Saving the Story
~ by Christina Baldwin
When I began teaching journal writing in the late 1970s, I took my classes to the Minnesota Historical Society to explore their treasure trove of “not famous” voices. Wearing white gloves and masks to protect fragile pages of spidery handwriting from our fingerprints and breath, we poured over correspondence and diaries from the pioneer and Victorian era. If the life stories of “ordinary people” were valued to the Historical Society, maybe the letters and journals we were writing would be valued someday too.
That someday has come.
In the past nearly fifty years, an entire genre of memoirs by ordinary people has kept the publishing industry solvent while expanding our sense of human community, empathy, adventure, and identity. And now with access to blogging, Substack, the Medium, and social media, stories of ordinary people are exploding everywhere all at once. This explosion can be overwhelming, especially in environments where anecdotes float in a verbal/visual debris field without context or chronology. Those of us who have been writing away in journals are devotees of context and chronology: that's what keeping the narrative thread of our lives gives us. We don't have to be somebody of power or fame, we all have lives that contain jeweled choice points waiting to be polished into story.
It is my life work to help people understand the true nature of story and to harness story's power and potential. Words are how we think: story is how we link. Story is the great connector of experience, the way we make meaning, bring order into chaos. Taking authorship of our own lives through how we tell our stories creates pathways that empower us, allow us to live more fully with what is, and imagine a future of personal strength.
"Once upon a time there was a little girl who felt different from the rest of her family…" Many of us have a story that could begin with some variation on a theme of difference, and we can imagine a number of ways this story could unfold. Maybe the little girl is punished for her difference. Maybe she feels herself a victim of not belonging. Maybe she makes bad choices and poor marriages. OR maybe she discovers this sense of difference is her superpower, the gift she brings to the world around her, the essential perspective she has to offer. The emotional "fact" remains, but the interpretation and what she does with it—as a child and an adult—is the authorship of her life.
When I was fourteen years old, I read The Diary of Anne Frank and was so inspired by the revelation that a young girl's voice could have impact, I opened a notebook and began copying her—not her words or experience but breaking the internal silences I was keeping. I created a secret place to write, hidden under my father's workbench in the basement with a lamp and a sofa pillow. I confessed which boy I liked from school, and my fears as the oldest child in my parents' shouting-match of a marriage. On those pages I whispered to myself my doubts and longings, my dreams to become a writer. And it was in this private practice I slowly gave birth to myself. All these years later, with boxes of filled notebooks tucked in back closets, I count this decision to write my life as a foundation for who I have become and what I have done. I am still in that exploration and love being in it with others.
First, we claim our personal stories; then we can help others claim their stories.
Holding onto the narrative thread is an important contribution in these times. History is what scholars and conquerors will say happened: story is what it was like to live on the ground. We are all living on the ground in this historical moment, and tending to personal story is a way to chart our course. Our stories, whether left shimmering in the electronic blogosphere, or stashed on paper letters and journals, become a treasure and a mystery - for our own life review, for grandchildren, for archives, for the mystery of the long clock that ticks beyond our lives.
Bio: Christina Baldwin is a pioneer in the renaissance of journal writing and author of groundbreaking books on writing, story, hosting circles of sacred space, and most recently an historical novel. See www.christinabaldwin.com for books and resources.
➡️ Join Christina Baldwin and a community of informal writers and storycatchers in her five week course for Natural Transitions Institute. Details here: https://www.naturaltransitions.org/offers/6Ls94N6X/checkout
