I tell stories.

I weave the mundane into something identifiable. If I do it well, you will recognize a piece of your life in the details I share of mine.

I don’t think it’s enough to list out the things I do well, the things I’m terrible at, and the hopes and dreams I have for myself, my family, and my life. Instead, I want to understand how each of these things relate to each other, or how they contradict one another, or how they challenge my trajectory as I see it.

I’ve always been a storyteller. I started by telling stories about my motherhood on my first blog, because that’s often an all-encompassing time in one’s life. I was vulnerable before I identified what that meant. I didn’t mind then, and I don’t mind now, telling the stories of where I failed, and how I struggle and what I don’t understand, because I know when I’m brave enough to tell those stories that someone else around me can see themselves in my story. It gives someone else permission to struggle, and a community of all kinds is important to my own growth and my own understanding of what I’m really like.

I even earned a chance to tell one of my motherhood stories into a microphone, for the Listen To Your Mother show in Metro Detroit on May 1, 2016.

Super flattering screen shot, no?

I linked my love of storytelling to my love of politics and started The Voting Project during the Canadian Federal Election in 2015. I gather podcast subscriptions like it’s my job, I start conversations on social media, I teach students about pulling at the strings in their life and tying them together to describe who they are and what they want to be. Then I ask them to go bigger, be less rigid, bring their greatest triumph and their lowest moment together in a way that reminds them at best of their power, and at worst of their humanity.

Storytelling is that sweet spot where we get to redesign a moment in time, then share that moment with an audience to influence their perception of their own world. I tell stories to open my life up. The bonus is when it does the same for someone else.