Telling Stories: Feeling Most Ourselves

I just celebrated a milestone birthday.  While I don’t usually like big parties, for this one, I thought it would be fun to invite a bunch of my Victoria friends to a backyard open house for food and visiting.  Thanks to my wife, my kids, and some good friends, we organized and enjoyed a super event!  What a special gift to celebrate with so many people from so many different segments of my life.  It left me pondering about the gift of human connection, friendship, the enjoyment of shared experiences, and storytelling.

One of my best friends, whom I've known for the last 40 years, made a surprise visit and spent the weekend with us for the celebration.  He later sent me a note that said something like, “I feel most myself when I’m around you guys.”—such a beautiful compliment and, also, such a strongly shared sentiment between our two families.  

There is something here in this sentiment that may point to a more generally shared truth about human connection.  Could it be that we are all “most ourselves” when we are around those we love and with whom we have shared life experiences?

When we show up to life day by day, we have all sorts of interactions and engagements with people.   Human beings share life in hard times, fun times, meaningful times, boring times, and just plain-ole average times.  When we “do life together”, I believe we leave pieces of ourselves with others and others leave pieces of themselves with us.  These “pieces of ourselves” are gifts to one another—gifts of experiences, of conflicts, of shared sufferings or joys, of brainstorming and problem-solving, of pondering and questioning. 

This sharing happens, whether or not we are conscious of it at the time.  For example, some of my most fundamental values and core philosophies were carved out of the pain and joy of shared, daily living with a group of friends during our university years.  I would not be who I am without them, and in this way, I carry “pieces of them” with me to this day. 

When we “do life together”, I believe we leave pieces of ourselves with others and others leave pieces of themselves with us.  

Then, life carries on.  When we have the opportunity to reconnect with people in our histories, we will hear stories and share memories.  These connections offer the opportunity to “re-collect ourselves” and gather up pieces of ourselves that we’ve left with others throughout our lifespan.  When we recollect, we remember anew.  We hear the shared experience through the lens of another, and this helps regather the pieces of ourselves that are present in the other. The word "recollect" comes from the Medieval Latin word recolligere, meaning "to gather again”.

Story-telling cultures pass down knowledge, wisdom, values, and moral understanding through the oral tradition of inter-generational storytelling, ceremonial practices, and experiential learning.   I don’t tend to consider myself the product of an oral tradition, largely because much of my learning has come through formal education, written literature, and empirical research—methods of learning not typically associated with oral traditions.  

But I also recognize that this quick assessment may minimize the storytelling aspects of my own dominant culture because it all-too-easily discounts how rich storytelling experiences are present even in non-oral traditions.  Maybe we need to invite ourselves to notice our casual storytelling more attentively.

With that appreciation in mind, I have become much more attuned and awakened to the informal spaces of storytelling that occur within my own community.  Here, storytelling experiences happen quite informally, and one common space for us is when we open our home to share a meal with friends, colleagues, neighbours, acquaintances, and even strangers.

Have you ever considered that when a meal is shared, it offers a ritual with a more intimate setting for storytelling?  I imagine we can all relate to the kind of gatherings where small talk occurs in less-than-intimate settings.  In these settings, storytelling can often feel like one-upmanship or an impression-making contest.  In contrast, I’m reflecting here on the kind of storytelling when someone asks a genuine and curious question.  Someone tones down their need to compare themselves and instead becomes present to someone else who is uniquely other.

Whenever we meet new people, a common question my wife and I receive as a couple is, “How did you two meet?”  We’ve probably told the story of how we met several hundred times, and it is especially interesting to observe the nuances of how this story evolves, how every time the story is told the emphasis is placed on different aspects, and how new perspectives are added as we reflect on it more than 30 years later. 

We change and grow, so our stories about ourselves also shift, and in some ways our old stories become new stories each time we tell them.  That is fascinating. It is also interesting to receive unique questions about our familiar stories, because a curious question might carry a twist to it that opens and reveals a new telling.  

Now, imagine the added layer of re-telling a story within a familiar community of people.  When my wife and I tell the story of how we met, we are often among others who have already heard it, like our kids, or sometimes other friends.  These folks have their own dynamic experience of our stories, so they can offer insight and commentary to the story as it is shared with new people.  This adds layers of nuance to the telling and the sharing, and in this process, a rich tapestry of regathering is formed.

True, we can tell a story in a rote way, reiterating the basic elements of the scenes and the factual data of events.  But when a story is told to a curious listener, when the listener is fully engaged and present to the story and won’t let us get away with a rote version, something different can happen.  When this occurs, our stories become more than just the sharing of rote facts.  They become something more like recollections—where we “re-collect” ourselves, re-gather ourselves and maybe even learn something new about ourselves.  

I recall a very cool experience of storytelling when my wife, two teen children, and I met for dinner several years ago with one of my old childhood friends, Mark, and his wife and two teen children.  Mark, his brother, Jon, and I had many adventures in our childhood years, and during our dinner, 35-or-so years later, one of my children suddenly realized that this was the guy who was the main protagonist in one of my oft-told and favourite adventure tales as a kid. Our children had heard the story many times.

When we were young teens, gallivanting around the old coffee farm connected to the property of our house, we found a raw coffee bean and stuffed it into the end of a short piece of curtain rod, put a firecracker in the other end, and lit it off. Since we couldn’t tell if the bean was shooting out like a dud or like a rocket, Mark agreed to take a shot in the butt from about 10 feet away.  To make a long story short, he probably still bears a scar on his behind! 

Our kids loved this story, and as we recalled it during dinner, Mark remembered the event once again, anew.  It was re-collected for him.  Of course, he had never shared this story with his children because it had faded from his memory.  It was amazing to retell the story to his teen kids and observe them hear something they had never heard before about their dad. 

Then, Mark recalled another shared adventure from his memory of the same era, but this was one my children had never heard because I had never told it.  The experience was surreal, and the word “re-gathered” or “re-collected” comes to mind as the best way to describe it.  Pieces of myself that had been shed and shared with friends were re-gathered, and I felt “more myself” in the sharing of these stories.  

I’ve just given an example of a fun story, but the same re-gathering happens when we tell stories of suffering or grief, and this may be why storytelling is such a key aspect of grieving well.  Do you ever keep quiet because you don’t think your story is worth re-telling?  Perhaps this circular process of re-telling stories is a way we work through our losses, and maybe we need to give ourselves more permission to reflect aloud, even if the listener has heard the story before.

...the same re-gathering happens when we tell stories of suffering or grief, and this may be why storytelling is such a key aspect of grieving well.

It may also be interesting to nurture more formal rituals of storytelling.  We can learn here from our brothers and sisters who come from cultures with oral-dominant traditions.  It seems that oral traditions are quite attentive to creating formal spaces to retell stories.  These more formal gatherings might well be called ceremonial rituals.  Ceremonies can have an air of formality and mystique, but those of us who approach our storytelling in more casual formats may do well to challenge ourselves to push through the initial discomforts of formality. 

Typically, a formal ritual calls the community to attend to or mark something.  The gathering brings with it a trust and an expectancy that something will happen in the re-telling of a story and that this can be trusted.  In ceremonial rituals, pieces of ourselves are communally recollected.  I like ceremonies because they often have these elements of marking something, and the stories are what make the ceremony interesting.  

Something as typical and casual as a meal together can shift into a unique kind of ritual or ceremony when someone tunes in attentively with a good, curious question.  David Brooks uses the word “illuminators” to describe people who do this well (Brooks, pp. 28-42).  An illuminator may ask a good question, but equally important is that we trust ourselves in offering authentic pieces that are indeed worth hearing.

I hope these reflections offer some promptings that awaken you to a new expectancy in your storytelling and story-listening.  When my friend says, “I feel most myself when I am around you guys”, it prompts me to think about the ways that storytelling and story-sharing can help us re-collect ourselves in important ways.

Consider the truth that by showing up more awake and attentive, with a willingness to show authenticity, you actually offer gifts to people—these gifts are pieces of yourself.  In storytelling, we offer opportunities to regather these pieces with each other, and we find we feel most ourselves.

Joel Durkovic is the Director of Arbour Counselling Centre, Registered Clinical Counsellor, Registered Marriage and Family Therapist, and Registered Supervisor. He brings compassion and expertise to his work with individuals and couples. Read more about Joel here.

References:

Brooks, David (2023).  How to Know A Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, Random House, New York.