“Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.” ~Adrienne Rich
I grew up in south-central Pennsylvania, about twenty miles from Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station. In 1979, when the TMI accident occurred, I was a freshman in high school. Schools closed. There was talk of a hydrogen bubble that could explode. Pregnant women and children within five miles of the plant were told to evacuate. President Carter toured the facility to reassure nervous citizens.
I watched the news every night during that event. What I remember most clearly is not just the fear but the inadequacy of the information. Let’s just say there were challenges explaining, in language a fifteen-year-old could understand, what was happening and whether we were safe. My parents were dismissive of my fear, so I carried it alone. I had a suitcase packed and no one to drive me further away from the plant.
I suspect that early experience stayed with me at a deep level, as I’m sure it did for many people who experienced it.
Later I would be the first person in my family to go to college. I studied the humanities: literature, history, philosophy, art, poetry. I worked my way through college as an administrative assistant in a university hospital. During that time I mentioned to one of the neuroscience professors there that I was beginning to imagine a career involving writing. He gave me the look. Polite but questioning. He said to me, “You need a lot of life experience to be a writer.”
At that point in my life I was short on imaginative possibilities for myself, much of that lack shaped by the home I had grown up in. But I held fast to the claim. I would be a writer.
What I eventually understood was this: the life experience he assumed I lacked was not behind me. It was ahead of me. The only way to reach it was to step into the identity before the evidence existed. And sometimes people try to dissuade us because they are living from the limits of their own stories.
A few years later after some work in magazine publishing and welcoming my first daughter into the world, I applied for a staff writer position at, you guessed it, Three Mile Island.
I got the job. I flourished there. I wrote for and edited a twelve-page weekly employee newsletter — printed on paper in those days — that some 900 plant employees looked forward to on Friday afternoons and took home to their families. I gained a deep understanding of the technology and the communications programs that had evolved out of the accident era. I eventually became a communications leader and a plant spokesperson.
One Saturday morning the plant shut down unexpectedly, and by that afternoon I was live on the evening news, standing next to a reporter and a satellite truck, telling the community what had happened and explaining why they were safe.
I had become the voice that I needed back when I was fifteen.
A career in communications grew from those defining moments, first deciding I could become a writer and then becoming one. Since then I have spent thirty years helping organizations find and share their truest narratives. What I kept finding is that the work is never only about the words or the talking points. It is about the story an organization carries about itself. Change that story and you change what becomes possible. Leave it unexamined and it runs like background code, shaping decisions, communication, and culture whether anyone chose it or not.
The same is true for people. The stories we can tell shape what we are able to imagine and build. Some we carry deep within ourselves. Some are handed to us by others and must be revised or replaced. And the stories that are simply unavailable to us — the ones we never encountered, never saw reflected, never knew to reach for — shape us just as powerfully as the ones that did cross our path.
That is what I want to explore here. We build our identities from the stories available to us. That availability has never been equal or neutral or fair. And we are entering a moment when the forces shaping which stories are available, to whom and on whose terms, are more concentrated than they have been in a long time.
The research and theory behind these questions will appear here too, because they illuminate what is at stake. But the stories come first.
I am glad you are here.