Step up to your story

When I was recovering from my eating disorder, I had no language to describe my experiences. My suffering was my reality - there were no metaphors or literary devices or fancy language that I could use - my pain just was. 

When I first started Body Banter, one of my main goals was to encourage people who didn’t normally speak up about their experiences (whether this be due to cultural stigma or personal shame) to share their unique perspectives.

But a key barrier that I didn’t realize until very recently was that many people likely don’t even know how to describe their experiences. A key part of telling a coherent story is being able to talk about the beginning, middle and end. How can you do that if you don’t even know where you are in the story, let alone how to put it into a cohesive whole? 

The Body Banter project aims to highlight the fact that a good, real story doesn’t need to be written in fancy or beautiful prose - in fact, the nature of human stories are that they are always unfinished. We are constantly trying to identify where certain parts began, where we are today, and to continue writing about where we will be tomorrow. 

There’s a saying that my friend said to me one day, as I was complaining to her about how insecure I was about my future. “You will never be ready until you are doing it.”

In application to the act of writing and telling our own stories, we have to play ACTIVE roles in engaging in other people’s stories, resonating with their accounts, and learning to craft our own. And by doing so, we become better able to understand how our past connects to our present, and how we can set goals for who we hope to be in the future. It helps us better connect to our missions as human beings - to connect with ourselves, others and the world around us. 

So I encourage you to share, and if not that, at least write your stories down, however fragmented. As you keep on walking along your journey, you might just return to that little fragment, and find that it is the puzzle piece that you’ve been missing all along.