BAD CHOICES MAKE FOR GOOD STORIES.
In fact, it made so much heart-sense to her that she immediately posted it to Facebook! And it's true. Desperately true. I think of coffee dates and long, winding dinners with new and old friends which are spun around and around, wound in and out into intricate twists and turns - sometimes snagging tears, or knotting up into confused questioning with gentle attempts at untangling... but more often than knot, the fabric of the unfolding stories is embroidered with laughter, in all its colours: wry, cynical, overjoyed, compassionate: chuckles, belly-aching guffaws and giggles.
While Pinteresting yesterday, the French word, 'diseuse', really tickled my fancy as one of the roles I've come to realise I fill in the lives of others, and my own life. So much so, that I think it may just be my life's purpose as opposed to the artist I always imagined?
Diseuse (pronounced dee-zœz), French for "teller", also called talkers, storytellers, dramatic-singers or dramatic-talkers.
“In our time (early 1900s) we have fallen under the spell of three remarkable women practising the art of the diseuse — Ruth Draper, Cornelia Otis Skinner, and Joyce Grenfell. Each of these great artists has the gift of crowding the stage with imaginary figures who become so vivid as to be practically visible, but as all of these artists happen to be members of the fair sex it could be assumed that they possess a magicdenied the mere male of the theatre(cross-out mine)."
 |
| Dazzling diseues x 3: Joyce Grenfell, Cornelia Otis Skinner & Ruth Draper (clockwise from left.) |
One of the reasons I've splurged this bit of my secret heart out here is because I believe we all have stories that we absolutely must share. Storytelling is healing because it allows a trauma or agony to be digested and metabolised from an abstracting distance. Storytelling doesn't only heal the teller, but heals the listener through their compassionate identification and the re-perspectivising of their similar agonies as the story touches on still-open eina's and disrememberings that need to be revisited now that time has been able to work its safe-distance, healing magic.
Much younger, I felt incredibly clumsy and humiliatingly misunderstood in my ability to recount stories - even simple ones about my day at school. I was constantly berated for being so excited in my telling that I'd hop, skip and jump between the chronology of my tale, confusing the listener, causing (apparently) quite p*ssed off frustration. Varsity comforted me in this little woe when I discovered the Post Modernism thesis that it is quite marvellously artful to make no sense at all. My twenties, however, got me writing daily in journals: about everyday joys, relationship tangles, what I thought about a film, the quick jotting down of a recipe, a dusty memory. Perhaps this is where I learnt to order my higgledy-piggledy stories into cogent narratives with a beginning, middle and end? The ability to relate a story quite succinctly was probably also improved by blogging. When I lived in England, I became gatvol of writing endless, updating emails to friends and family back home - so I started writing my news in one place and replying more meaningfully - without all my thousand stories - to those in my inbox who needed my response to their own news and yarns.
When people tell me they enjoy/are encouraged by my words, they usually add that they wish they could also write but simply lack that thing called 'talent'. I always tell them: we are our stories. We don't need talent to tell them. If you can think thoughts in your head, then you can display them in conversation or writing. And, as I said before, we MUST tell them. They inextricably weave connections between hearts - and this, at the end of the day, is what life is only all about. (Please forgive me for what some may see as pessimistically macabre - but which really is a sobering, priority-adjusting reality: When you are on your deathbed, you will be running through the heart-stories of those you met only unforgettably once, those of your beloved, told with her head on your heart in the dark, your children's recounted adventures - and your own stories.) And so, I propose that as storytelling has transformed every part of me and made me truer than true (to myself and others), that you begin to tell your stories. Wear your heart on your sleeve: {you}niquely, courageously, truthfully. You will fly!
PS. I think what keeps people silencing their stories is fear of being labeled as egotistical and self-centred. It silenced me, too. But remember: it is how we share them that matters: humbly, truthfully.
