hey cuties!
This week was fun, thanks for the challenging assignment, Erika!
Below is my story. I don’t actually have any beef with coffee or the consumption of coffee, though this tale may have been inspired by one person’s (your truly) inability to handle her caffeine.
I’ve always been an incredibly shy person, I would say veering past shyness and into the realm of anxiety. In the comic above, I give a little shout out to my love of solitude, but for real, the silenter, the better. This doesn’t mean I don’t like people, in fact, I am often super curious about and wish to connect with a lot of the people I only know as acquaintances, but when it comes to actual interaction I freeze up and all sorts of thoughts go through my brain and it can be really hard to articulate anything. Anyway, oddly enough, as a teenager (when my anxiety was at its peak), I found that it was actually much easier for me to talk to large groups of people, rather than one on one. There, for me, is so much more control in presenting to a group of people, having them sitting there for the purpose of listening to you, and being able to evoke emotions (you choose which emotions to evoke, and thus which emotions to feed off of). Actually, about 90% of it probably had to do with the fact that you could prepare ahead of time, and I have a very good memory, and thus was in complete control of what was going to happen. I did public speaking competitions and slam poetry regularly, and even ended up being class valedictorian ***I don’t know how this happened, because I honestly only had one friend, Eliza, to whom I spoke during my entire high school career, and when she wasn’t around at lunch time, I would honest to God just pace through the halls. Maybe everyone thought I was pacing through the halls because I was super involved; jokes on them, suckers!!!!***
Ok, that was a tangent, but when I got to university, I started drinking developing coping mechanisms for my shyness–tools I regularly turn to when feeling uncomfortable. One of them is most definitely humour; a bit of forced over-sharing and exaggerated emotion to make up for the silence with which I wish to engage. I use this ALL of the time and sometimes it evolves into a fake it till you make it type situation–the more I engage with people, consciously forcing myself out of my comfort zone, the more I begin to enjoy it (mostly).
This storytelling assignment brought me back to my roots of speech giving and spoken word. The ideal situation for story telling would be in front of a large group. Like Thomas King in his Massey Lectures. In total control. But I couldn’t so much conjure a large group of people, so I did tell my stories one on one to two friends. With this, my stories became a little more conversation like; I’d get interrupted for clarification, or read the individual’s face and feel the need to step out of the story and justify or explain things. Or I felt the need to cater each telling to each individual (mainly how much I would allow myself to swear when imitating P). At first I thought this was a bad thing, I was like “look at how much I am being interrupted” or “this is so not like traditional story-telling” but then I realized that that is exactly what King was talking about. All stories are always growing and changing. Even though I might feel more in control of a large group of people, I have no clue what they will do with my words, or what is going on in their brain. I may feed off of collective energy, but the words change as soon as they leave my mouth and hit someone else’s brain. Someone else’s consciousness. A story is not always so much an exchange of knowledge, but just an exchange. Our brains and experiences and memories and anxieties do the rest, the changing and growing of the words. Stories are very human things.
love,
Jocelyn
Works Cited
King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Peterborough:Anansi Press. 2003. Print.
This is the cutest thing! I love how creative you were with this assignment. The way you chose to present the story is on its own a comment on storytelling. The story itself is cute and funny, but if you hadn’t presented it in a comic, I might have found it a bit confusing. Adding the drawings somehow helps me suspend my disbelief. If you were telling me the story, I would question the talking animals, but since they’re in a comic strip, I don’t. This again is something interesting about stories… We know that cartoons and comics often step into a fictional realm, so when we read stories in these mediums, we don’t really question what we’re seeing. Its abnormality is somehow normal because of the medium you chose to use.
I also really dig your discussion. I feel a similar anxiety when talking to people, even friends I’ve known for years. I tend to fixate on silly things I say for days afterwards, wondering how certain people interpreted certain things. This makes talking to people difficult sometimes. Humour is absolutely something I use to get over that weird anxiety, and it’s a good thing because I think I’d be incredibly boring otherwise. For me, it absolutely is a fear that I’ll say something that I can never take back, even if it’s something like a slight over-share or a really, really bad joke. Once stories are told, they’re out there forever, and people can do whatever they want with them. That’s a scary but very powerful thing!
Anywho, I loved this! Looking forward to reading more 🙂
Hi Melissa,
Thanks for the love! That is a really valid point about how we are often more willing to suspend belief for some mediums of story rather than others–I myself hadn’t thought about that aspect of it. It is really interesting how willing we often are to take up different perspectives and believe different ways of thinking–I’ll have to start paying more attention to the different prompts via style and tone that engage readers/listeners to spread their belief. Thanks again!
🙂
Hey Jocelyn, I feel like the combination of words and images makes a lot of sense in light of your commentary. I too share an anxiety about the finality of the spoken word. Certainly there is something beautiful and communal about your words taking on an independence once they leave your lips, but who knows how they can be twisted for darker purposes (see: the Nazi party’s misappropriation of some of Nietzsche’s ideas). But by combining images and words, you have taken a little bit more control over the interpretation. Beyond this, you have more completely imprinted your own subjectivity on the story than you may have been able to do with words alone. Like King spoke about in his interview with Jordan Wilson, stories are not exclusively linguistic, so you sort of have two stories being told side by side here, mutually reinforcing each other. Very nifty. Great post!
Hi Hayden,
Thanks for your comments! You make a really good point about how adding illustration kind of enforces a bit more influence over tone and how the story is to be interpreted–I did that totally subconsciously, but it makes complete sense. Thanks for the insight!
🙂
Jocelyn! I love this post!
The way you’ve chosen to present your story is great—I feel like it would accompany the oral storytelling very well, as it allows for a jumping off point upon which you could expand if you chose.
Your points about storytelling and catering the story to each audiences rings so true with me. I told my story once to a group of three friends (who all wanted to interrupt and ask questions for clarification or just to be smart asses) and then I told it again over the phone to one friend, who was very quiet and patient as I told it. As soon as I finished telling the story to the group, they all wanted to share their thoughts or give their ideas to what the story could have been—which I think goes along with your observation of how the story is an exchange and how they change and grow.
Thanks for sharing!
Hi Whitney,
Thanks for your comments! I agree that it is interesting how stories change with groups of people listening–it is interesting because it can be frustrating with friends being smart asses, but that keen exhibition of interest in wanting to be involved in the story is valuable. It is cool that all of your friends wanted to provide input, and I think it kind of reflects how groups collectively make up histories and identities. Thanks again!
🙂