Miss Cranky here has lost the thread. And without the thread, the story goes nowhere.
Right now, this energy of telling stories is moving through all of us. But some of us carry constant access to it, which means something specific.
You’re wired to tell stories. Not as a hobby. Not as a skill you picked up somewhere along the way. It’s how you think. How you teach. How you connect. When it’s working, people lean in, something shifts in the room, and what started as a casual conversation turns into something people carry with them for years.
But Cranky Pants here is chasing the stimulation for its own sake. New experiences, new ideas, new stories, always reaching for the next thing. And somewhere in all that reaching, the thread of what truly matters gets lost. The stories get entertaining, but they stop being illuminating. People are engaged, but they’re not changed, because the story ended up being about the telling instead of the truth sitting inside it.
This is the forgetting. Getting so caught up in the richness of the experience, the color of the detail, the emotional charge of telling it, that the actual point, the thing the story was supposed to land, slips right past everyone before they can catch it.
There’s also the version where the story starts drifting. From what actually happened into something more. The details get a little more vivid every time you tell it. What started as your story slowly turns into a composite, your experience woven together with somebody else’s, until the emotional truth is still there but the literal facts have shifted. It’s not exactly lying. But it can chip away at the trust that made people want to listen to you in the first place.
In class, there were times I got lost in telling the story, often because I lost focus on why I was telling the story. I learned to anchor in to the reason for sharing the story, or I lose focus and end up going in circles.
Here’s the question that helps you know when you’re in Cranky Pants territory: Did I have something important to say, and somehow end up here instead?
Only you know the honest answer.
In our next chat, we look at what the She Tells the Stories energy looks like in everyday life, when it’s working the way it’s supposed to.
I wouldn’t miss it. I hope you don’t!
Find your happy. Love what you do. Make a difference. Come back to me safely. See ya!
