Light After Lightning: Storytelling isn’t the extra part of the work. It is the work.

Dear Lamplight Community,

When I first thought about the relationship between storytelling and mental health care work, I noticed how easy it is to focus on diagnosis and treatment plans. They’re often analytical, structured, and organized into charts and spreadsheets. But the heart of the work is more human—always happening.

On how lightning works, canada.ca says:

“There is still some debate in the scientific community about how the electrification of clouds occurs. However, scientists agree that positive and negative charges must separate within a cloud for lightning to take place.”

But it’s only after these currents meet that we see ‘lightning’ in the sky.

You might say another form of light after lightning is visible when care providers help those they work with. Or when parts of our stories meet…

Every person wears and carries stories that can’t be transcribed into a file or even a notebook. Stories aren’t as polarized as lightning, but they do carry interacting pain, joy, shock, and triumph.

“Care provision” often appears in the same sentence as “holding space,” which to me means holding not just what’s collected in clinical documentation, but what’s left—what exists between us in care spaces, whether spoken or not. Sometimes, what isn’t said is the story, too.

A story’s building blocks are relationships, culture, resilience, and meaning-making. When I listen, I don’t just listen for symptoms. I listen for the way stories carry information that numbers can’t actually capture. They tell us what matters to someone when it’s painful, what’s been protected, and what’s still possible.

I often ask myself if I’m listening to correct or listening to understand; rushing to labels or staying curious long enough to see the person behind them? When someone shares their story, even in fragments and shards, they’re tethering it to something sacred, better known as trust. Trust is healing’s catalyst, and in a way, the bridge between understanding experience and expanding it by inviting us to be part of that process. This is how life-changing shifts happen.

As care providers, we don’t exist outside of storytelling, either. The instance of storytelling isn’t a liminal space. We bring our own values and lived experience into the room, whether it’s offered verbally or not. Importantly, lived experience isn’t story—our lives don’t have clear shapes or forms like we’re taught in school. But our lives can wear the shape of a story the same way we find rest in a bed at night—story helps us hold pain, memory, joy, and grief. And as care providers, we offer the skill, intuition, and care to help others transform their values and lived experience into a story, if that’s supportive for them. Sometimes it’s not. And that’s okay, too.

In this way, storytelling isn’t the extra part of the work. It is the work. It’s how we understand people, how we build relationships, and it’s often where healing begins.

I’m grateful and excited to be writing this monthly letter for you—more to come.

Until next time,

Maria

Read Issue 3 of Lamplight Here 🤍