I remember sitting under a table in the Green Room at Fox News in 2014, desperately willing my phone to charge.

As the battery crept to 3%, enough power for the hundreds of text messages that had come through over the last few hours, my heart rate accelerated. I remember thinking:

Do I suck at my job?

You know what? 

I DID suck at my job. 

I was working with activists trying to bring attention to experiences often ignored: being detained by ICE, being trans, losing a loved one to police brutality, getting evicted.

These activists did wild, risky, and flamboyant things to bring attention to these experiences.

Shutting down Barack Obama at a White House pride reception.

Disrupting Hillary Clinton during an Ohio press conference.

Following an evangelical preacher around a parking garage to yell about his hate speech against LGBTQ people.

My job was helping these activists get booked and prep for media to “tell their story“.

And yeah: I kind of sucked at it.

Telling their story, or why they cared about these experiences, usually involved talking about the most traumatic experiences of their life.

If that sounds like it was not great: you’re right. 

At least, the way I did it wasn’t.

And that’s why I sucked at my job.

The people who told their stories, or created these media moments, or strategically leveraged other moments to tell urgent, less popular stories, didn’t do anything wrong.

In fact, many of them started movements in ways they don’t always get credit for even a few short years later. 

I was working with people I really cared about, people who had powerful, real stories about what happened to them, why it was messed up, and why the world needed to change because of it. 

And yet. Yeah dude. I kind of sucked at my job.

For me, a “storyteller” tweeting frantically from Paneras around the country to “change the narrative “ — something was really, really off.

And when I was in that freaking green room in Fox News Latino, I finally started to notice.

What was it?

—

The way we talk about stories sucks, especially social change stories. 

If I say “telling your story “ —

Come on.

You immediately have a mental picture, and I bet it’s not a good one. 

Maybe it’s a garden level nonprofit conference room where people are sharing every depressing, traumatic thing that’s ever happened to them.

How their Terrible Story motivated them to take this low paying, nebulously effective job.

Someone who makes more than everyone else in the room is like, “that’s great! Let’s put that on the website!“

Maybe in your mind it’s a more upscale affair: a power suit lady straight from Parks and Rec with good makeup and lighting is talking about “centering voices” while saying nothing of substance.

Or how your story of student loan debt has inspired her to create a Pell Grant that will solve this problem, as long as you run a small business in a disadvantaged community for 3 to 5 years.

Whatever you think of “telling your story,” it probably has nothing to do with The Truth.

This makes sense, based on everything happening in the world, but it’s also nuts.

Because one of the only good things about our dystopian hellscape right now is it’s easier than ever to tell The Truth in a way that matters.

#BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, Occupy, the exposure of decades long coverups in police departments, the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts, Hollywood — 

At the end of the day, all of these movements were about The Truth. Telling the True Story of what happened. 

So why do we feel skeptical of “telling our story”?

We’re thinking about all the times we’ve been invited to be vulnerable about who we are and how we feel, while still only getting room for a certain experience, emotion, or feeling. A single story.

This happens in the most heinous 1% corporate offices, but it happens just as often in dingy church basement meetings. 

And even though the power and resource differential between those two spaces is enormous, a lot of the times we feel much more hurt by what’s happening in the church basement. Because those people are our people.

—

What’s wild is that all of the movements I just named happened because people told their stories.

They weren’t “telling their story.”

They were telling their real freaking stories.

The stories that probably made them think “oh fuck, am I ever going to get a job again?“ or “is the FBI going to retaliate against me for what I am saying today?”

And for many of them, the answer was yes.

Hold on — okay, there are like five of you reading this I can hear in my head.

Those 5 people are right: it’s not just stories. 

The people I just described did a hell of a lot more than “tell a story. ”

But the reason we know about what they did, the reason whatever they did moved so many people to action?

Whether they meant to or not, it’s because their actions told a story.

So, it’s wild that when it comes time to “tell our story,” so many of us are like “fuck you, you evil PR person.”

Or “you’ll never get my story out of me!“

What? 

That doesn’t make any sense.

We’ve let the story about ‘what a story is’ be

co-opted just as much as our own stories are

co-opted. 

When I think about what was going wrong when I sucked at my job, when I was hiding under the table—

I was focused on a fake story.

A story that had nothing to do with what was actually happening to me and the people around me.

Corny as it sounds, I had completely lost sight of The Truth.

When I lose sight of The Truth, it’s not always dramatic: usually it has nothing to do with trauma or oppression (at least on the surface). 

It shows up when I do things like call a reporter and talk up someone for being a “social justice hero” when I actually can’t stand them.  

Or when I think this whole action is one person’s ego trip — but the press release is all about how More Than Ever Noble it is.

And in the case when I was hiding under the table, even though I really believed in this person and what she person had done, I was way too into the story of how I was important in her story. I was caught up in the story that I knew what I was doing, that I had anything to do with this weird moment + this person’s sudden (and short-lived) Notoriety. When I finally stopped telling myself this story, damn. It hurt, because it was a story I had been telling for five years. But it also meant I could finally replace this fake story with a true one. And committing to a true story about myself, the world, the work I did, the future? Even when it sucked, it sucked a lot less than the ambient anxiety, self loathing, and aimlessness that the fake one caused.

Too much of the time, we throw out how freaking important stories are.

We’ve let a cottage industry of corporate PR professionals who have no idea what’s going on in the world co-opt the idea of story. 

We’ve let them tell us “story” is a buzzword, that it doesn’t mean anything. That the only people who have a story are the ones are avoiding actual work or action.

Bullshit.

We need stories, man.

Stories are how we make decisions, empathize,

build movements.

At least, true stories are.

They’re uncomfortable.

It kind of sucks to tell them.

They’re either kind of embarrassing, or actively dangerous to tell.

They’re about people, what we do all day, and our feelings. 

They are about how we deal with conflict, what we suck at, the gap between who we are and who we want to be.

They’re true.

And for better or worse, those true stories are probably how we change the world, or build what Mariame Kaba calls “hope as a discipline.” 

So, what’s a true story about you?

How do you feel? 

What did you do today?

What makes you hopeful about the future, if anything? 

Tell me something you’ve never told anyone at a PR training.

Or tell me a story you’ve never told anyone at all.

 Seriously, do it. You don’t have to do it today, or even in the next few months. You don’t have to do it in a reply to this email even.

(But if you do, I’ll read it and think it’s cool as hell, no matter what it is about.)

Just tell a story.

One that’s yours, and true. 

Because as nuts as it sounds, I genuinely think that’s how we’re going to win.

-H