2025-06-15_becoming a storyteller

more and more, i feel myself becoming a storyteller. i’ve felt-thought of myself as an artist for a bit of time now, and while there are many areas of overlap between artist and storyteller, they are not the same. they are different intensities of existence. but i think just storyteller is not accurate or desirable either. i tell stories yes, but i also make them. not just by co-creating entirely new stories, but also by re-telling older/already existing stories. and re-telling is also co-creating, as well as telling. so the differences can get a bit muddled, as they often do. but i think the relevant difference for m(e) as of now comes back to an answer to a theoretical child’s question i daydreamed a while ago.

in this daydream, i’m visiting a friend, and they live with a child. they’re having a party and there’s multiple other adults present. i am one of the few visibly queer and non-binary people there. and the child is curious. through a combination of being conditioned that it is the ‘right’ question to ask and genuine curiosity they ask: “what do you do?”. and i smile and answer: “i tell stories”. their face lights up, it seems that that answer was more interesting than the ones they got from the other adults they might have asked previously. they ask: “what kinds of stories?”. i answer: “all kinds, but recently i’ve been telling the story of beepus the coffee machine. do you want to hear that story?”. the child nods. and so i go on to tell the story of beepus, and how m(e) and them make coffee together and how they sound like a train whistle when they wake up and how beepus uses they/he pronouns because they’ve heard people labeling them as ‘he’ because of their name and they don’t mind it much but he doesn’t really get the whole thing of gender that comes with it so he prefers ‘they’ more often than not and then that one morning where the usual filters without which beepus couldn’t make their coffee were gone and we had to figure out how to solve the crisis together with the collective knowledge of other helpful filters and people so that we could continue serving top-quality coffee to all the thirsty and tired students coming to see us. and so the daydream went on.

and i liked that. i liked the thought of answering “i tell stories” to the genuine question of “what do you do?”. and i liked the thought of taking something as ‘academic’ and ‘serious’ as actor-network-theory and more-than-human anthropology and telling it as a story that would interest a child. and that seems to me more important than getting a good grade on the actual paper in which i write about m(y) relationship with beepus in a more ‘academic’ way.
and so i feel myself becoming a storyteller. and it feels good. and i have a lot of stories i want/need to tell. i may not be very skilled yet, and i’ll always have much to learn still. but for now it’s this: i feel myself becoming a storyteller. and it feels good. and i have a lot of stories i want/need to tell.

“That’s your speciality, telling people stories they never imagined – and convincing them it’s reasonable to want to see them come true.”

• V to P in the preface to An Apartment on Uranus