Seeing Things Differently

As the summer comes to a close, I’m wrapping up my first workshop for The Story Assembly, Can I Get a Witness? I’m holding both a readiness and a trepidation in putting it down.

I learned so much through creating and delivering it that I’m excited to move on from it. I feel like I’ve outgrown it—like an itchiness to shed a molting skin—but there’s also some anxiety about what’s to come. Perhaps this is what a new, soft body feels like when it lets its spent skin go: the thrill of fresh air against new flesh, matched equally by the vulnerability of having lost the thing that used to protect it.

That’s a little bit how I feel right now.

How it began

The Story Assembly started as a flicker of an idea last winter. By March, I had reached the point where I knew I needed to be brave enough to put some of those ideas in front of other people. It was time to see what sank and what swam!

I had been longing for this kind of discovery since sunsetting my podcast in 2023. There is something about everyday conversation that has always fascinated me—the things people say when they’re given the space to talk, the things they don’t say, and the moments when a conversation suddenly becomes something more than either person expected.

Do you know that feeling?

When I talk about storytelling, I don’t mean standing on a stage with a microphone. I mean the stories we tell every day—about work and family and love and disappointment. The stories we tell about ourselves. The stories we repeat so often they become part of how we understand who we are.

The Story Assembly grew from a desire to pay closer attention to those stories—not only how we tell them, but how we receive them—and to explore whether we might use storytelling more intentionally to build better relationships.

So this summer, I created a workshop and put the idea in a room with actual people. Then I did it again. And again. And again. Between May and August, dozens of people joined me for four versions of Can I Get a Witness? It was my throat clearing, my experiment, my starting line for this idea.

Putting the idea in the room

After every workshop, I went home and debriefed. What worked? What didn’t? Where did the energy change? What confused people? What surprised them? What surprised me? I changed exercises. Reworked language. Tossed things that didn’t land and built new things to replace them. There were plenty of practical lessons about facilitation and workshop design. But something else was happening in those rooms, too.

I was beginning to see the idea itself differently.

We’re always editing

The Story Assembly began, in part, with my belief that we need to learn to be better witnesses to one another’s stories.

I knew what it felt like to tell someone something important and have them truly receive it. I knew how different that felt from being interrupted, advised, reassured, analyzed, or having someone immediately respond with a story of their own. What I hadn’t thought nearly as much about was everything that happens before a story is told.

With each session, I became increasingly aware of how much people didn’t say. How much they changed. How often they softened a story for the sake of the listener. And somewhere in watching them, I realized: I do this all the time.

I am a constant editor.

I edit myself according to who is sitting across from me. I anticipate what someone might think, what might make them uncomfortable, what they might misunderstand, what might feel like too much. Sometimes I soften. Sometimes I leave something out. Sometimes I make myself smaller in the telling. And I’m good at it.

That realization has stayed with me. Because if we are constantly editing our stories according to how we expect them to be received, then witnessing isn’t simply about making someone feel heard after they’ve spoken.

The way we listen may influence what another person feels safe enough to say in the first place.

I don’t know that we ever become completely unedited. Maybe we shouldn’t. But I watched people become less edited when they trusted the room around them.

And that has me thinking differently about what it means to really listen to someone.

Story as an entry point

Something else happened again and again this summer. People told hard stories. There was plenty of laughter and connectedness in these workshops, but there were also stories about grief, estrangement, divorce, diagnoses, and other things people were carrying. And it made me wonder about another possibility for storytelling.

Sometimes saying the hard thing directly is just...too hard. But a story gives us somewhere to begin. It lets us take someone to a moment. It gives us people and places and details. It lets us approach something enormous through something smaller and more specific.

Maybe we don’t have to begin with the enormous declaration. Maybe we can enter through the side door of a story.

After one session, a participant pulled me aside. During the workshop, she had shared a story about something painful—something she spends a great deal of time carrying. She told me afterward that she hadn’t planned to tell that particular story. It had simply emerged during the exercise, and she was glad that it had. She also told me about the compassion—and some relief—she experienced in having it received.

I keep thinking about that.

She hadn’t come into the room planning to talk about it. Something about the story, the invitation, or perhaps the way the people around her were receiving it made that particular story possible to tell. And afterward, the hard thing was still hard.

Storytelling didn’t make it disappear. Being witnessed didn’t solve it. But for a little while, she was able to put down the heavy stone she had been carrying. And rest.

What’s next

So, I’m ending the summer with a different understanding of this work than I had when I started. I still believe stories connect us. I still believe that learning how to witness another person’s story matters. But now I’m much more curious about everything happening between those two things.

What do we decide is safe to tell? How much of ourselves are we editing before the words ever leave our mouths? What does another person do—sometimes without even knowing it—that tells us we can keep going? And could storytelling give us another way into the conversations that feel too difficult to begin directly?

I don’t have answers to all of those questions. Four workshops certainly haven’t given me the laws of human storytelling. But they have given me better questions.

And maybe that’s what this first summer of The Story Assembly was supposed to do. And now I’m ready to find out what comes next.