The Importance of Telling Our Story
Why you should keep going even when you think no one is listening
In the first two editions of this storytelling guide we’ve addressed how to tell your story using different oral storytelling styles, and “The Why” of telling your story to different audiences. In this third installment we want to take a moment to address the importance of telling your story.
But first, let’s take a moment to acknowledge that the world is different after the recent election. What we in movement spaces feared might happen has happened and that reality is responsible for the reckoning we will begin to see affect our work. Whether that looks like a drought in funding, the shuddering of entire departments of employees like we’ve seen with the DEI backlash, or the subtle urge to change the language we use to be less confrontational about the causes we champion so as not to alienate those fed up with identity politics, the reckoning is here.
So what do you do in the face of this politically expedited backlash?
Remember that narrative work is generational.
Keep telling your story.
Narrative Work is Generational
We didn’t get to this moment in history overnight. Just like the justice and equity gains of the last century did not occur overnight. The ideal vision for our country is locked in a binary tension like a game of tug of war. The slack in the middle of the rope is where narrative strategy begins. It is where storytelling originates. It is where the collection and dissemination of those stories, with their similar narrative themes, ideas, and messages begin to help one side or another persuade and pull the country toward their vision.
At this time we are witnessing the effectiveness of the other side’s strategy after decades of storytelling. That is their generational work.
But our generational work toward creating just futures, just opportunities, economies of care, abolition, and creating community care, safety, and protection for the systemically disenfranchised and strategically undervalued does not stop.
It does not stop.
Which is why we keep telling our story even if you think no one is listening.
Keep Telling Your Story
The reason you keep telling your story is because it matters. Because you matter and your voice and your work is important.
I am reminded of Zora Neale Hurston’s famous quote, “If you are silent about your pain, they will kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
Zora Neale Hurston died poor and in obscurity in an unmarked grave in central Florida until Alice Walker resurrected her stories, history, and legacy starting with this Ms. magazine article in 1975. Now Hurston is heralded as one of the greatest storytellers, folklorists, and writers of all time. She never stopped telling her stories, even when people stopped listening. And through the diligence of another writer who picked up the mantle of Hurston’s calling and found a solace and salve in Hurston’s words we know Hurston’s work, life, and her stories in ways that people generations ago did not.
Keep talking. Keep telling. Keep going.
There is a place for grief. But there is not a place for despondence or apathy.
Your story matters, even if you feel like it only matters to you, become your first audience and tell your story to yourself. That is what writers do, what artists do, what activists and changemakers do. We keep telling the story that we can’t stop talking about, that won’t turn us loose, until we are no longer the only ones listening. Then we fine tune that story giving it shape and style, and tailor it to who we want to tell it to next until our story is no longer singular but amongst a plurality of voices and similar stories that stretch the slack in the rope taut and persuade the tension away from the other side and over to ours.
Storytelling is work, it is necessary, and it is vitally important for our future.
Keep telling.
