A single story

Share the world with one another

Our life matters. It is a centrifugal force, both shaped by and shaping everything around us. A single story added to the body of diversity.

We ebb and flow, across the riptide of life. There are multiple single stories, adding to the tidal flow of what is and could be.

But it is through the convergence of these single stories that we bring more richness and depth to our surroundings. We are better for it. As a person, a community, a world, a universe.

The dangers of a single story, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shares, challenges us to consider the _power_ of stories to influence identity, shape stereotypes, and build paths to empathy.

Don’t let the single story become the only story, for we miss out on a crucial component of life: We.

The single story can become unbearable at times, yet we come together to support and encourage, to adapt and survive, together. We overcome obstacles.

Let the single story become a thread in the fabric of multiple stories, to blanket the world in love. We will be better for it.

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.
– Jeanette Winterson, ‘Why be happy when you could be normal?’