Stories have this quiet way of holding you when nothing else can. For me, writing has always been the one place I didn’t need to shrink myself or over-explain. In high school during quarantine, during a high time of uncertainty because of the COVID pandemic, I wrote a letter to no one in particular. It started like a diary entry but morphed into a narrative tracing why I constantly felt like I had to perform being okay. I wrote about the silences in my family, the pressure to achieve, the fear of burdening others with too much feeling.
At the time, that letter didn’t fix everything. But in rereading it years later, I saw myself with a little more compassion. I was able to name my shame, and in doing so, release some of it. It also helped me realize how many of my behaviors, like over-apologizing, retreating, and freezing up, were responses to stress and unprocessed anxiety. That one story didn’t erase the weight I was carrying, but it helped me carry it with more clarity. And that changed everything.
Navigating culture and healing through storytelling
For young people of color, especially those navigating multiple cultural expectations, storytelling can be a radical act. One way it helps is by making the invisible visible. We don’t always grow up with a language for emotional nuance. Sometimes we’re taught to push through, stay quiet, or just survive. But stories allow us to pause and say: This is what I felt. This is what it meant. This is what I needed. That in itself can be healing.
Another way stories help is by creating mirrors. When you hear someone articulate an experience you thought only lived inside you, whether it’s a struggle with depression, the feeling of being “othered” in a classroom, or the quiet panic of disappointing your family, it cuts through isolation. You realize your pain isn’t proof that you’re broken. It’s proof that you’re human.
Reading Michelle Zauner’s memoir, Crying in Hmart, cracked something open for me. Her honesty about grief, cultural identity, and the difficulty of caring for someone while losing them helped me see that mental health isn’t always a “before and after” narrative. Sometimes it’s just the ongoing work of staying soft in a world that asks you to be hard. She never glamorizes pain, but she also doesn’t apologize for it, and that gave me permission to share my grief without diluting it.