Stories Waiting to Be Born

As writers, most of us are procrastinators. For some reason, the thing we want most to do is the very thing we avoid. We let life get in the way of writing our stories. We find excuses for avoiding them. If we’re honest, we’re a little afraid of those stories. We’re not sure we can tell them as well as we’d like. We’re scared we’ll fail if we bring them out into the light of day. And the longer we go without writing our stories, the harder it may be to face them.

Maya Angelou once said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” This sentence makes me think of a pregnancy that never comes to fruition. Imagine being pregnant, year after year, but never giving birth! I have some stories in me like that. Do you?

Just recently, I have come to realize, though, that when it comes to stories, every “pregnancy” is different. The stories within us needs to develop and grow. They can’t be pushed out into the world according to some arbitrary schedule. And instead of feeling guilty and anxious about this, we can cherish our untold stories, nurture them, hold them close. They’re glowing sparks of life hidden inside us.

Of course not every pregnancy goes to term. I miscarried four pregnancies (the sort that produce babies, not stories), and I know the deep pain, the sense of failure of losing something beloved, something no one else saw or knew that had been brilliantly real to me. Sometimes that happens to our stories too. And when it does, it hurts. Pieces of our own hearts may seem to die before they ever truly developed. We feel despair, a gloomy hopelessness. “I’ll never write this story,” we say to ourselves with a sense of guilt, even shame. The thing we hoped for, dreamed about, sheltered within our imaginations, seems lost to us.

But remember, stories, unlike human babies, may need years to be ready for birthing. If you feel your stories have died inside you, look again. Open that part of your heart you’ve shut tight, reluctant to look inside for fear of the sense of failure and loss that lurks there. You may find that the shiny little spark is still there, like a tiny, persistent pulse of life. The story may still be alive, still waiting to be born.

In the spiritual season of Advent, we focus on waiting, hoping, anticipating a joy that lies ahead—the birth of Love into our world. We prepare for that birth, believing in its fulfillment. The holiday season (Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, whatever you celebrate) is a time of light in the darkness. It’s a season that focuses on children, a time when we delight in play and imagination and wonder. What if in this holiday season, we joyfully anticipated (without doubt or anxiety or guilt) the coming birth of the story within us? What if we celebrated its coming with playful wonder, with a child’s confidence?

Carl Jung wrote, "The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth."

Do you love the story within you? Do you play with it? What can you do now, in this joyful Advent season, to prepare for your story’s birth?

William Blake’s “Nativity,” 1799