Few things have felt truer to me than this quote from the late Alan Rickman:
I cannot tell you how many times a person has told me at the end of one of our shows that they feel like they have been renewed by an evening of storytelling. Their heart has been filled. Their mind has been put at ease, at least for a couple hours, and perhaps longer.
Storytelling is magic. It is medicine for the mind. Food for the soul.
I’ve been telling stories all over the country and the world since 2011, and here is one of the strangest things that has happened to me in the course of my travels:
Twice I have stepped off the stage after telling a story at The Moth in which I expressed great vulnerability and been approached by a woman who needed to tell me about her recent miscarriage. In both cases, the woman had yet to tell anyone in her life about her loss but had somehow decided in that moment that I was the right person to tell.
When I told Elysha about this craziness (the second incident happened just recently), she said that it wasn’t crazy at all. There is unknowable amounts of emotion wrapped up in the tragedy of a miscarriage. Grief, guilt, shame, despair, and unspeakable loss. Women oftentimes have great difficulty talking about a miscarriage, even to people who they know and love most.
In both of these instances, Elysha explained, these women likely saw me as a person willing to open my heart and share something sacred about my past. I shared a story about my life in a way few people are willing to do so openly. In the eyes of these two women, I became the perfect person to unburden themselves of their secret. Someone who they could trust. Someone who possessed an open heart. But also someone who they would never see again. In that way, I was safe. They could speak their truth and then leave it behind.
Admittedly, I was surprised and confused when these women revealed their secret to me, but each encounter ended with a hug and many tears. And perhaps a bit of relief from something that these women were carrying alone before they met me.
Rickman was right. We need to tell stories about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible.
Now more than ever.
