How stories work

I have been writing some of the stories of my own life, those that are important to me in terms of the way my life has gone.

It has occurred to me that what I'm doing is mythologizing my life.

I don't mean that I'm making things up that didn't happen, but that I'm looking at my stories in a larger context, the context of a whole life and the meaning of that life. I find as I write my own stories, I not only see my life in terms of a greater meaning but act of writing, or telling, the stories imparts meaning to my life. It gives me the sense of being linked to something greater than myself, to being part of a greater mythology, the sense that I exist on a deeper level than that of my ordinary day-to-day experience.

The other parts of telling our stories is having people listen to them, and listening to the stories of others. I am part of a recovery community where we spend most of our time telling and listening to our stories. Over the years, we hear how people's stories change as their understanding of the themselves and the Universe changes, and that helps us to deepen our understanding of ourselves. We find out that we are never alone, that we are connected to each other and that whether we know it or not, we are all walking together.

I've also been very privileged in my life to be able to listen to and write the stories of others. There is something in us that needs to be heard. I've always loved the Zulu greeting that translates as "I see you" because I think we all need to be seen, deeply and with love, in order for us to get a sense of who we are. For me, listening to people's stories so I can write has sometimes been a way to do that. It enriches and enobles in so many ways: the subject is enobled by the telling; I am enriched by listening, then further enriched by writing; the subject is again enriched by reading his/her story and other readers are enriched by reading the story ot another.

Mythology is so deeply healing and it exists in more places than we think.