The Stories We Tell (And the Ones We Don’t)
I often tell the same story when I’m looking to relate to people. It’s about my first year in America, when I was in kindergarten and just five years old. I had moved from Trinidad, where everyone celebrated everything in my eyes. Hindus, Muslims, and Christians celebrated each other’s holidays, like Diwali, Eid, and Christmas with passion and pride. I had moved to New Jersey and was certainly not yet acclimated to my new home or its culture. So, when my kindergarten teacher alluded to a big holiday in November coming up, and asked if anyone knew what holiday that was, I was relieved and ready to shine. Finally, I thought, something I know all about. I was going to school these kids on this big November holiday.
I raised my hand, feeling almost smug, and as she called on me, I proclaimed, “Diwali.” If I could pay to have recorded that moment and the look on her face, I would have. She was completely bewildered. Certainly, I thought, I could clarify and remind her. “Diwali,” I restated with emphasis, “you know, when you light the diyas.” Somehow, this did not do the trick. The puzzled look on her face only grew, and she instead went on to explain that she was referring to Thanksgiving, which I had never heard of. By the time she got around to teaching us about cornucopias, I was convinced these were the strangest people I had ever met (and they were probably convinced that I was).
Until recently, I never understood why I felt so compelled to share this story. I analyzed it recently and thought about the potential reasons I do. It makes people laugh, sometimes. It reveals, in a harmless way, truths about myself that, on some level, I want people to know: I feel like an alien sometimes. I am an immigrant and being from another country and living in this one has shaped my experiences and my identity in so many ways. There’s a part of me that sometimes walks enthusiastically in the wrong direction, confident that I am right. Beyond that, I think it’s a story about love. Love for my younger self. Love for the patience of those like my kindergarten teacher, bless her heart. Love for our differences and our silly human brains that forget what we have in common.
I think understanding why we tell our own stories allows us to also understand the people around us more deeply. My grandmother tells me stories about God and her favorite story, the Bhagavad Gita. I am reintroduced to devotion every time I am in her presence. In these stories, she has found peace and purpose. She shares them not with self-righteousness or urgency, but with the kind of calm energy that certainty inspires. She’s revealing to me truths about the universe and herself, and if I listen, I get to know both in a more profound way.
My parents tell me stories of their own fathers, both of whom died prematurely. My mom’s dad died of a heart-attack at 40. My dad’s father took his own life after struggling with illness, depression, and the death of my grandmother. But these are not the stories they tell.
My mom talks about putting curlers in her father’s hair one day while he was sleeping, and how he didn’t realize until after he’d gone out on the front porch and noticed the entire neighborhood and all the passing cars laughing at him. She tells me stories of the joy he brought into her world when she was just being introduced to it. My dad talks about his father like a legend, sharing tales about the force of a man called “Captain.” He tells me stories about his dad building a company and a life for his family, and the way he tells them lets me know that he’s talking about his best friend.
It’s easy to understand why they choose to share these stories. In a way, they’re breathing new life into the men that shaped their own lives. We speak about the beginning and end often. Any stranger could read public records to find out where they were born and how they died. But my mother and father and their siblings are the record-keepers of everything that happened in the middle of these men’s lives. And these are the moments that live on, filling the spaces they have left behind.
It is still impossible for me to imagine a world in which I might one day have to fill the spaces my parents leave behind. But still, when they’re not around, in another room or country, I find myself filling up space with stories about them. I talk about my dad’s sense of youth- how he once sang “Wrecking Ball” by Miley Cyrus at the top of his lungs several times in a row when I threw a Halloween party, or how he’s the only person I’ve ever known to jet-ski from Trinidad to Tobago, or how I spent my 18th birthday jumping out of a plane with him. I talk about my mother’s unwavering commitment to love- about how she is equally fierce as she is tender- how she would fight for me by day and read me bedtime stories at night, or how when our five-year-old family member was asked what love is, she responded, “Love is like…Shu-Shu (my mother’s nickname).”
I retell these stories often as well. And I am grateful people are patient with me when I do. But, truthfully, I think our constant retelling of stories is one of our most endearing human qualities. One of my favorite things is when someone I love tells me a story they’ve told a dozen times, and they tell me as if they’re telling it for the first time. I don’t always know why they tell it, but I know that for whatever reason, this is a form of soul-baring they look forward to.
And then, there are those stories that we never tell. Ones of trauma or embarrassment or shame or guilt. Ones that we are forced to hide. Or ones we wish to forget. I still remember the first time I told my partner a story like that. We were just friends at the time, and it was so early in our friendship. I told the story without even being prompted to, and halfway through, I knew that this was something different. I recognized that I felt comfortable enough to bare a part of myself that I never showed. It was one of the moments that I would later recall as signs I had found my soulmate.
It’s been a few years since then, and the stories we share are my favorite- they have transformed my life to somehow be even more filled with love and wonder and magic. They are brighter than I could have imagined; and a part of me knows that the first stories we ever told each other allowed all the rest to unfold.
I learned something else about stories never told the same year I told mine. I was canvassing for an LGBTQ+ organization when a girl I never met told me a story about her soulmate. It was my job to stop strangers in public places, explain the current state of inequality for queer people, and ask for help in advocating for policy change. She quickly explained that she couldn’t help out financially but wanted to talk to me about something she’d been waiting to talk about for quite some time.
If I was working for this organization, she felt like she could tell me a story she’s never told anyone. So, she came out to me. Explaining that she was a lesbian, in love with her favorite person on this earth, she told me that they both had to hide their truths because of the strict families they came from. She was so deeply in love and wanted to scream it from the top of her lungs all the time but couldn’t. So instead, she whispered it to a stranger. It might not have been the Tom-Cruise-Jumping-On-Oprah’s-Couch-Moment that she dreamed of, but this storytelling was nonetheless glorious.
She showed me a video that she made. It was montage of their home movies with Lana Del Ray playing in the background. A series of brief moments revealed their love story- holding hands when no one was looking, stealing glances and sharing kisses, laughing with each other, eating messy food, brushing their teeth, spending whatever moments they could whenever they could in the private paradise of each other’s presence.
These moments were absolutely normal, filled with everyday routines, yet the simple intimacy made it one of the most beautiful stories anyone has ever shared with me. My heart still aches that so many love stories go untold because of fear, and I’ll spend my life fighting for those stories to be told. But I am glad she told her story that day, and I am grateful that I heard it. The words she spoke to me, and the moments she captured with the love of her life allowed her to highlight a truth worth telling. Even if it had been growing in the dark, the story itself created more light in the world.
Storytelling allows us to navigate our lives this way, finding the light as we do so. It lets us know which parts of ourselves we want to include, as we create our own personal mythology. I will continue to learn about myself and God and the universe through storytelling, inspired by my grandmother’s quest to do the same. I will remember the stories of my grandfathers forever. I will cherish the stories made with my parents and partner and loved ones beyond this life, and I will pass them down with pride. I hope that stranger I met one day gets to scream her story at the top of her lungs, the way she wants to. I hope to tell stories that liberate people and inspire them to tell their own, the way so many stories have inspired me.
When we tell stories, we open up that which was once closed. We open windows into the past and future. We create doorways into the heart and bridges between souls. Our words allow us to navigate through that which separates us to find that which unites us. Everyday we are constantly engaging in storytelling through dreams and conversations and all forms of art and body language and the way we move through our days and into each other’s lives- we are constantly partaking in the greatest story ever told.
To remember that I am a storyteller is to remember that magic is never lost- that it exists within all of us. That we are human beings but so much more. That we have the power to make things and people and moments and feelings live forever. Storytelling will make us eternal, and we must decide what’s worth immortalizing. For me, the answer is and always has been love. Love stories, between a woman and God, between children and parents, about the self, about friends or strangers, or about our romantic partners and soulmates- are the ones worth telling and retelling, the ones worth shouting, the ones that deserve to be everlasting.
The Stories We Tell (And the Ones We Don’t)
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