The Thread that Pushes Back
I grew up knowing my dad had been to Vietnam, but I didn't really know what that meant until much later. By the time I came along, the war was over, but the war inside him wasn't. He had gone after a series of devastating family losses, carrying his grief into combat and then bringing home something even heavier, what we now know as severe PTSD. However, back then, we didn't have a word for it. We just had the ripple effects.
Life at home was a mix of love, silence, and unpredictable storms. My dad worked hard, blue-collar, hands-always-busy hard, but there were days when his anger or withdrawal filled the room before he even walked in. As a kid, I didn't connect the dots between the man in front of me and the trauma he'd carried back from the other side of the world. I just knew I had to adapt, to read the room before stepping into it, to find my own ways to stay safe.
Surviving that shaped me. It taught me how to pay attention. It made me sensitive to what's not being said. And it also handed me a story...one that, for a long time, I didn't tell. I didn't think I was supposed to. It was my dad's story, not mine. But as I've gotten older, I've realized that telling it...my version, my experience...isn't betrayal. It's resistance. Because silence lets the wounds fester, while story brings them into the light where healing has a chance.
That's what I mean when I say storytelling can be an act of resistance. For people who've been ignored, erased, or told their experience doesn't matter, speaking up is a way of saying, "I was here. This happened. You can't pretend otherwise." And there's power in that...transformative power, in fact.
You see it in the world's great movements toward justice. The Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa and Canada didn't just release reports, they gave survivors space to tell their stories, publicly, in their own words. Those moments didn't just document history, they named pain, exposed injustice, and demanded that communities listen. Science even backs this up: when people name their lived experiences, it reshapes how those experiences are held, both in their own memory and in the collective memory of a community.
Faith traditions have carried this wisdom for centuries. In liberation theology within Christianity, the voices of the poor and oppressed are not background noise—they are the very center of the Gospel's call. In Dalit storytelling traditions within Hinduism, poetry, song, and narrative have long been weapons of dignity in the face of systemic exclusion. In the Black church tradition, preaching is often a collective act of resistance, recounting a people's history of survival and hope so that no one forgets how far they've come and how much farther they will go.
When marginalized voices tell their stories, they aren't just describing the past, they're reclaiming power over their future.
So here's my invitation this week: read a story or memoir from a perspective radically different from your own. Don't rush to analyze it or decide whether you agree. Just sit with it. Let it do its work on you. Then ask: What in me shifted because I heard this? What assumptions just got challenged?
And if you have a story you've been carrying...one that's yours to tell...reach out to us at heythere@justloveneworleans.org. We want to hear it, and we want others to hear it too. Because your story might be exactly what someone else needs to keep going. Because sometimes the most sacred act isn't speaking...it's listening so deeply that someone else's story takes root in you. That's how resistance spreads...one story at a time.
Thread by thread, weaving a world where no story is erased,
Sam
