prisons and crowbars

Being unable to tell your story is a living dealth and sometimes a literal one. (...) Stories save your life. And stories are your life. We are our stories, stories that can be both prison and the crowbar to break open the door of that prison; we make stories to save ourselves or to trap ourselves or others, stories that lift us up or smash us against the stone wall of our own limits and fears. Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place. 

- A Short History of Silence, in The Mother of All Questions, Rebecca Solnit (2017)