My Story
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(Photo of me and my lovely daughter Kira was taken by Jessie Andrews for Bagatiba)
The Way of the Storyteller
I think the old adage 'everyone has a story' doesn’t quite capture the reality of human experience. Rather, we all have many stories, and they shape who we are and how we move through the world.
I'M A COLLECTOR OF STORIES. I'm a dreamer. I'm a storyteller. It's what I do. It's what I have always done. In my professional career, I’ve been a writer and an editor for lifestyle magazines for more than three decades. But it's more than that; I walk the way of the storyteller. It's as much the path that's chosen me as the one I’ve chosen for myself, and it has everything to do with being a person with narcolepsy. My experience of narcolepsy is that I move through life with one foot always in dream, sometimes so much so it feels like being in two places at one time. Perhaps that’s why I have always loved stories; they encourage us to explore the unknown and introduce new ideas and perspectives.
I have a deep appreciation for the role that storytelling has played in our world. From when we were first etching pictographs on cave walls to this super-tech era, where a new form of pictography – social media – expands our storytelling capacity to a fantastic degree. I marvel at technology that gives us infinite opportunity to explore the far reaches of the planet and to not only walk in the shoes of others, but to learn how those shoes were made, and even to buy them or contribute to a campaign to help the shoemaker create a business to support her family.
Stories can inspire us to be our best selves and compel us to action.
Words matter: The words we choose and how we convey them can profoundly impact our own lives and those of others. By sharing our stories, we bear witness, share burdens, hold up examples of generosity and courage, experience our individuality and our commonality, deepen our compassion, and better understand our humanity and our place in community.
My passion for story has been the impetus for many life choices, including going to journalism school. It led me in my early career to the US Virgin Islands, where I worked as a columnist and assistant editor for Portside, a niche magazine that explored the unusual lives and myriad jobs of the crew of cruise ships. It led me to the exploration of other storytelling formats, such as screenwriting and spoken word. It led me to the United Nations, to work under a one-year contract on an international development initiative called The Global Meeting of Generations. It led to the extraordinary opportunity of helping to launch a world-culture, arts, and lifestyle magazine called AVALON in 2010. It even inspired my decision to return to school in my fifties, as I wanted to learn the language of the law to better understand how it impacts our daily lives.
Do you have the sense that there’s more for you to discover about your own story?
Are you ready to take a deeper dive? Come on a storytelling adventure! Sign up for the Dream Story Workshop or shoot me an email at onelindablack@gmail.com to host the Dream Story, Love Says, or Hero in the Mirror Workshop at your home, event, or wellness retreat.
“Some people do. They sleep completely, waking refreshed. Others live in two worlds, the lost and the remembered. They sleep twice, once for the one who is gone, once for themselves.”
– Naomi Shihab Nye
TEN THINGS ABOUT NARCOLEPSY
1. Narcolepsy is an autoimmune disease.
2. Our immune system destroys hypocretin, a hormone that regulates sleep cycles.
3. People with narcolepsy rarely go into deep sleep, so our bodies don't get the essential rest it provides.
4. We have chronic insomnia. When we do sleep, we go right to REM and vivid dreaming. Kind of like watching (or starring in) movies all night long, mostly of the noir and horror genres.
5. We get excessively tired during the day, some days more than others, as the effects of sleep deprivation accumulate.
6. We are prone to sudden sleep spells that can occur anywhere, at any time, that might last for a few seconds or as long as fifteen minutes.
7. We are also prone to hypnogogic hallucinations, basically dreaming while awake, the experience of which is akin to being in two places at one time.
8. And then there's automatic behavior. We will continue a rote function – typing on a keyboard, washing dishes, even speaking – during a sleep spell.
9. Many of us are also prone to cataplexy, a sudden loss of muscle control – eye twitching, fingers losing grip, leg giving out, even full-body collapse.
10. People with narcolepsy tend to be highly creative. Not surprising, I guess, given how easily we move in and out of the dream realm!
A WAY OF BEING
Thanks to narcolepsy, I have a rich and vivid dream life that fuels my creative endeavors and my insatiable pursuit of story, which pairs well with my other lifelong loves: travel and the culinary arts. When I travel, when I go out to eat, I want to know the story behind every experience. Where did this recipe come from, where were the ingredients sourced from? When was this cafe built, who built it, where did the stone come from? Wherever I am in the world, one of my favorite things to do is to take a stroll, find a cafe that beckons me, and take up a seat where I can watch the goings on. I’ll sit there for hours, sipping on a coffee, or if it’s later in the day, a glass of wine, with my pen ready and my journal open. I may write, or I may not. But if I’m there long enough, inevitably, I will fall asleep. For a moment or two, or sometimes longer. Often, I will have the sort of dream I mentioned above, where it’s like being in two places at one time. I’ll have awareness of being in the cafe, but the dream happens at the same time. That’s when the magic happens, in terms of storytelling! So many of my spoken word poems come from those between-the-worlds spaces.
Navigating life as a person with narcolepsy (PWN) can be difficult. It’s challenging to fit into the 9-to-5 box of the working world, for example. And it can be potentially dangerous, like if we slip into a hypnagogic hallucination or have a full-body cataplexy crossing a busy street. But I have come to believe that narcolepsy is a gift. One that can be burdensome, but a gift, nonetheless. I see it as a different way of being in the world, as my way of being in the world. We PWNs find some things difficult that others take as a matter of course – like wakefulness. On the flip side, where some people have little or no dream recall, and some might spend their lives seeking entry to the deep well of dreams, we come to it naturally.
My dream life infuses every aspect of my waking life, how I think, how I parent, how I heal, how I am in relationships, how I cook, how I work. I believe our dream selves are as valid and essential as our waking selves, and can serve to counterpoint our more judgmental and linear waking personas. My dream self is my own higher guide, my teacher. I often say I suspect that in the ancient worlds, people with narcolepsy would have been the shamans of the tribe, for our ability to traverse between the worlds. But we all have an inner shaman, a version of ourselves not defined or restrained by our thinking minds. That’s the premise behind my Dream Story Workshop. Using writing prompts and exercises, we explore our dreams and use them to shine a light on our waking lives.