A 3 am Letter That Might Sound Weird at Noon

Stories are life

Sometimes this happens to me and I’m wondering if it ever happens to you.

You wake up in the middle of the night and some new possibility takes over your mind. And the energy in that possibility makes it impossible for you to sleep, even though your body might be tired.

It’s 3 am and I’m sitting here writing these words in the hush of darkness, the cool air of fading summer is drifting through the open window and my breaths are long and deep in the psychic space of early morning.

I know what’s coming in a few hours.

Emails, phone calls, administrative tasks for my business, family breakfast, my kid going off to school, laundry, dishes, garbage to the curb, the onslaught of news, global challenges, and trying to keep the ship of my personal mood and attention upright in the choppy water of modern day life.

I’m writing what I guess is the equivalent of a letter to you at 3 am on purpose, and planning to send it before the middle management of my mind detects that I’ve snuck into the office and stops me from saying something that might sound weird at noon.

I need to say more things that sound weird at noon.

The thing I want to say is that stories are life. Life is literally made of stories. Our cells organize around purpose, and meaning, and drift away from each other or bond together based on the charge of stories. Just like people do. And when we suppress our stories, the big experiences of our lives that have left paw prints so deep in our psyche that we trip on them on the way into business meetings, we suppress our very selves.

We suffer when we suppress ourselves.

And I feel that piled up human suffering at 3 am.

Perhaps many of us do.

Suffering isn’t a secret we can keep from others. Everyone feels it in their 3 am soul. We might think that openly sharing our suffering is a burden to others, but in actuality, it’s a relief, because shared suffering can be digested by the whole. The personal hoarding of suffering is the root of disease.

I’m not talking about complaint by the way.

Complaint is the avoidance of suffering.

Suffering is simply the nature of human experience—the unbearable lightness of being that is produced by the intensity of conscious experience, positive or negative. When we share the intensity of our experiences through story, we transform suffering into joy.

While I don’t personally know many of you who are reading these words—I want to. I am hungry for human story. And I know I’m not the only one. We trade in story everywhere, at every turn, it’s inseparable from our culture, our relating, and subtle and overt exchanges. But like many other natural things, we’ve commodified them. We busy ourselves with selling, owning, defending, paywalling, denying, patenting, publishing, analyzing, politicizing, and justifying our stories.

But what if we just let them be?

What if our stories were free to play, the way we let children play, without serving a purpose, or getting something done?

It’s now 5 am.

Somehow two hours have passed to jot down less than 500 words.

But story time doesn’t function like ordinary time. It lingers and dallies, relishes and savors—sinks in like a predawn summer rain making its way to thirsty roots.

I often chew my nails during the day, but there is no nail-chewing going on for me in these wee hours. What an amazing feeling it is to be awake and feeling at rest at the same time.

And I think that this is what I got up to say.

The exchange of story is a shared resting state for humans.

And I want to be a champion, a protector, a space for the unfolding and sharing of your story—of everyone’s story.

Human story is what comforts us when we’re feeling alone and depressed. It reminds us that others also feel like imposters, that we’re not the only ones who experience despair when others succeed because it makes us wonder if we’re uniquely broken somehow, unworthy of good fortune.

But human story also cuts through the white noise of productivity and reminds us that getting nothing done is sacred, that attention is precious, that small moments, living creatures, natural beauty, a poetic thought, and the atomic force of simple clarity can all be still found in the crush of a speeding day if we’re paying attention.

I fear that stories and the sharing of our human experiences are losing the game of time and space in the modern day. They’re being shoved into corners, trampled by traffic, forgotten in our collective daily race toward the future.

I want to make time for stories. For your stories and my stories.

For those of you who have shared them with me in our groups—thank you.
For those of you who have shared your stories with others—thank you.
For those of you who keep reading my own stories—thank you.

You’re keeping something very important alive.

I’ve thrown a lot of words at the subject this morning, but it’s actually quite simple.

As one Substack author so eloquently said it recently:

"Sharing stories, little vignettes of everyday life, is such a lovely way to connect."

Kellie Beckmann-Quin

Have a nice day.

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Saturday Is Story Sharing Day

Saturday, Aug 31st, 9 am PST

Open to both free and paid subscribers.

Here’s this week’s prompt.

What moment was the highlight of your summer?