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.

Having a place the story starts and a place it’s going: that’s important. Telling your story, as honestly as you can, and leaving out the things you don’t need, that’s vital.

The Moth connects us, as humans. 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 ...

The number-one quality of all great storytellers is their willingness to be vulnerable, to tell on themselves in front of thousands. Each story told is a gift to the listeners.

We live in a world where bearing witness to a stranger’s unfiltered story is an act of tremendous compassion. To listen with an open heart and an open mind and try to understand what it’s like to be them—why they think like that, dress like that, made the choices they did—takes real courage.

But seriously, it didn’t take me too long to realize that the reason for that was mostly fear, and that that fear pervades everything: where you live, what you do for a living. You find the first solid thing, and you don’t risk going any further.

It took us eighteen years from the day that we arrived here for me to be granted an American citizenship. On January 29, 2009, I was sworn in as an American citizen, and I pledged allegiance to my new homeland. And it is through my children, my two-year-old son and my unborn child in my womb, that I will make sure that this gratitude that overflows in my heart every single day will continue to live on long after I am gone. May God always bless our America. DORI SAMADZAI BONNER is

It’s very hard to break those ties from the first family that formed you.

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.