“The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.”
– Mary Catherine Bateson
I have been journaling for as long as I can remember. Back when I was little, my journals were glittery, hard-cover notebooks with decorated pages. Every entry, every day, was a short description of my day: “Dear diary, today I woke up at 8 a.m. and had breakfast…” My entries captured my external landscape and were recollections of simple events. My words matched my lived experience and basic inner life. As I grew, my vocabulary expanded to describe an increasingly complex inner life, and my sentences matched that complexity. My words grew as life became richer and more complicated. And yet, my entry journals have remained the same to this day—a recollection of my lived experience and inner life. Of course, now I don’t start with “Dear diary” as I know I am writing to myself, and I do not require such formality. Nor I write every day, only when some events (internal or external) occurred and need sorting out in my mind.
Journaling provides me with an “external” perspective of events, which helps me recognise my patterns and clarify my thoughts and feelings.
In 2020, I started writing short stories. The first one just “happened” effortlessly. One morning, the title “84 Escalones” (84 Steps) came to my mind, and I went along with it. I immediately felt “in the zone” while writing; it was almost as if my brain was off, and there was a current flowing through me, making me type the words that eventually became this first short story. I only wrote a memory from my childhood: visiting my paternal grandparent’s flat every Friday after school. A memory I didn’t know was lodged in the attic of my mind and the meaning that habit had to me.
You see, journaling is simply documenting what happened. Storytelling involves illustrating the meaning of what happened. Journaling helps us see what happened from an external perspective. Storytelling helps us understand what those events meant to us. Storytelling gives us an entry point to our inner narrative, to the stories through which we learn. The thing is that we do not learn from lived experience but from the meaning we create or extract from those experiences.
This is why it is so healthy to revisit those inner narratives and update those meanings because…
“The stories we tell literally make the world. If you want to change the world, you need to change your story.”·
– Michael Margolis
Why do our inner stories make the (our) world? Because they determine our behaviour.
Your internal narrative is the ongoing story you tell yourself about who you are based on the experiences and beliefs you’ve formed throughout your life. These beliefs are powerful; they shape your present reality and influence your future.
Fast forward 4 years since that magical, early pandemic lockdown morning in 2020, and I have written ten short stories about memories and meanings. Whenever I finish a story, all I feel is becoming lighter, as if I was shedding some invisible burdens. Also, I should share with you that writing some stories gets really hard; tears were shed, deep breaths were taken, and the imperative of stepping away from the keyboard was taken because some stories were “muddy” and their meaning painful. But these stories were the most important as they were carrying the heaviest weights.
I am still writing short stories, and I plan on publishing them once I feel a sense of completion. Not yet, but I am closer to closing the circle I opened with “84 escalones.”
In the spirit of inciting you to peek into your own memory chest in your attic, I have a fragment from Sandra Cisneros’s book La Casa en Mango Street and a writing prompt to explore the meaning of your name. Click on the button below to access the writing module, and if you are up to it, email me your response.
Full disclosure: The writing module mentioned above is part of my program, “Tell Your Own Story: Autobiographical Writing to Improve Your Spanish“ (and your life! 😜). The program has two modalities: self-paced and guided (with me in 1:1 sessions). If you are interested, have a look at the details here or reply to this email for more information.
