When I was six, I read The Little Red Hen over and over. The ending didn’t make sense to me but I knew it mattered and I was determined to figure out why.
At eleven, I didn’t fully grasp the satire of Animal Farm, but I still remember the heartbreak and helpless rage as Boxer was sent, betrayed, to the slaughterhouse.
At seventeen, I met Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss. She haunted me then, and she still does.
Even before I could articulate it, I knew the power of stories. I felt how they could provoke, teach, disturb, move — how a character’s life could intertwine with my own. Stories were mirrors and windows: sometimes showing me the lives of others, sometimes reflecting back something I hadn’t yet named in myself.
What I didn’t realise then was how stories can heal.
Stories can convey complex information in an engaging and accessible way. They offer a language for things that can otherwise remain unspoken. And when we have the words for something – when our experiences are knowable, nameable and explainable – feelings of shame and isolation are reduced.
Shadow Monsters not only helps children understand mental health challenges but also helps them see they are a normal part of human experience and that they can be understood, supported and moved through.
In a similar way, Other Wise Hearts offers a window into Autistic experience. It reflects the common threads I’ve heard again and again in my conversations with late-identified Autistic people and offers insight into and understanding of those themes.
But stories do more than offer cognitive understanding. In them, we can see ourselves and find self-compassion, we can see others and find empathy. They provide us with endless life possibilities, some act as warnings, others form the basis of our dreams. They allow us to safely explore fear, grief and rage, and connect with the most vulnerable parts of ourselves.
Through them we can come to know acceptance and belonging. They can offer us hope and help us find meaning. They remind us of what it means to be human and can change not only our minds but our hearts.
In these ways, stories don’t just reflect life. They shape it and help us heal.
