When you think of storytelling, what comes to mind? Is it novels, movies, or the fairytales of your youth? Or maybe it makes you think of theater or dance, even music — an interpretation or reimagining of a journey or a quest.

That’s all storytelling is at its core — an account of something that happened, and how something changed from beginning to end.  

We also tell stories in our daily lives. They might be less produced and have smaller audiences than the ones we see onscreen, but whether we notice it or not, we are constantly relaying the experience of our lives in stories. What we dreamed about, how we slept, what we wanted to be when we grew up, how we met our best friend, why we always wanted to go to France, where and when and who we were with the first time we felt truly alive — these are how we share our experiences with one another, and how we make sense of them to ourselves. 

“They might be less produced and have smaller audiences than the ones we see onscreen, but whether we notice it or not, we are constantly relaying the experience of our lives in stories.”

Because in art and in life there is one thing that all storytelling invites us to do: make sense and find meaning in what happens to us. 

Events that seem random or out of our control become tragedies that teach us what really matters; hilarious anecdotes that reveal the true nature of a loved one; winding, soul-seeking journeys that ultimately bring us peace. Stories are how we connect with each other through difference, and how we deepen our capacity for compassion and understanding for one another. But like anything truly powerful, their potential to impact our lives for the better is in equal measure to their potential to impact our lives for the worse.

It’s not even all down to the conclusions we might draw from the stories we make of our lives — in time, we often revise these. What we thought was an ending might have been a beginning, or a very messy middle. Often, we aren’t working with the entire story anyway — especially when we’re telling stories to ourselves. It’s often just fragments that make up the shape of our interior lives, creating the very first domino in an endless chain of details that will ultimately determine what kind of a life we believe we’re living.

No matter how little control we have over so much of the world around us, we have immense power in the way we talk about it. Starting from the moment we begin naming each person, place, and thing, we are wielding a tool that has the ability to build and to destroy our most basic connection to who we are and what sort of life we’re living. That tool? Our language.

Just words

I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that language is as close to magic as many of us might ever get. The words we use to tell our stories to ourselves and to each other have the most terrifying potential to bring us together, or tear us apart. There’s even a word that describes this self-opposing potential perfectly: to cleave, which means both to bind together and to break apart. Language cleaves us, and we use it every day without thinking.

“The words we use to tell our stories to ourselves and to each other have the most terrifying potential to bring us together, or tear us apart.”

Most of us aren’t very careful or precise with our words in casual, daily conversation, and so it can be easy to start off describing a situation from a fairly neutral space before landing on more emotive language over time, without any idea how this tonal shift might also impact our worldview.

When it comes to the words we’re using in our interior lives, we are influencing how we govern our bodies, our environments, our interpersonal dynamics, values, relationship to success, and so much more. Think about that. It’s the difference between providing information (“We’re out of milk”) and assigning blame (“You drank the last of the milk”). It’s naming a sensation (“These pants are tight”) versus presenting a value judgment (“I’ve really let myself go”). It’s sharing an emotion and expressing a need (“I’m feeling overstimulated, so I’m going to take a minute to calm down”) instead of surrenduring to the feeling and lashing out (“I can’t believe I did that! Just leave me alone!”).

The trouble is that we tend to want to skip past the observation stage and jump right to interpreting. When we ask what happened, we aren’t always looking for a play-by-play, right? We want to know what it means, how we feel, and what the lesson is.

This is not only a really sloppy way to tell a story, but can often become actively harmful to others and to ourselves. Skipping the part where we just take in as much information with as neutral a lens as possible is a surefire way to miss the sort of key details that will determine whether your words will cleave something together or apart.

Observing — for longer than you think

In my thirties, I was an educator at an American art museum where I was trained in the practice of public interpretation. As a field, interpretation is often linked to historical and heritage sites, as well as national parks. Many times, I was the only representative from an arts institution, but the tenants of the practice were easily transferrable, because whether you are being guided by a park ranger or a historian or a museum docent, you will be invited to start in the same place: by naming what you see.   

“Whether you are being guided by a park ranger or a historian or a museum docent, you will be invited to start in the same place: by naming what you see.”

After five years guiding countless public tours, I can confidently say that most of us have a hard time with this. There’s something about standing in front of a painting and being asked “What do you see?” that makes most adults break out in a cold sweat. Because what most people think this question is asking is “What do you think this means?” They also think there is only one right answer, and they’re terrified of getting it wrong.

Visual thinking strategies is a technique often used in interpretation practices, and the first step is pretty basic: Describe, literally, what you see. (Note: I am using the pre-2014 definition of the word literally, meaning exactly and without exaggeration.) So if looking at, say, Amy Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama, you aren’t going to name the artist, the sitter, or anything else that isn’t strictly visually apparent in the painting itself. You’re going to say instead: “This is a painting of a woman. She’s wearing a long dress. It has some color blocking and black and white patterns on its skirt. She appears to be sitting; she is holding one hand under her chin, and looking directly at the viewer. There is nothing around her. The background is one shade of light blue. Her skin is painted in grayscale.”

After naming what we can see, we can start adding information: This is the artist’s name. This is the title. You can read the didactic on the wall, learn all the specifics of the medium and the provenance. And then, you look at the painting again.

“We’re not assigning meaning to our observations yet, we’re just contextualizing them with some more information.”

Here’s the part that always surprises people: We are still, at this point, not going to discuss anything they expected when they hear the word “interpret.” We’re not assigning meaning to our observations yet, we’re just contextualizing them with some more information. Maybe the didactic mentions the dress design and its ties to Pop art; or maybe it draws a connection to the quilting patterns of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Maybe it only gives an artist bio, but mentions that painting the skin tone in grayscale is a hallmark of Sherald’s portraits of Black figures. Whatever the new information, you go back and look again, and you notice what’s changed.

It’s only after spending a solid ten minutes or so simply looking at the painting that I’d invite the group to speak more freely. When you consider that the average museum visitor looks at a work of art for about 27 seconds, I know that this seems like an eternity. But it is also what turns a passing glance into something impactful.

Every time, my tours were amazed at how much more deeply they felt, understood, and saw in the work after ten minutes of observation. They’d often discuss how painting skin in black and white evoked old photography, which would lead to reflections about the goal of portraiture versus documentation, and the medium most commonly used across class and race. We’d usually end up covering everything I would have shared in a lecture, but the outcome of such a tour would have been mediocre by comparison. Guiding them to practice a slower pace of engagement opened up opportunities to experience the work firsthand, turning what might have been a forgettable or even negative experience into something truly meaningful.

Slowing down our sensory input is essential to processing our experiences into stories. Because when we rush to decide what something means, we’re often not only missing details, but also the opportunity to connect in an authentic way. When it comes to viewing a painting, that might not feel like such a high stakes issue; but you can imagine how catastrophic that might be when applied to your life.

Practicing in the wild

On a recent flight by myself, seated snuggly in the window next to an empty middle seat and a businessman on the aisle who was mercifully keeping to himself, I almost cried with joy. It had been a super stressful work week, I’d only slept about three hours the night before, and my daughter was a wreck when she said goodbye to me that morning. But I had a bag full of treats, an empty seat next to me, my noise-cancelling headphones, and a nearly four hour flight where I had nothing to do but work on my novel. To me, this is total bliss.

And then I felt the first few bumps on the back of my seat. I thought it was just the passenger behind me settling in, until it happened again. And again. A rhythmic banging started, and then a big, sustained push. A minute passed, just long enough for me to think it was over. Then at exactly the moment I put my water bottle to my lips, my seat jerked hard, sloshing water over my face and onto my lap. Now I was pissed. I took off my headphones and whipped around to glare at the person behind me, and I found myself faced with a scene that had me processing a lot of information at once.

“I took off my headphones and whipped around to glare at the person behind me, and I found myself faced with a scene that had me processing a lot of information at once.”

A young mother was juggling a snack bag and a bunch of Kleenex in the middle seat, two young kids on either side. Each was a flurry of motion and noise: The girl on the aisle was crying, her hands and hair covered in yogurt. The boy behind me was wriggling out from under his seatbelt. He climbed up into his chair and started yelling, “Daddy!” over and over to a man sitting by himself several rows back. The man lifted one hand serenely and waved, then put on his headphones and bent over his phone. The boy plopped back down into his seat while I watched, lifting both feet and throwing them as hard as he could against the back of my chair.

The mother looked up and our eyes met between the seats. Her face was absolutely stricken with anxiety, clearly concerned that someone like me was going to be angry that she couldn’t control her kids. She opened her mouth, an apology already on her face, and I felt an almost violent desire to stop her from giving it.

“I have a young child,” I said instead, and I felt myself really, genuinely smile. I gestured at her son, who was knocking against my chair with his fist. “So please do not worry about me.”

“Really? Thank you,” she said. “It’s their first flight.” She melted, and I felt her relief in my own body.

“Wow!” I said to the kids. “You guys are doing so great.”

I have traveled alone with my daughter; I know exactly what that specific cocktail of anxiety, overstimulation, hope, and frustration feels like. I know how it is to face a crowd of strangers in a place where families are allowed despite not being designed to accomodate them. I know how lonely it can be when people are cold and judgmental as we try to navigate the situation as best we can. And I know what it feels like when people make room you, how little it takes to make a hostile space feel suddenly welcoming. 

“I know what it feels like when people make room you, how little it takes to make a hostile space feel suddenly welcoming.”

I was faced with a choice: One version of this story was of a stressful flight, where a loud, obnoxious child kicked my seat the entire flight, and his mother did nothing to stop him. Another version is that I gave a fellow mother one less thing to stress about during a deeply stressful situation. And honestly, it wasn’t that bad after I understood what was going on — it all sort of melted into the general turbulence of the flight.

I don’t want to paint a picture of me as some sort of benevolent hero — I’m actually kind of withdrawn and taciturn in crowds, with an RBF that is probably descended from gorgons. Left to my own unchecked tendencies, I don’t willingly talk to neighbors, and in public I generally want to be left to my own little thoughts without interruption. There are many, many other examples in my life where I have huffed and shot dirty looks or even actually said something snarky to a stranger who’d offended me with their mere presence. (The nerve!)

And for the record: I don’t think that spending four hours with a toddler kicking my seat was like, the most fun thing in the world. But it became manageable because of what doing so meant in this story, which only starts with the moment I decided to give a fellow mother a little more breathing room.

The more lasting effect of the experience is that it challenged self-limiting beliefs about my capacity to move through public spaces. It revealed a quality of my character I wouldn’t have ever thought I possessed. And now I’m on the lookout for more opportunities to flex those muscles.

What you see, not what you know

Familiarity complicates things. We have a tendency to trust what we know over what we are actually observing.

If I wasn’t trying to build this habit, I might continue to tell stories about how I become an inevitable grump in public. I am familiar with this version of myself. But if I believe that’s really who I am, and that’s the only way I can ever be, then it makes almost every instance of going out in public only about experiencing the inconveniences of others. It makes every errand a dreaded event, miserable before it’s begun.

“We have a tendency to trust what we know over what we are actually observing.”

I don’t want to dread walking the dog or going to the grocery store or taking the bus just because I’m telling myself that I don’t like to be around people. I have to stop trusting that I already know how all these experiences are going to go, and learn to be open to the experiences they actually are. Otherwise, I’m not really living my actual life, or letting myself grow — I’m just telling the same warped version of events I’ve already decided are true.

I learned this lesson many times over the years as an art student, when I’d spend hours in a figure drawing class and come out with something that looked nothing like the model. The problem was almost always because I had stopped really looking at the model — she was familiar to me, so my attention got lax.

“Don’t draw what you remember a foot looks like,” one teacher used to say. “Your memory doesn’t have this foot, right here, right now, in front of you. That’s the foot I want you to draw.”

I wonder what might happen if I keep building the habit of observation — of not drawing what I think I remember a foot looks like, but drawing the foot that’s actually here, now, right in front of me.

Stephanie H. Fallon is a Contributing Editor at The Good Trade. She is a writer originally from Houston, Texas and holds an MFA from the Jackson Center of Creative Writing at Hollins University. She lives with her family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and she is the author of Finishing Lines, where she writes about her fear of finishing, living a creative life, and (medical) motherhood. Since 2022, she has been reviewing sustainable home and lifestyle brands, fact-checking sustainability claims, and bringing her sharp editorial skills to every product review. Say hi on Instagram or on her website.