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The Drug Dealer's Daughter & the Spoken Word Stories of ACEs

 

Storytelling is always beautiful and that is true no matter what truth is being told. If a story has moved me to tears I don't feel sad I feel more alive, human, connected and maybe even overjoyed.

To get to hear a story is like being able to watch a flower push through dirt. It's having the honor of being present at a birth and getting to see labor shift into new life. 

Hearing story isn't always dramatic. Sometimes, it's the exhale of relief, the coming home after grocery shopping and having food spill out on familiar counters.

The way a human spirit has the urge to share, to be known and seen and heard, despite anything and everything stuns and inspires me. It makes me want to be better and braver and kinder.

Stories make me feel alive and hopeful even when they are about the hard parts of life. I love stories.

Not all stories are told in words on a page or on a stage. Some carry stories quietly, in secret and hold them in postures or habits or routines, the way a meal or bed is made just so. 

Today, I woke craving the spoken word today and searching for voices speaking about ACEs in first person.

I hope one of these stories stirs, lifts, opens or affirms you. I hope one refills or refuels you at the end of your week.

1.

"My stories are not against anyone; they are for the life we need."          Dorothy Allison

2. 

"I want the stories I read to take me over, to make me see people I do not know as they see themselves"

Dorothy Allison

3.

4.

"Each of us has our own stories, and none of them are the same no matter how similar some of the details." Dorothy Allison

5.

"I want to know what it was that you looked at unflinchingly, even if you did not know what you were seeing at the time."

Dorothy Allison

6.

7.

8.

"I want hard stories. I demand them from myself. I demand them from my students and friends and colleagues. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, really understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain, reexamining them, re-creating them in the story, and making them something different, making them meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling."

Dorothy Allison

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