How Story Affects and Changes Us
The power of storytelling, demonstrated through personal essay and fiction
This week, I’m thinking about storytelling. I’ve been immersed in an essay by Cheryl Strayed which was recommended to me by an editor whose class I’m slowly making my way through.
It captivated me for many reasons, not least of which is that it brings up imagery of the Pacific Northwest and mentions Portland, a place that held me so lovingly in my creative pursuits and in my healing journey that I have missed it every day of the five years I’ve been away.
Although I connected with Strayed’s essay on a personal level because of the link to the Pacific Northwest, the piece also contains a lot of universal themes any reader can relate to. How we are encouraged to hide our grief. How this erasure affects us on a personal level. What it means to be married and cheat on your spouse. We see the author admit to her mistakes and tell us the reasons she made them. We see Strayed wrestle with being unfaithful to her husband as she mourns her mother’s death. She knows what she is doing isn’t working and that on some level, she’s lying to herself, but cannot compel herself to stop. Who among us hasn’t lived that? The work is honest, raw, and, one might say, brave. It lets us know that life is messy and difficult, and that sometimes when you wish you could do the right thing, you can’t bring yourself to follow through with it.
There is an art to storytelling and it takes a lot of work to bring a personal narrative onto a universal stage. It is said a lot in literary circles that quality writing will weave the universal with the personal, and the more I read, the more I find that to be true. This is a critical part of the work because in the universal, we find connection with each other on a deeper level. It’s not just about telling people what happened, it’s about figuring out what it means to us.
Alice Walker’s short story, “Olive Oil,” demonstrates this in fiction. Walker uses an everyday ritual to show us the healing power of love and acceptance. The story tells us that the little things matter, that small acts of love are deeply meaningful and powerful ways to let our beloved know how much they mean to us. These little things build trust and connection, which, in soothing our wounds, strengthen our bonds to each other.
Orelia is a black woman whose self-esteem has suffered because of men’s casual cruelty towards her. When she rubs olive oil on her dry skin, she remembers being called names for how her knees and elbows were “ashy,” which diminished her self-confidence starting in childhood. We are told how the men in her life betrayed her with their meanness when she expected them to love and care for her. The reader can infer that this leads her to believe she is less beautiful, less worthy of love and care, than she would feel had her loved ones cared for her better.
John, one night, sits in the room with her when she bathes and begins to rub olive oil on her skin. He asks her what she is putting on and she considers lying to him. The reader understands it’s not malicious but self-protective. She expects that he will behave the same way as the other men. Why bother to trust and leave herself vulnerable to disappointment and hurt when the men in her life have shown her they don’t consider how their words affect her?
Instead of lying, however, she invites him closer to her. “Smell,” she says. When he responds with kindness and tells her, “I like it,” her smile tells the reader how John’s words have soothed her heart. Orelia finds some relief from the grief of being a black woman in an unforgiving world that tells her she’s not enough. John finds that he can connect to someone he loves and show her his love for her is true.
Both of these pieces made me cry at the end when I read them, for different reasons. Both are examples of storytelling that changes us, that makes us think about the world on a deeper level, and both are examinations of relationships. Strayed’s looks at what happens when grief tears our relationships apart and destroys our will to live. Walker’s story shows us how the simplest, smallest actions can repair what grief has shattered. What does it look like to soothe someone’s grief? How do love and loss affect us as human beings? What does acceptance do for the wounds we carry, both the big and the small? What happens when all you want is to be loved but nobody seems to be able to love you the way you need to be loved?
Both pieces show a masterful grasp of the individual material. I appreciated Strayed’s for her descriptions of how low she felt about herself in her darkest moments. “My life as a slut.” “I was a piece of shit.” It’s honest.
I loved that Walker’s work shows the audience how powerfully healing a small act can be. It gives the reader who may be suffering and pained with their own grief a sorely needed sense of hope.
On a personal level, I understand that I am not where I need to be as a writer. I’m not sure how to structure my material or balance my writing life with all the other parts of me. I keep going because, even though reading, writing, and thinking are not grand “out of this world” acts, they are quietly powerful ways to heal.
Like Strayed, I carry immense grief. My grief is for the girl I lost to rape, the light I lost to domestic violence, the power and confidence I lost to harassment and personal attacks for what I have said. Like Orelia in Walker’s story, I shy away from connecting with others because I expect more of what I’ve had before. It is a huge risk just to make a phone call. Walker, though, offers us a gift in her storytelling. My takeaway from reading was, “The right kind of love can heal you.” What a magical proposition, the idea that when someone loves the places where you hurt, those places can stop hurting.
This is the power of storytelling. It is life-changing in the subtlest and gentlest of ways, and that’s why story is one of the most effective ways to change our world. It changes us and how we relate to each other.