Stories

It’s currently past midnight during finals week and I’m pondering life as I attempt to write a paper to accompany an English project. I mentioned it earlier, but my project is on the significance of stories. I wanted to share the anecdote I wrote for the project because I feel it really represents who I am and what I do-and maybe this is part of why I blog. It offers a different view into my life and shows a little slice of writing that is quite different from blogging.

I love to tell stories; it is who I am. There is something amazingly satisfying about making someone laugh, turning the mundane into the absurd, turning nothing but free-floating thoughts into a cohesive entity. I love weaving together morsels from here or there, the threads of stories that are either my own or repurposed from another source. I used to fear the loss of stories—I embarked on a project of taking a selfie a day for a year simply so that each day I had a compact memory, a story I could not lose to the abyss of time. Then, I realized that my stories make me up—they stand alone and cannot be lost as long as they are told. So I continue to tell my stories to anyone and everyone who will lend an ear. I tell of my adventure of nearby getting caught on a giant lightning rod (a sailboat) during a colossal thunderstorm, of my dad climbing out the fifth floor of his college dorm on a rope—just to see if he could—and then getting stuck halfway down, of the night I stayed up to watch the sunrise just because I could, but was too afraid of heights to climb up on the roof to see it. I tell of the most interesting case I have seen from my summer job at a vet (a dog under the influence of marijuana), of the latest trouble my puppy has caused, of the exploits that have to be censored for certain audiences. I tell of the dead squirrel that prompted a major shift in my future career, of 6am wake up calls to prank a friend, of staying up late and only sleeping two hours to wake up early to exercise because my sleep-deprived mind was incapable of the thought process necessary to determine I should sleep in. These stories are my own, but by telling them I share them and they can become someone else’s to own, to recycle, to stitch together to create something new. They gain a life of their own, independent of mine—a life that may be longer than my own.