Telling the story of the moment

Randy left this comment on my blog post about Accepting Positive Feedback:

There's a little, or not so little, shock that some of our tellers experience when the audience so wholly appreciates his or her story ... the audience laughs, applauds, oohs and aahs. I think when a teller is completely involved in his or her story, s/he experiences a sense of not being entirely responsible for it. This has a lot to do with our culture of individuality, when it collides with the lived sense of allowing the truth of a time to flow through us and express what matters to the people who matter to us.

I wrote in that post about my own experience. I had a hard time looking directly at the audience while they were laughing at particularly funny parts of my story. Randy suggests that it can be hard to take credit for the audience’s enjoyment of a story when the storyteller lets the story flow naturally and be what it is meant to be in that time and place. The story naturally becomes what the audience needs in that moment.

This idea that surrendering to the moment makes the storyteller more able to connect with the audience suggests a high level of intimacy. I think this is right. Others have also said that storytelling is incredibly intimate (or can be). My looking away, then, might also be an attempt to pull back a little from a moment that was more intimate than I was prepared for. I went back to thinking that it was my story, instead a story for all of us.

I have been surprised in my conversations with people that the story resonated with so many other parents. This was the story about calling poison control. I viewed the story as mostly funny. Not necessarily that revealing or deep. I am aware that buried in there is the truth that parents often feel inadequate and fear severe punishment for making mistakes. I don’t dwell on this issue too much, but I think this is what really speaks to people. The humor in the story lets us laugh away our tension, but the message is clear and, apparently, needed.