In a previous version of the Self Narrate website, people were able to submit written stories for a weekly story roundup. In transitioning web hosts, most of those stories have been lost. We were able to rescue the following two stories.
Mariette Gallor
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my life was from my first breakup with a guy. I was like 16, not really experienced with boys and stuff, and he was like my life. I had been dying for a boyfriend for, like, forever. I was a sheltered Cuban girl, and that totally wasn’t allowed. It made me want it even more. I came to the age when I was allowed to have a boyfriend and I thought that would make me happy. I put up with it for a while. After like 10 months, I finally said this guy is treating me like shit and hurting me, and exploiting my love for him. He was doing really messed up stuff. So I broke up with him. It was a really hard lesson. You know the lesson, you can’t sacrifice your own happiness just because you feel like you want something. Some people get lost by having an objective. They just see the objective, but then what if you hate the objective after a while, but what if the objective is hurting you? You say, I have this thing that I want, so I’m happy, but that’s not the case.
Lorenzo Collante
I can remember perfectly, like the day it was yesterday, the day I learned how to walk.
I was eight months old. We lived on a 40 acre farm. One side of it was pastures with a barn that my dad built for my mom and her horses. The other side was nothing by crops and a gigantic persimmon orchard. Then there was this HUGE mushroom facility. My dad made a name for himself by organically growing mushrooms. We had this huge house that started out as a really shacky abandoned house that they built back up.
Behind the house there was a huge oak tree. My parents didn’t really care so much if we wandered around the property. It was a 40 acre farm in the middle of nowhere. So I spent a lot of my time as a child outside. I remember I crawled outside somehow and I actually tried to climb up the side of the oak tree. What I ended up doing was using the oak tree as a guide as I was learning how to walk. And I ended up learning how to walk like that. I used the oak tree as kind of a merry-go-round or something. It was not long after that that I was climbing up trees. I was all over the place.