When Everyone Has a Story to Tell

We are storytellers. All of us.

Emotional or dramatic, inspiring or just plain crazy, we all have a story to share.
Conversations become meaningful when people start sharing their stories with each other.
Tales are swapped, friends are made and your piggy bank of stories ends up getting richer and
richer. The best part of all of this is that your narratives are your very own anecdotes, your
recollections of the most memorable events of your life. These stories have shaped the person
into who they are, and sharing them with someone else gives them deeper insights into their
own life.

In times when people are bent on proving that their life is “Just perfect, thank you very
much!”, what a refreshing change it makes to come across a person giving an honest account of
his life or talking about her deepest insecurities! Just like a beam of sunshine in a dark room,
giving hope to so many people trying to hold their lives together, telling them that it is okay to be
imperfect and that it is alright to make mistakes. Social media these days is all about that
perfect selfie or the highly filtered beach photo signifying a dream exotic vacation. Either that or
rants going on and on about how feminism is destroying the world. Amidst all of this, you see a
post about a person winning at being a father or a student talking about how this is a mad and a
competitive world and you find your faith in humanity slowly being restored.

Yes, it is Humans of New York I am referring to, and I just cannot stress enough on how
awesome a Facebook page it is. You have an old couple still madly in love with each other, two
friends catching up on their lives and a girl who looks so beautiful that she is described as
looking like the fall. You also come across a girl battling the demons of depression, trying to go
about her life as normally as possible, a teenager fighting drug addiction and a person trying to
get over a rough break up. It basically is a collection of narratives of people being people, some
enjoying the bright patches of life while others trying to cope with much darker situations. The
page apparently started off with an aim to make an exhaustive catalogue of the inhabitants of
NYC but in the words of Brandon (the angelic soul behind this concept), “Somewhere along the
way, HONY began to take on a much different character”. Short stories and quotes were
collected from those people and were added with their portraits. Thus began one of the best
blogs to have ever existed on the Internet, and it is getting better everyday, spreading positivity
in people’s lives.

I remember when I first discovered the page, I ran into a huge inferiority complex
thinking that I will have nothing interesting to say when someone like Brandon approaches me.
Then, the more I read the posts on the page, the more I realised that it is not about you coming
up with a witty one-­liner to impress a person enough to put you up on their blog. It is all about
what makes you you and this is a story you know very well, having lived in it for the whole of
your life.

So go ahead and share your story. It is the most beautiful thing you can do as a person.

-Pooja Shamili Ganti