I am Deborah Roper, a young millennial just trying to navigate the world I live in.

I’m a casual writer and chronic over thinker, and my interests follow wherever my ADHD leads. Some things stick, however, and one of them is my intense curiosity in understanding people and the complexity of life.

As the saying goes, the more you learn the more you realize how much you don’t know. I feel this keenly every day. In this great universe of unknowns, I ground myself in Matthew 22:36-40. Jesus identifies the greatest commandments as love God and love others, and these are the foundation of my exploration of life.

I’ve always loved analyzing, pulling apart the threads and understanding how they weave together. I’ve spent countless hours analyzing topics like a story plot, a character, a social issue, a concept, a theological belief.

My B.A. in Communications expanded this to include communication theory: the use of words, the making of meaning, the nuances of interpersonal communication.

This website is home to many of my complete and incomplete thoughts. Writing them gives me the ability to intentionally choose my words and all the time I need to carefully craft my message.

I’ve heard it said that the purpose of an artist and creator is to identify what people feel but are unable to name. To give voice to the thoughts they don’t know how to say.

I wholeheartedly agree. Furthermore, I believe that humanity ought to share what we learn with each other, to hold out our hand to the people struggling beside us.

Ultimately, that’s the purpose of this website: to offer up my own life experience in the hope that it might help someone else.

Life is full of stories. In fact, I would say it’s impossible to live without them.

I could write a whole essay on what I mean by this and how I define story, but I love the way Mark Travis explains it in his article here.

Recognizing our own lives as stories highlights just how necessary they are. To break this down, I believe there are four reasons why we need stories.

Stories convey nuance. Education relies on lectures for teaching, and while they can be helpful, they cannot explore the nuance of life the same way that stories can. Life is full of shades of gray, and there often isn’t just one right answer, if there’s an answer at all. Stories reflect this. They offer a way to experience life without people having to live through it.

Stories help us learn about ourselves. One of my college professors said that artists create to give people a “me too!” moment. It’s hard to learn about ourselves when we don’t have knowledge to judge by. Stories give us that foundation to ask questions like these: what is it you relate to in the story? What does that reveal about yourself? What choices and experiences can you learn from? What is the storyteller putting into words that you’ve ever been able to articulate?

Stories help us learn about others. It’s said that the best way to understand someone is to walk a mile in their shoes. Stories are one of the best ways to capture the struggles and experiencs and emotons that other people go through. Furthermore, when the word is so vast and there are so many lifestyles and cultures and conflicts, stories are often essential to widening our understanding of life and the people living it.

Ultimately, “story” is a lens to view life. When we begin to look at life as story, we realize that there is far more going on behinds the scenes of someone’s life than we’ll ever see. We’ll know there’s a hundred different choices that we could have made to change the outcome. We’ll remember that everyone is the center of their own story, with their own struggles and conflicts and experiences. We’ll be ready to listen to the different stories the world has to offer and know how to learn from them. We’ll begin to see the nuances and shades of gray in life where we once believed it to be strictly black and white. We’ll learn how to empathize with those we previously could not understand.

I believe that to love our neighbor as ourselves, we need stories. We need to know our neighbor in order to love them, and we need to understand love before we can offer it to someone.

Well, I’ve read a thousand stories and heard a hundred different points of view.

And I’m far from finished.