I am a story teller.
And like all story tellers, I too have a beginning, a middle and an end. I too shall invest you in characters beyond your control, feed you lies of an alternate reality, and yet still comfort you after a long day. Like other mediums, I communicate my story through the form of words, a twisted tale of words that may prick you, causing blood and tears to flow.
Yet storytelling isn’t fixed to one medium.
Storytelling is everywhere. It’s in the nature around us, the way that the birds communicate, the way that bees drink nectar from flowers. It’s in the birth of the largest of animals, and the smallest of organisms. It’s in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the supple taste of a plot, a climax, a solution.
Storytelling is a creation of a world of imagination, of problems and of solutions. Storytelling is a layer of the truth, the way in which the truth is revealed to each and every one of us. Storytelling is a way to communicate our experiences. Good and bad. Light and dark. Fire meets water. Storytelling becomes the way in which we interact with the world, the way we can make sense of the experiences we go through.
My dad always says that my troubles are just stories I tell myself. In a way it’s true. Stories are how I cope, how I “deal” with my hardships and how I am able to understand and interact with the world around me. At times, it does help. But most of the time, I find myself more overwhelmed than I first began.
So why do I do it?
To be honest, I don’t really know. Sometimes it’s easier, telling myself a story with layers of truth, rather than the whole truth.
At the end of the day, my experiences become blurred with the false realities I tell myself. The lens I look at the world through becomes unfocused. Blurry. Jagged. By the end of it, the tales I tell myself become more powerful and deadly than the soft, harsh reality of the truth.