The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

by Catherine Burns

Honesty matters. Vulnerability matters. Being open about who you were at a moment in time when you were in a difficult or an impossible place matters more than anything.

Because we all have stories. Or perhaps, because we are, as humans, already an assemblage of stories. And the gulf that exists between us as people is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin color, gender, race, or attitudes, but we don’t see, we can’t see, the stories. And once we hear each other’s stories we realize that the things we see as dividing us are, all too often, illusions, falsehoods: that the walls between us are in truth no thicker than scenery.

And when we dare to listen, we remember that there is no “other,” there is only us, and what we have in common will always be greater than what separates us.

“We all fall, and it matters. But when the fall is all you have left, it matters a great deal.”

And I’m thinking what a roller coaster mental illness is. Not just for the patient, but for everyone else involved. It’s a sentence that you’re given, and it’s a life sentence. And there’s all the things that you have to go through: the doctors, the drugs, the violent outbursts, the destruction (literally and emotionally), the police coming to your house, the shame that you live with. It just goes on and on.