No Matter What You’ve Been Through, Your Story Is Important

“The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.”

Thomas King—one of the great storytellers of our generation—said this, and he’s not wrong. Storytelling is the cornerstone of our civilization. It is, perhaps, the preservation of humanity. Stories feed the human soul. In a world as polarized as ours, stories have the ability to unite. They allow us to be heard, hear others, and understand different human experiences.

Our ability to share stories is our superpower. It gives us the ability to share a part of ourselves with others. It allows us to empathize—connect with others and understand and accept differences in a world as tumultuous as ours. Through this, it allows us to educate the masses, share knowledge, and enlighten those who are unaware. Storytelling is a gift, and one worth sharing. 

Mine is not a story of greatness. I haven’t traversed across numerous countries in search of myself. I am not part of a diaspora, having overcome difficult odds and great suffering. I’m not sans terre—I don’t have reasons to not belong. I haven’t defied overwhelming odds to achieve something miraculous. I have yet to do anything extraordinary. But as Paulo Coelho once said, “What many consider ordinary people are the ones who will change our lives.”

So I like to remind myself of this: there are over 7 billion people in this universe. Over 7 billion souls and thus over 7 billion stories, each vastly different from everyone else’s. Every human experience is different. We have met different people, traversed different places, shared different experiences, had different thought processes, and endured different traumas. All of these makeup unique, beautiful, and breathless stories, each, in its own way, extraordinary.

So we must tell stories. And we must learn to give them away. Because it is part of the human condition to share our experiences and etch our mark into the fabric of the universe–a testament that we were here, and we lived, and we did what we could to bring people together.