Why Stories Are Important | How We Fight (Part 1)

I am 25 years old, and I will never meet everyone in this world.

A girl grows up in a small town. She is surrounded by family, a community, and her life is complicated and difficult in its own ways. She works hard. She has her faith, her beliefs. She watches boys and girls in her community go to war, some come back and some don't and some are unrecognizable. She watches some films, reads some books, watches some TV.

She sees certain stories played out, again and again. She watches a film about a man not unlike her neighbor who goes to fight a war against an enemy. She knows what that enemy looks like. She reads a book about a romance between two people who remind her of her parents. She knows what those good people look like. She watches the news and sees that a young man who looks just like her son is being accused of committing a crime so heinous, it can't be real. She knows what injustice is. She reads the newspaper and sees that a policewoman who looks just like her sister-in-law is being rebuked for the obviously accidental death of an older woman (who can't be from around here, she looks so out of place).

Our world is shaped by the stories we encounter. This is not something that applies only to readers or certain types of people, rather it's a trait shared by all humans across every culture on earth. Storytelling - in some form or other - has guided mankind since our first days.

Storytelling has also always had another power, one that has not yet fully been unlocked. This is the power of expansion.

Like me, the hypothetical girl/woman described above, will never be able to meet everyone on earth. Like me, she will navigate life doing the best she can with the tools she has. She will look at people and make connections to what she knows. She will make decisions based on these connections. She will recognize the humanity in other's based on her experiences.

And like me, she will fail.

She will fail because it is impossible to know everyone. Humans are complex and baffling. Our lives are huge, but they are also tiny and isolated. There will always be things in this world that are foreign to me, types of people I have never met, situations I've never imagined, beliefs I could never conceive of. Some of these things will be frightening in their foreignness, in their difference from what I believe in.

The question then becomes: How do I learn to set aside that fear?

Stories provide us with settings that we could otherwise never encounter. Not only can stories force us to see the world through the eyes of someone different or foreign, it can introduce us to entire contexts that we might not have otherwise encountered. These don't have to be fiction and they don't have to be literature. I learned about Chinese marketplaces from a friend who wandered through them. I learned about the struggles of being blind from the side of a blind friend. I learned about the discrimination against queer people from friends who almost didn't have the words.

But I don't know everyone. I learned about the changing landscape of modern Nigeria from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I learned about Georgia's post-independence struggle in the early 1990s from Nana Ekvtimishvili's film In Bloom. I've learned about ancient Korea from Linda Sue Park's A Single Shard, about the struggles of being black in upper-class 18th century England through the film Belle, about one girl's experience with mental illness from the television show My Mad Fat Diary, and so on.

And this, of course, does nothing in regards to stories that simply normalize things I'm not familiar with. Sometimes, just the act of showing that something different to one person is, in fact, normal is critical, whether it relates to race, ethnicity, religion, physical ability, gender and identity, sexuality, or class background. Stories allow us to recognize humanity in people we've never met, in situations we've never encountered, in cultures we previously didn't understand.

These all combat hate, and this is one way in which we fight.