Sonder, and the power of a story
Me sharing my story at My Japan Story SLAM!
A friend who saved your life, dying of cancer. Slowly losing touch with your roots as an immigrant. Impassable cultural divides between lovers. Saving a life in the tsunami, and the reverberations of that. Love lost and lessons learned. A mother fleeing during wartime, and the impact of generational trauma. Masterful storytelling, heart-wrenching and sometimes funny.
The power of a story. Something I was recently reminded of when I spoke at My Japan Story Slam.
I spoke in public for the first time about the ending of my marriage, and the emotional and financial impact it had on me as a woman who also happens to be an immigrant entrepreneur. No professional agenda. Just sharing. I was anxious in a way I rarely am before speaking these days. Was it right to share something so personal in a room full of strangers? Would it damage my professional reputation if people knew something so traumatic about me? In my experience, and in my client work, when those are the questions you're asking yourself, the answer is usually "do it." Thanks to the friend who reminded me of that. Even coaches need to hear it sometimes.
Afterward, I felt much lighter, and more at peace with the details of the situation. What happened to me was still damaging, but after telling my story this way, another thread wove into the tapestry of my life in full color, letting me deepen into a love for how my life actually is, rather than how it isn't. Scars and all.
Organizing your experience for narrative, and for performance, is powerful. It helps you find peace and clarity, connect more deeply with others, strengthen your community, and build resilience by facing traumatic moments in your life in a different light. Other storytellers related much the same thing. The catharsis of the story, and how they felt changed after.
It was an ichi-go-ichi-e kind of moment. You had to be there. I won't be sharing the video online. In a world where everything is packaged for consumption, where questions about the place of AI in creative industries abound, it was lovely to sit in that ancient human moment, gathered around beer, telling stories. Connecting in new ways with familiar people and strangers alike.
A few days later, my fellow storyteller Will Nealy taught me a new word. Sonder. The realization that each one of us is a universe unto ourselves, every stranger living a life as “vivid and complex as your own.” Often described with a tinge of overwhelm, a made up term by author John Koenig.
sonder n. The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own -- populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness -- an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you'll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
For me, it isn't overwhelm. It's awe. (I know, I’m splitting hairs). It's the same awe I feel in coaching sessions when I'm helping clients make sense of and tell their own stories. When we connect the stars in their personal constellation, something new emerges. Stuckness dissolves. Tensions ease. Ideas are born. Actions are taken. Lives and teams and companies change. Problems large and small are solved. New products are developed. New art is created. New cultures are built. All because we took a little piece of that universe and crafted a story from it, and brought the body into the delivery.
That night, I experienced that for myself in a new way. My universe will always be just a little different, now. Thank you to my fellow storytellers for letting us in that night, for giving us a tiny glimpse of your personal constellation.
