Backstory’s Top Universal Themes

I’ve done dozens of interviews, and now universal themes are starting to emerge, which I find fascinating and thought I would share:

A Celebration of Immigration
My clients want to remember and talk about where they came from. Someone leaving a place they know to a place they don’t know. From Shanghai to Calgary, from Sweden to Los Angeles, from Ukraine to Brooklyn. New customs, strange languages. Weird smooshy white bread. A holiday called Halloween. Forging a new identity. Each immigration story features varying degrees of resilience, bravery, and faith.

The World As A Teacher
Travel tops the list of experiences people want to remember. A romantic train trip from Los Angeles to New York. Living and working in India. Setting sail for Europe on a student ship. Traveling to the Soviet Union during the Cold War as a part of an American delegation. These far-flung adventures leave lifelong impressions on the people I talk with, changing them in very profound ways.

Love and Loss
Love is the glue and loss is its shadow. You can’t have one without the other. The passion of couple that met in high school 60 years ago, and the marriage that sizzled out. The love of a precious violin that has lasted decades, the loss of the family dog. The joy of becoming a new parent, the grief of losing one. These stories create the foundation of our lives, because we all know that no life story is complete without both.  

These examples are all taken from my interviews. I often ask myself: What makes up a life? The details are different but the broad strokes are the same. Maybe that’s what binds us together: the universal need to tell our stories to be heard, and to know that someone is listening.