The Story Shared
“It seemed to her that between herself and all the other people in the world, a wall had been built up and that she was living just on the edge of some warm inner circle of life that must be quite open and understandable to others” (Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio).
From the time I was a child, reading helped me better understand the world around me and those within it. As a stage IV cancer survivor, active in a community of other survivors, I’ve also seen the power of a story shared. The moment you read words placed together in such a way as to explain your own feelings, fears, confusion, or hope – you begin to feel less isolated. Those imagined walls that kept us from that “warm inner circle of life” are revealed to be just that – imagined. I find reading to be an act of hope.
Our individual stories are woven together in a “single garment of destiny” as Martin Luther King, Jr. aptly describes in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. We are both individually and collectively a human story. Reading has helped me to see past the edges of my own seams and the squares of fabric sewn nearest my sides -- to exhaust the metaphor; it has reminded me that there is so much I have yet to understand. A novel can open our minds to the experiences of strangers and draw out of us empathy and human solidarity.
No better story comes to mind to describe how I view our world than Winesburg, Ohio. Here is a novel told through individual stories sewn together with a single tenuous thread. Each chapter revealing a character desperate to be seen and heard – to break through the separateness of life, isolation and loneliness. I believe there is truth revealed through the stories of others, and that they need to be both told and heard.
Our stories create the framework for how we view the world and live in it. Winesburg, Ohio captures stories of alienation, loneliness, unmet potential, love and obsession. Anderson was criticized for his telling of these fictional, unromanticized stories of the people of a small rural town in America. But they are very human stories. And it is the recognition of our own feelings of alienation, loneliness, unmet protentional, love and obsession that we see in our stories that can allow us to correctively alter the framework. Our suffering, that we once might have desired to hide, is repurposed in its exposure. The experiences and emotions that can create our walls are the same tools that we use to break them down and find community, connection and love. To find hope.
Henri Nouwen writes in his book, The Wounded Healer, “it's an illusion to think that a person can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.” I believe we find healing through our stories, which create connections beyond our time and our space and ourselves.