Story as Resistance



Dear friends,
Every age faces its own kind of silence — the moments when truth gets softened, rewritten, or ignored altogether. Yet storytellers have always found ways to speak, even when it was risky to do so. This reflection is about those moments when telling your story becomes an act of resistance — not through anger, but through courage, honesty, and love for what is real.

Not every story is told from the winner’s seat.

For as long as humans have spoken, those in power have tried to shape the story that is remembered — and to silence the ones that are inconvenient. But truth has a way of finding its voice. Sometimes it comes as a shout, sometimes only as a whisper. Yet even a whisper, if passed from one heart to another, can outlast a shout.

When the official story is false, telling your own becomes an act of courage. It might be as simple as standing up in a meeting and saying, “That’s not how I saw it.” Or as daring as writing down the story your grandmother told you, even when others dismiss it as myth.

Oppressors have always feared storytellers because stories carry truth — the kind that seeps quietly under doors and refuses to die. They are harder to burn than books, harder to bury than bones.

The African proverb says it best:

“Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

When only the hunter tells the tale, the lion is always the villain. But once the lion begins to speak, history shifts. Perspective widens. Empathy grows.

In every age, there are stories that need reclaiming — about women, about the land, about justice, about belonging. Sometimes resistance doesn’t look like a march or a manifesto. Sometimes it looks like a grandmother at her kitchen table, telling the truth she has carried in silence for years.

Because every story told honestly pushes back against a false one.

“The most dangerous people are those who tell a story that is not true.” — Unknown

So let us be dangerous in a different way — dangerous to lies, to forgetting, to indifference. Let us tell our stories with courage and pass them on, one whisper at a time.

Question for you:
💭 What story do you wish the world would tell differently?

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