On Storytelling

Recently, I hung out with a few new friends, and ended up telling them about the time I had a baby in the bathtub of my parents’ house. (n.b. this post is not a graphic birth story, at all. no need to click away if you are faint of heart or weak of stomach.)

Some of you remember when this happened. Any woman who becomes friends with me will eventually hear this story. It’s personal, but also hysterical and entertaining. After telling it again with almost-six-years-later perspective, I thought it would be fun to go back and read what I wrote about it as it happened. I first wrote a blog post announcing we were in North Carolina and planning on a homebirth. Then I wrote a birth story.

The story I have told for the last several years remotely resembles those stories. It contains several of the same key facts. But overall the feel is very different. In fact, everyone’s favorite parts weren’t mentioned at all!

Perhaps, with so little time and distance, I felt like those details weren’t appropriate to share. Over the years, they became less so. Maybe I became a better storyteller, or this story is just better suited to an oral telling rather than a written one.

I have been thinking about stories and storytelling quite a bit lately, and one thought I can’t shake is that when you write a story and publish it, you lose several things. The tone and response of the audience drives a telling, and you lose that feedback. Also, you lose the control of getting to decide who hears the story and when. (There are some possible gains as well, such as preserving it for the future or even profitting from it, I don’t deny them.)

Maybe some of our greatest stories are best left unwritten. But telling them, and listening to others tell theirs, makes me feel somehow very human.