I sit behind this keyboard regularly thinking about the various progressions and places my life goes.  All formatted and written in a way that I hope comes across easy and accessible.  I figure, if I can at least tell you all a story, then maybe it would make what I have to say more bearable.  I’m not a very good storyteller, at least in person I struggle with it.  There is something about proper storytelling that is mystical and enticing to me.  Great storytelling makes you feel what the teller is feeling, see what the teller saw, and understand the story that they are building right in front of you.  It grips you and takes you on a journey, only to put you back to where you were before right at the end.

I think we all experience storytelling, it permeates our lives in the small, telling people about our day, to the large, reliving a major event in our lives.  It’s how we go about getting updates and information about the people around us.

But for me, I always have a hard time with it.  I get bogged down with trying to explain everything, and if I miss something, I’ll go back and correct the record.  I don’t know where to start or end, the rise and fall that feels more like a plateau than the mountain it should be.  I get tripped up by the words and am compelled to go through the every minute and irrelevant detail.  A story people suspect should only be a couple minutes turns into a marathon full of tangential information and excessive need to correct.  The format to which feels more like a report than story, like the telling of facts than an adventure.

I grew up with them though.  The first storyteller in my life was my dad who used to tell me from the bedside, both reading from great books aloud right, and telling bits and pieces from his own life over the years.  There was always something exciting about it, it was then not strange that I picked up listening to others as a habit.  I relish the stories they decide to weave right in front of me.  That’s probably why I also feel so comfortable listening to the background noise of talk of radio and have filled my phone to the brim with podcasts spinning stories and narratives.
It’s just my hope that I can somehow capture the magic storytelling has locked within.  As with all things in my life, its work in progress.  I’ve been told to start with a place and a problem.  Both things that are hard for me, because my problems usually happen over many nights and many places.  It’s hard to pinpoint where there the breakthrough happens, so my stories muddle together and lose its meaning like a trying to transport a puddle with your hands.   It’s something I hope to work at for the future, so when it comes to my turn by to tell my story, people will be happy to listen.