Why do we listen to other people’s stories, but not our own. Here’s why?

I’ve just listened to a friend’s story surviving 911. It created moments of metaphysical transportation to the haunting scenes she described, and in the process I found myself empathising, thinking What! How? and Wow!

I was mentally reliving her story, but through a safe place, and recollecting where I was on that day in England at a meeting with War Child’s Sajo Idrizovic. Re-listening to the personal what must it have been like, as perhaps implicitly I’m measuring my own coping ability? How might I have coped? It’s the thing we do, don’t we? We imagine ourselves in that situation. But we also reframe our thoughts around the person telling the story. We can’t help but see the storyteller in a new way. The whole process is one of constant dynamic continual engagement.

Alien, troubled, or different environments, even the familiar to our own solicit this engagement. I wager I will never go to the Moon, so stories about travel to Space wrap me like a Tesseract.

But what happens when you don’t know the person, and more times than the familiar we don’t know the author. From reading a blog, a newspaper, getting stuck on a tweet, I know nothing about the storyteller. Their trauma is accessed differently. Imperceptibly, some kind of association is being sought, tenuously, and meaning is being made for a multitude of my own reasons which is sentient and linked to culture.

I don’t know quite what they all are which is why multiple stories will break my daily stride online. Copious books catalogue storytelling tropes that close in on us. It may be an absence of something. The story may validate a thought, pique curiosity, or solicit a reaction of any myriad kind e.g. love insecurity, a red mist. The reasons are countless in the dotted wells of emotion surrounding us. But inherent in the story’s interest quotient is the way it’s been told, and of course who’s telling it.

From as old as Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to Oppenheimer lies secrets and connective threads about storytelling that ensnare us. It’s something I spent six years looking at for a PhD. We’ve given it a name, cinema and retroactively apply it to work of Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Frances Watkins Harper. Their writing descriptively and emotionally visually manifests itself to the us.

In that course of thinking of other’s stories, I found something out, which this post materialises into at the end of the page and something I’ve refrained from doing, until now.

With stories from the unfamiliar, I’m seeking meaning to recalibrate myself, and the human mind is a bottomless pit for doing that. But in reflecting on stories that stir me, I do something many of us all do, I equivocate on myself. Off course I do.

My suffering could never compare to the trauma of such a cataclysmic event as 911. The profoundness of the occasion is overwhelming in ways that makes it unique. Perhaps the same could be said when thinking through major events like the aftermath of the atomic bomb (re-prompted from watching Oppenheimer), or any of the modern major wars if you were in them and survived.

But these self stories re-awaken narratives in our bodies if they exist — memories buried, which might be considered inconsequential. They’re all the more inconsequential when you consider yourself protective of them.

INSIDE JOB
My friend’s sharing of her story reveals courage, strength and a mental nakedness. I’m projecting here too because my circumstances have no comparison, but lodged in that compartment of my brain marked “personal” any story in here is not for sharing. It exposes me. Many of us do not like being exposed.

The plethora of story forms of a kind that eschew personalisation and trauma, evoking the essay voice exist in their own sub domain. We gather at conferences to hear these, not generally delivered as personalised narratives, but packaged as knowledge bytes, that we might learn from and adapt in our own world.

Billions of pounds are spent here. Advertising does its job to underscore one’s inadequacies and how the imbibing of this knowledge on offer will complete us, at least in this area. They are experiences we crave like an addict. The author’s general knowledge soon becomes ours in a blatant lift. That’s not the storytelling I’m speaking of here. That’s not the universal social currency on my mind.

Back in 1997 when I built my first website, my old school webmaster asked me to write about myself for them. I declined. Firstly why would anyone be interested in me, and secondly write about me — a delicate balance of my self-aggrandising and performance — no thanks. This is personal.

Of course personal traits impact this sharing discourse, and it’s been interesting to see how over the decades I’ve gotten more comfortable peeling of layers. That said, I’d sooner listen and write about others than reveal a frailty about myself, and it’s something I’ve learned too in my professional career as a journalist. It’s not about you!

But then friends ask me to share. Can I speak to students? Share my stories. I pause momentarily. I know what I can talk about, perhaps the thrills of being a reporter in a conflict zone, surviving a freakish accident 40metres below the sea, being chased in a car of bandits wanting to hijack me. I was doing 100km/hr to avoid capture.

But it stops, bypasses the part of my brain for personal traumas. I remember a Masters student saying to me, “you’ve been my lecturer for a whole year and I don’t know you”. Lots of unpacking here, but in a sense a bit like the scene in Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, I recognise in chains of commands that sharing the personal tends to go upwards.

That thing on being a good leader. Don’t show your weaknesses, because it provides agency for others to do so. The late Colin Powell gives this talk. Revealing our own weaknesses in critical work, stress conditions like the army is counter productive. In those environments guard that mindset; it’s the one thing that will keep you.

And that‘s it! My mental toughness requires I keep those stories locked away in the compartment marked “private and personal”. That mental toughness needed growing up in care, then being taken to Ghana to be put into boarding school, to life-threatening situations caught up in a military coup, to family divisions which meant I wouldn’t speak to my dad for fifteen years, and then an international story which BBC and others want to interview me about that I gently decline. But requirements shift depending on the era.

I shared a story with a friend yesterday, that I’ve learned that my great grandfather, an accountant and German was involved in the slave trade from Ghana. I’m finding things out. But still Nah! like the Saving Private Ryan film when Tom Hanks’ character is asked to tell his story and he says no, this one’s private. Yep it is!

So a combination of the personal, a degree of imposter syndrome (who’s going to care anyhow?) means I like to hear other’s stories, but not so my own. But stories like my friend’s incredible ordeal have a secondary effect. It’s a cumulative one, a slow burn from somewhere else that gradually mission creeps and solidifies an internal monologue about the power, or is that the healing power of sharing.

I went through this, found support, and it’s helped me, and you could do the same too. You just need to open up. But take your time. You’ll know when you’re ready.

Slowly, or not at all we’re drawn around. That door is slightly apprised — the bits that are uncomfortable are reassessed. What does it mean to go there? There are many reasons again. Hope is one of them.

Can I begin to tell part of that difficult story? I’m finding out through a proxy. www.videojournalism.co.uk