My work in storytelling and documentary film this past year, in Palestine, Tanzania, and South Africa has shown me the incredible capacity for humans to do amazing things and at the same time, to conduct the most horrendous acts—based upon the stories we carry in our individual and collective histories.

We use stories as guides through our lives. Stories we tell ourselves, stories we tell others, stories we are and are not aware of which guide our success, our failures, our beliefs about who we are and how we are similar or terribly different from the “others”.

When we change the stories we tell ourselves, we change how we perceive history and shape the stories to come.

Other essays in What I learned from the Road