v.44 The Stories We Carry: What One Trip Taught Me About Staying Open
Welcome to Life, Created—a new [old school] blog for modern times. This twice-a-week(ish) dispatch is a space for us to dig deeper, share ideas, recognize microjoys and build community beyond the mindless scroll.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot more about the stories we carry about ‘others.’ The quiet narratives we inherit, absorb, or create that shape how we see people and how we expect to be seen. These stories often form long before the moment arrives, quietly influencing how we move through the world.
So when I was invited to speak at an event in Florida, I hesitated. I wasn’t looking forward to visiting the state. Given the current political climate, I made a lot of assumptions. I wondered how I’d be received and how I’d be perceived as a keynote speaker. Florida, to me, had become synonymous with loud headlines, policies I deeply disagree with, and narratives that made me feel like I (and the people I love) wouldn’t be welcome there. But I went anyway, for work. And while I was prepared for discomfort, what I found was something else entirely. Every person I encountered, truly every single one, was kind, generous, open-hearted, and welcoming.
It’s human nature to generalize, to take a single experience and stretch it across an entire group of people or a place. But doing so, especially when it comes to human behavior and identity, is dangerous. This experience in Florida pushed me to reflect on how easily we allow singular voices or stories, often the loudest or most extreme, to define entire populations. And in that space between assumption and reality, I found a moment of reckoning.
Especially now, in a time when antisemitism, Islamophobia, and racism all seem visibly on the rise, the instinct to protect ourselves by creating mental distance from others feels… understandable. But that instinct can quietly evolve into separation, suspicion, and fear of one another. And when we let fear take the lead, we lose our ability to see individuals with clarity. We begin to expect harm everywhere and miss the humanity that is still very much present.
I’ve been surprised by strangers more times than I can count. Like the woman I sat next to on a plane, who initially looked like she had no interest in people, but who opened up mid-flight about her flying home to be with her dying father at the hospital and just being notified mid-flight that he’d already passed away. I invited her in for a hug and she cried on my shoulder for 20 minutes. Or the man behind the counter at a gas station who offered restaurant suggestions with the pride of a local tour guide. Or the random woman in the Midwest who, after a brief conversation, called me “family” and offered to pray for me, sincerely, without condescension. These moments have taught me that when I meet people with openness, I often find connection. But I have to be willing to release the stories I’ve been told and the ones I’ve told myself.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in her powerful TED Talk The Danger of a Single Story, names the exact thing I’ve experienced. “The problem with stereotypes,” she says, “is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.” That line lives in my bones. Because when we take someone else’s experience, or even our own, and try to stretch it across every individual in a community or state or identity group, we flatten people into caricatures. We lose nuance, we erase complexity, and we disconnect from the truth that people are layered. Communities are not monolithic. And no place is ever just one thing.
The danger in this kind of thinking is that it breeds disconnection and fear. It creates echo chambers where we stop listening, stop seeing, and start reacting. We reinforce bias. We uphold stereotypes. We distance ourselves from shared humanity. My experience in Florida reminded me that there are always exceptions. And sometimes, those exceptions are so profoundly different from what we’ve been told, they recalibrate our entire worldview. This was my experience. It may not be yours. And that’s okay. But what’s not okay is insisting that one story, ours or someone else’s, is the only one worth telling.
We live in a world that often demands certainty. But certainty rarely leaves room for truth. Instead, I believe we’re called to sit in the complexity. To hold multiple truths at once. To lead with curiosity. To listen, to observe, and to leave space for the possibility of being surprised in the best way. Let’s allow people, places, and even ourselves to be more than the stories we’ve been told.
This week’s microjoy: Being the first one to arrive at a café for breakfast felt like a quiet win. No line, no crowd, and I got to choose the best window seat without a single side-eye. I sipped my coffee in peace and pretended I was far more productive than I actually was. A simple, satisfying microjoy that brightened an otherwise ordinary day.
P.S. Per usual, if this resonated with you- please COMMENT, LIKE, or SHARE. Help spread the word.
Welcome to Life, Created.
With love, wisdom [and small mercies] from Montclair. xx
