexamine our lives and reimagine possibilities.
What if we don’t like what we see?
What if we fail at changing something important?
What if we live our lives according to other people’s shoulds instead of what we want?
But if there’s one thing to take away from the ever-changing spoken stories of folktales and fairytales, it’s that if you’re alive, it’s not too late.
So take a cue from the storytellers of long ago, creating old stories anew for folks huddled around a fire.
With a story, you can
regain your power
challenge a narrative
give people hope
correct a lie
tell a new lie
pass your ancestors’ wisdom on to others
relive your favorite memories
(and most of all)
remake yourself.
Isn’t that amazing power for something oft-demeaned as gossip, frivolity, or “just” for kids?
*which is not always best, but that’s covered by dozens of long books, and not relevant here, but former political philosophy prof me just cannot help herself!