She almost didn’t tell it. Someone needed her to.
A quick note before you read this one. It touches on suicide and suicide loss. If that is a hard topic for you right now, take care of yourself first. This will be here whenever you are ready for it.
The Captivating Narrator has stopped collecting stories and started knowing which ones belong to her to tell.
When this energy is in its best version, your storytelling becomes something that changes people, not just something they enjoy hearing. They are changed by it.
The story you tell in a meeting. The offhand example you drop into a conversation. The way you recount something from your own life at exactly the right moment. Those things create the kind of recognition that shifts how someone sees themselves. That is not entertainment. That is transformation through story.
At this level, the “I believe” voice carries real weight. You have earned the right to that belief through what you have lived, through the stories you have gathered and told and refined, through letting your own life become the material for what you share. People do not just hear your stories. They feel the belief underneath them. And that feeling is what opens them up to something new.
Your best self here has also made peace with the fact that stories are never perfectly objective. They are filtered through what mattered to you. Shaped by what you learned. That is what makes a story human. And human is what makes it land.
Some of my most memorable moments as a professor are how my students responded to the stories I shared.
My life has been profoundly influenced by death by suicide. Many family members died that way. I have had challenging times in which I was suicidal. My son has lost some of his closest friends to death by suicide. It changed us as a family.
When I felt the pull to share a bit of this story with my students, I did. Carefully, in an effort to help whoever needed to hear it. I still hear from students about how sharing my story affected them. When I questioned whether to talk about it, I remembered this.
In my first ten years of teaching, students filled out a paper evaluation of their professors, with room to write feedback. Reading the comments was always interesting. They ranged from “I love her. She’s the best professor I ever had,” to “This woman can’t teach. She’s the worst.” Happily, there were more good than bad.
We got the written feedback about a month after the semester ended. I was reading through the stack of comments when one of them stopped me, chills running through my body.
In the center of the page was a lovely note thanking me for how I taught and what I did for my students. In the lower left corner, in tiny, tiny writing, the student had written this:
“Thank you for sharing the story of your son’s friends and your family. If you hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t still be here.”
I learned to trust that the nudges give me the signal about the timing of the stories I tell. Because telling the story can make a difference for someone.
You were given a voice that says “I believe.” Use it for the things you truly believe, from the depth of what you have lived, and watch what happens in the rooms you walk into.
Find your happy. Love what you do. Make a difference. Come back to me safely. See ya!
