Letter To The Reluctant Blogger: I Am A Story

Dear Me,

In the year 2018, back when the world was still civilised, and the air was still vibrant with the possibilities of life, and the earth hadn’t yet tasted the sour bitterness of COVID-19, I read a book. Well, back then, all I did was read books. That, and bragging about reading books. There was a time I read 17 books in a single week.

Good times.

Anyway, the book I read was by Okey Ndibe, who has become one of my favourite authors. He follows me on Twitter (yes, Twitter. It’s still Twitter, and it will remain Twitter until it comes back to being Twitter). The book was Arrows of Rain. It’s set in a fictional African country called Madia, but really, you could swap in the name of any African country and it would still hold. Africa is a country in that way.

The book was ostensibly about how stories must be told and how silence can both kill stories and kill the audience. The line that stayed with me, the one that burrowed into my bones and made a home there, was this:
“Remember this: a story that must be told never forgives silence.”

Let’s set aside the basic needs for a second, food, water, shelter, the things that keep our bodies alive. Let’s look higher. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs ends in self-actualisation. That’s the crown. The peak. The pinnacle. In self-accualisation, you will find stories. The ones we tell ourselves, the ones we live out loud, the ones whispered in the dark, and the ones that are told of us.

Stories are life. And if we are life, then we are stories. Walking, breathing stories, each with a beginning, a muddled middle, and an ending that could be glorious or tragic, or maybe, sadly, just quietly uneventful.

This brings us back to Ndibe’s powerful assertion about stories that demand to be told. If we accept that we are stories, then we bear the responsibility of making those stories worth telling. We become both author and protagonist, tasked with creating stories that honour the complexity and possibility of human experience. The silence that Ndibe warns against isn’t just the silence of untold stories, it’s the silence of unlived ones. It’s the quiet acceptance of a life that generates no narratives worth preserving, no moments worth recounting, no choices worth examining.

If we start looking at our lives as stories that will be told long after our last breath, we might begin to live like they matter. Because they do. And if they’re not told, if they’re buried or silenced, we risk becoming nothing more than air. Wisps of breath. Invisible. Forgotten. Yet, somehow still part of the fabric of the universe, because we lived.

The movie Coco captured this perfectly. In that world, the dead live on in the memories of the living. But if no one remembers you, if your name is never spoken again, then you disappear. Forever. And to me, that’s the real death. The quiet fade into nothingness.

We don’t want to disappear. This is why we seek to leave a piece of ourselves through the children we have. Trying to leave behind a legacy. Children, legacy are the essence, the blood we live behind. But what if their children’s children forget us? What if what we need to do is not leave behind blood but stories set in stone? What if we lived lives so full, so loud, so worthy of story that we became impossible to forget?

We need to live on. And we live on better in stories.

I don’t know how many of these Reluctant Blogger letters I’ve written. But every time I read them again, I’m reminded: I am the product of stories. Stories told to me, of me, through me. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe I’ve always been trying to write myself into existence. To make sure I don’t disappear. That, at the twilight of my life, people who met me would tell the stories of me.

Every letter I write, every reflection I record, becomes part of this larger project of story-making. I am, as we all are, a product of the stories told to me and about me. But I am also an active participant in shaping the story I will leave behind.

Love

The Reluctant Blogger.

These reflections grew from scattered thoughts and half-formed ideas, but that’s how all good stories begin, with fragments that demand to become something whole.