Jessai Flores

Last week, I bought myself Joan Didion’s “The White Album” as a belated birthday present. As a person who almost exclusively reads books from antiquity and science papers for my classes, I figured it would bring me some joy to read something purely for pleasure again. I opened the book, exhausted from the day but committed to reviving my old hobby. 

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

“Oh,” I thought to myself. There were no thoughts for a couple of seconds as I processed what I had just read. Didion had cut to the core mission of my life, and the lives of the people that made me, in a single line. The stories people have told me have shaped me into the person I am today.

The biggest storytelling influence in my life has been my babysitter-turned-honorary-older sister, Beth. There is always a hilarious turn of events in which the characters are put through some sort of debacle, but ultimately the heroes come out victorious in the end. For example: the time she got kicked by a horse during the sorority rush process and had to do the whole thing in a boot, or the time her house burned down in college. Her humorous, unassuming and self-deprecating tone has you sitting on the edge of your seat. All of the sudden, she hits you with the punchline, and the story resolves happily. 

Some people just have the gift of telling a great story. Growing up, I would ask her to tell me more stories than I could count. But underneath those intriguing and funny stories, there was an important message, a framework for approaching life. Beth taught me that if you experience life with a sense of humor, you can turn almost any experience into one of amusement and gratitude later. In other words, when life gives you lemons, make a great story out of it. 

Whenever Beth tells you a story, you can picture yourself the story is taking place, and you can’t help but root for her and all of the protagonists. I called her yesterday and asked her to tell me another story, one that I remembered hearing but didn’t exactly remember the details of. 

She was exploring Portugal with her brother, his wife and her two other brothers on rental Vespas. Even over the phone, the picture was so clear. They took a wrong turn off of the Portuguese road on the Vespas, and somehow ended up six Vespas in a row, on a busy ten-lane highway. Cars were honking at them, and they were all freaking out as the cars got closer and closer. And get this, the Vespas were going at a speed of 15 miles per hour, tops. A herd of Americans, crawling along the shoulder of the highway on their silly Vespas that they barely know how to drive. Eventually they found their way off the highway with their limbs all intact, but with their Vespa-driving street cred? Not so much. “My family still jokes about it to this day,” she said. Wholesome, funny and satisfying, her stories make you grateful for the own experiences in your life and the people you share them with. They make you picture you and your friends in the same situation, laughing after an exhausting day, just grateful to be together. 

I have subconsciously adopted the same storytelling framework. My best friend and I spent a life-changing week hiking on the Camino de Santiago this summer. When people ask me about my experience, I tell them first not about the beauty of the old Spanish churches or the peaceful meadows and run down walls creeping with ivy, but the time our train got canceled and we got driven around on an old rickety bus for two hours, just to go back to the same train station. I tell them about us deliriously cracking up, finally on a train home, and looking over at each other and realizing how lucky we were to have found each other and experienced life together.

Whenever I tell another story about some dumb adventure with my friends or some silly problem in my life, I think about 5-year-old me, sitting on my bed, listening to Beth tell me a story before I fall asleep. Joan Didion so perfectly embodies with the first line of her book what all of Beth’s stories taught me, that storytelling is one of the ultimate triumphs of our lives because it lets us define who we are and what we value. Every time I tell a story to try to make some sort of meaning out of my life, I am trying to channel her.