Where do all the stories go?

Fosterverse Weekly #41

May 20, 2025

lighted we are all made of stories red neon wall signage inside room — Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash

People often tell me a lot about themselves, really fast. It's been this way since I was a kid.

Seventh grade. My first year in public schools after 7 years of Waldorf school. I was a complete fucking weirdo...I hadn't learned the normal social games yet. I dressed strange, I was a bit too sincere, I didn't know how to hide my crushes (that one never went away).

Somehow I became friends with a couple of the popular girls, although I think they were a little cautious about being publicly friendly with me. I was so far outside their social context that they felt safe being honest with me, because nothing I could do or say would impact their social standing.

In the span of a school year, that led me to become the primary support for one girl in her depression and self-harm. Suddenly, at 12, I felt personally responsible for the well-being of someone I hardly knew outside of our Skype chats. It was my first year with my own laptop, and being away from it for too long was scary -- what if she needed me, and I wasn't there? I never told anyone, because I didn't know what they might do or say.

I transferred schools after that year, but this relationship continued for a year or more after I left. I learned what to say to put her at ease, and in parallel, she gradually stopped needing me. I have no idea if that was because she healed, or found someone closer to help her, or something less hopeful. I felt both relieved of my hidden responsibility and deprived of a source of meaning.

I started becoming a vessel for other people to pour their stories into.

People I've spent somewhere between minutes and days with have told me about their fucked up families, about the horrific crimes they've been part of, about their hopes and fears and still-bleeding breakups and suicide attempts and and and and

Why? Why do they trust me?

I have always been a lover of stories. In many ways I live my life in pursuit of good stories, more than in pursuit of in-the-moment enjoyment. Over time those two things have converged, and now I can feel the story writing itself in real time. I find myself laughing at hardships I've brought upon myself or feeling grateful for whatever I will learn from a new flavor of pain I'm tasting.

Most of the stories I inhabit are not my own -- they are cobbled-together pieces of other people's stories, which are in turn made up of yet other people's stories, an ever-growing patchwork of hazy memory and intuition.

I've started seeing stories everywhere. The world is full of their ghosts: two chairs facing each other on a patio, a sun-baked RV that has seen more dreams than miles, a white-haired Cherokee woman's warm yet wary smile. A pair of hands turned to cracked leather by decades of work. A walker abandoned under a New York streetlight. A young man's piercing eyes.

Where do stories go? A hundred thousand experiences become a single number in a spreadsheet, losing their humanity in the process. We collectively pretend to make sense of reality with statistics, but objectivity has not the slightest chance against a single well-told story. The moments of upheaval that can shape a generation are birthed by suffering made real, a deeply personal experience gone public. For all our so-called rationality, we are creatures of experience and emotion.

When I write, I always start by trying to describe a concept, and always end up telling a story instead. There are limits to how well I can encapsulate an idea by describing it, but I can invite someone to join me in the world that the idea came from, at least for the time it takes to read an essay.

When we think about storytelling we usually focus on the teller, but stories also need someone to receive them. Many would-be storytellers are silent because they have no one to draw their stories out of them.

So I try to hold as many stories as I can. I am not the right vessel for every story, but the more of them I hear, the more they come to me seemingly unbidden. Somehow, every new story I hold gives me the space for yet another.