“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (Didion, 1979) — I thought a lot about this quote while exploring “The Power of Stories” module — the quote goes on:
“We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
For me, this truly pins down the power of stories into a thesis. To put it differently than Didion, I would say this: life can be difficult, complicated, scary and vast. We need ways of ordering our lives and experience, and we do that through narrative, through the stories we choose to tell about ourselves.
This is actually a skillset, I believe, a set of learned behaviors that may vary in their effectiveness. It can be inherited, from family or social circles — the way your parents might tell the story of your family and its history can have a big impact, as you might use it as the basis to start telling your own. It might have a massive impact on the way you approach the world!
For instance what if the story you heard growing up was: “The Johnson’s have always made it through adversity, no matter what we persevere!”
As compared to: “There’s been a curse on the Johnson family for generations…”
Or maybe you’re from a family that doesn’t tell any sort of story about itself – that might lead to a lot of confusion and ambiguity about your place in life. You might also take it as an opportunity to really have more control about how your story is told.
Either way you might develop these skills or not, I think hearing the way other people conceive of their own narratives, how they choose to tell a story about their life and experience, can have a profound impact on your own. I think that The Human Library for instance is an absolutely incredible idea that could bring one into contact with personal narratives and stories, and open one up to ways of living and dealing with life that you never previously considered. If libraries create a space for people to come together in non-judgmental open dialogue, I think there’s room for so much understanding and empathy, not just for others’ experience, but your own as well. The success of programs like The Human Library or StoryCorps should be our model to build on, maybe even hosting public events where people tell stories in a more performance style, like The Moth Radio Hour for just a small audience.
I’ve also been thinking about the possibility of the power of stories to truly heal people. What if we provided space at a library for people to come and bear witness for people who really need to share something, get something off their chest? I think this could have a genuine therapeutic impact. One model I’m thinking about is Mutual Aid Social Therapy (M.A.S.T.), developed by the Jane Addams collective, which aims to utilize a spectrum of mental health methodologies in small, anonymous community groups. It seeks to flatten the hierarchies of traditional mental health pathologies, instead relying on the knowledge of its community and a core of guiding literature to help give people the resources to process and heal trauma and grief, whether personal, or social.
I think the basis of all good therapy, and certainly for a M.A.S.T. community, is the simple act of getting to voice your problems out loud. Sometimes, just being given a space to do that can be the first opportunity someone has had to start understanding and processing what they’ve been through. This is the power of stories: what we hold inside as personalized cognitive experience, that “shifting phantasmagoria” can overwhelm us, but when we begin to give it form, externalize it, we can just maybe start to control it. Libraries, with their connection to knowledge resources on just about everything, seems to be a natural place for a M.A.S.T community to form. Librarians could assist in gathering literature resources for community members depending on what might be coming up.
I think that stories also connect us to the real root of all culture. In times before a system of writing or recording, all knowledge and information was passed through stories. As the written or recorded word has become privileged over the speaker, what have we lost? Even as we’ve reached a point in time where perhaps more people than ever are expressing their thoughts and feelings in posts on the internet, how is this different from hearing a story directly from someone in front of you. Libraries should continue using their unique place in our society and culture as a place where everyone belongs to recenter the power of the story.
References
Arne-Skidmore, E. (2021, August 4). New study on the impact of the human library. Human Library. https://humanlibrary.org/new-study-on-the-impact-of-the-human-library/
Didion, J. (1979) The White Album. Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
Eberhart, G.M. (2018, February 10). Sharing people’s stories:
StoryCorps partners with public libraries. American Libraries Magazine. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/sharing-peoples-stories/
The Jane Addams Collective (n.d.) M.A.S.T. Mutual Aid Self/Social Therapy. The Jane Addams Collective. https://janeaddamscollective.wordpress.com/the-mast-project/
Wentz, E. (2019, April 26). The Human Library: Sharing the community with itself. Public Libraries Online. https://publiclibrariesonline.org/2013/04/human_librar/