What's Your Story?

I like telling stories. No. I love telling stories. It’s so much a part of me that I honestly don’t know who I am without it. I guess, deep down, without these narratives to occupy my world, I feel somewhat hollow.

Any bit of information or news I hear, my mind automatically collects enough bits and pieces to frame a story with it. Inevitably though, I feel the need to communicate these tales to others. It has, however, been brought to my attention that this habit of mine is a bit tedious to handle for those around me.

People don’t always want to hear stories all the time. And I suppose I cannot blame them for this. People like to deal in information. The bare essentials. This I have to say I cannot comprehend fully. I guess I am still that petulant child demanding Grandma to tell me one more story if she needed me to finish eating my meal.

Those are my first memories of it, by the way. Listening to my grandmother tell me tales from the ancient epics as I listened attentively, wide eyed and slack jawed in amazement at the colourful characters and grand adventures full of gods and demons and war.

Did that early childhood mould this trait in me? I cannot be sure of that. Maybe I would always have been this way. I am a bit peculiar, after all.

In the early school days, I remember being in the spotlight, telling stories to audiences small and large. Something I assume, from the number of prizes I gathered in that area, I was quite good at.

I have to say, I don’t think I would be able to do that now. But there is a certain courage that one experiences only by virtue of the naivety of childhood. From the lack of knowing of what the world is, comes a fearlessness to do things before it. To be a performer of a hundred bold voices and a thousand exquisite emotions.

Could I have been a storyteller back then, if I knew what I know now? Could I have stood before an audience and passionately told those fantastic tales, if I knew they were not paying attention maybe? That they were also quite possibly people who dealt in information? The bare essentials of life, their only concern?

Is that what growing up means, I wonder. The process of becoming a person who doesn’t much care for stories any more. At least not all the time…

I guess I will never know for sure. I am what I am. Maybe I can keep my tendencies from weighing heavily on the people in my life, but that would be the extent of it.

I cannot change what I became, or how I want to live. I will always want that next story – petulantly and childishly.

Stories all around me just make living easier, I suppose.