Stories were Told on World Storytelling Day

In today’s episode of going to the conference, I again sat behind the nuns in green habits and failed to inquire as to the significance of the green.

When the Episcopal priest took the stage in the most remarkably show-stopping, geometrically fascinating, color rush dress I’d ever seen, my jaw dropped. I commented to the woman sitting next to me about the amazingness of the dress, adding that if I’d put it on this morning, I’d still be standing in front of my bedroom mirror wondering if I had the courage to wear it in public.

And then she (the woman next to me, not the priest) said, “Maybe it’s like yesterday, how we anticipate uncomfortableness in interacting with people so we don’t do it. You have to just put on the dress and walk out the door.”

She was wearing pink pants, a print top, and running shoes. She had amazing earrings though, so I figured she’d faced and conquered the dress bear more than once.

Yesterday, the priest wore a black dress with a ballooned hem with a long necklace of big red circles. Not beads. Circles. She also wore red patent leather shoes. Stupidly, I thought that outfit couldn’t be topped.

The priest introduced the speaker, a doctor/writer who teaches medical students about narrative medicine, that is, eliciting patients’ stories and telling their own as a means by which to deepen their practice and heal themselves. Five older people told their stories ranging from being misdiagnosed with a brain tumor, accidentally suspended from a trapeze, and having to navigate life after the overwhelming occurrence of a stroke, a car accident, and a diagnosis of Cushing Syndrome.

The doctor/writer stitched all these parts together in a beautiful, effortless way that made me switch my awe and envy from the priest’s dress to the doctor/writer’s slides. He talked about teaching medical students to set a timer for ten minutes and just write. And how he tells them to just let their pens go where they will and where they end up after ten minutes will be far different than expected. He talked about how doing this freed them from the constant beeps and requests and settled them as people. I want a doctor who free writes for ten minutes every day.

It was beautiful, all of it, despite the mystery of the green habits persisting.

And today is World Storytelling Day which is fitting in many ways. This year’s theme is “light in the dark.”

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Bruce Campbell, M.D., A Fullness of Uncertain Significance: Stories of Surgery, Clarity, and Grace, 2021.

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Photo by John Cardamone on Unsplash