Breathe in that beautiful story and all the gifts it gave you!
Now imagine that same story but written with terrible spelling and poor grammar, or told with bad acting, unflattering lighting, and clumsy edits. It's the same story, but the words are blunt where they could have been powerfully descriptive, or the wrong form of "your" glares at you picking a nerve, or a bad actor keeps saying "supposebly"....
Perhaps you would then have chosen to quit reading or watching in favor of moving onto a well polished tale. After all, you're busy and there are many such stories! Or perhaps you'd feel relief, or even joy, knowing that you are actually better than this storyteller. Instead you choose to experience the entire story with pity, searching for and highlighting the parts that prove your own betterness. Then there's those who will stay in the story only to laugh and pick apart the glaring mistakes that they wouldn't have made, the right way was so easy for them to learn themselves. Of course, they will ignore the truth that they too had to learn it.
But those who choose to enjoy and love and be moved by the story are gifted indeed!!
And most deeply and beautifully effected are those who know that the story is beautiful regardless, yet take the time--without rush or desperation--to help that story present itself in a way that makes it easier for a larger audience to understand, knowing that the story may feel unloved and afraid to be itself over time without some tips or edits. Knowing that it may hide on a dusty shelf believing with more conviction over the years that it is of no value, while dust collects and people don't even laugh or feel sorry for it anymore, seeing the yellowed dusty pages or warped and cracked movie case, they only ignore it.
They don't even consider it a story worth thinking about at all, and the story itself can't help but begin to believe it.
Imagine you take the time to teach and show and explain some of the grammar, spelling, lighting, camera angles, and delicious delivery tricks involved in storytelling. You work with no eye on the clock or calendar, no intention to please others or tell a different story that may have a more popular viewpoint or more money making explosions or gratuitous boob shots, but only to tell that same beautiful story with a little more confidence and a desire for it to be better understood and appreciated.
And here's my favorite part!! In teaching you don't push your own ideas or story suggestions, but rather allow the author to reveal their own. However, it's impossible not to become part of each other in this beautiful story. Together you will grow a little different.
Stories that are beautiful exactly as they are, but become even brighter and farther reaching when offered a friend with the time and love to help them tell it.
We are all different parts in different types of beautiful stories. Don't make the mistake of pandering, or trying to be only a bestseller or blockbuster.
Be the story that has value for you, and the rest will follow naturally.
Being your own beautiful story will take all kinds of shapes over your lifetime! And sometimes it will mean being the person who helps another person's beautiful story reveal itself. Like Annie Sullivan did for Helen Keller.
And that's a beautiful story indeed!!
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| Everyone is a beautiful story. Feel free to help your loved ones reveal theirs! |
Hugs, smiles, and love!!
Autism Answers with Tsara Shelton (Facebook)
