Telling your story

Yesterday I had a profound experience.

I went to the theatre with a friend - not quite prepared for what we were about to experience - and came out on the other end elevated, deeply grateful, and filled with laugher, compassion and hope.

 💛

90 minutes with one woman on stage (and a few volunteers from the audience), and the world suddenly felt like a better place.

Even when I got home to a frustrated son who was struggling with a school assignment and I had to help him with some music arrangement (he’s studying music, too!) until midnight, could I feel the effect of the performance.

And this morning? Yes – the smile was still on my lips, my heart softened and warm, my courage restored so I could do that task that I’d been putting off in my work and which had been terrifying me for some time. (It has to do with promoting my work to people I know – I’m not very good at that!).

What did this woman – this actress – do that left such an imprint on me?

And trust me – it wasn’t just me. Her performance premiered three years ago and was only supposed to run 5 times on one of the smaller stages. It’s been filling the main auditorium of our National Theatre for three years now. Yesterday was no exception, and together we laughed, wept, and hugged, feeling the connection and realising more about what it’s like to be human with all our different quirks, imperfections and emotions.

The actress’ name is Cathrine Frost, and in this play she was simply sharing her story of giving birth. That was basically it. But with that story as her focus point, she managed to take us on a journey from Socrates to the future, making us scream with laughter and weep with compassion. Compassion for ourselves as much as for her.

She had mastered the skill of making her own deeply personal – and at times severely traumatic – story universal and important to each and every one of us; man and woman, young and old. And she did it with compassion and respect for every character she included in the story – from her partner who had to live through her drama with her, to the nurses who supported her in her miscarriage, to the doctor who saved her and her baby’s life, and even to the Greek philosophers who had forgotten to wonder about the female body and it’s amazing ability to create life, thus creating a precedence of “forgetting” about half the population in the world!

Love, loss, exaltation, grief, anger, gratitude, wonder, fear… It was all in there – just as it’s all part of our lives. For every one of us, in one way or another. And she envisioned a future in which all the tripping stones that she had stumbled over on her path – and more – were solved, because someone in the future had found a way to solve them.

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Why am I sharing this with you?

Because when you live your story, it’s not just your story. It touches all of us. When you feel your emotions, live your trauma, and when you start to heal, we feel it. All of it. Because we recognise it.

And you never know when your 5 nights on the stage will touch a whole big crowd of people for years on end. You never know when your story will matter to someone. And you never know when you will make people feel that they’re part of something greater. That they’re not alone – we’re not alone. That we have each other, if we only dare to look around, recognise each other, laugh a little and cry a little together, and give someone a hug.

So today, I send you a hug.

A BIG hug.

And a reminder that you matter. We all do. And we can all make this world a better place – for someone. Just as someone can make it a better place for you.