Have you heard of The Moth story? Somehow, I came across it and got hooked. True, personal stories, told out loud, by people like you and me.
The Moth movement began with novelist George Dawes Green, who wanted to recreate the feeling of summer evenings in Georgia, where moths gathered around the porch light while people told stories.
They have now moved from the porch to the stage. The people, not the moths. They sound spontaneous, almost casual, as if someone simply walked up to a microphone and told you… a story.
But they’re not shapeless. A good Moth story is structured. Orchestrated. It has a first line that pulls you in. A scene. Stakes. A moment where something happens. A turn. A change. A landing. It’s a lived moment arranged so the listener can feel the shift with you.
I got hooked because these stories have something that is often missing from my own stories. A moment of truth that does not arrive dressed as metaphor.
So much of my writing still lives in the metaphorical stage of expression. I veil and unveil carefully. I circle the wound before naming it. I turn experience into image, reflection, symbol, atmosphere. Maybe this is the artist in me. Maybe this is simply the protector in me.
Truth is, metaphor is beautiful. But it can also be armor. And that’s what caught my attention about the Moth story. It made me wonder: What am I still protecting? Why am I still afraid to tell a story as it happened? So I decided to write something closer to a Moth story.
Of course, I had to bend the rules. A Moth story is meant to be told out loud. It belongs to the voice, the breath, the nervous system, the silence after an embarrassing moment. But my stage, for now, is this blog. So here I go.
I was in Vancouver, Canada, doing my master’s degree in theatre. I had left my country looking for something larger. Open-minded people. Creativity. Freedom. I was young enough to believe that somewhere else, people would be better. Not perfect. Just better. Less judgmental. Less narrow-minded.
But before I left, my grandmother had warned me. “People are the same everywhere,” she said.
I remember how I dismissed her words. I thought she was trying to keep me there. Maybe she did, but she was speaking from her own experience. She was someone who had moved from one country to another.
Then one day, while I was in costume design class, drawing, my costume design professor looked at me and asked: “Did you have pens and pencils in your country?”
For a few seconds, my brain stopped. I said nothing. I thought perhaps I had misunderstood her. The way people sounded in English was still new enough to me that I blamed myself first. Maybe she meant something else. But no. She continued. And I understood. She was asking about my country. Did we have pens and pencils there?
I remember looking at her and thinking: Is she that stupid? And then another thought came right behind it: Or is she trying to make me feel small? Because sometimes you just don’t know. Not when you are in another country. Not when you are speaking another language. Not when the person asking has authority over you.
Sometimes you stand there trying to decide if you have just met ignorance… or a bitch with a syllabus. I wanted to say: “No. We scratched into cave walls with animal bones, but thank God I made it to Canada.” But I just swallowed my sentence and said nothing.
Because she was the professor. And I was the immigrant. The foreign student.
This is the part I didn’t understand then. I did not only swallow that sentence. That day, I learned a new way of surviving. That day, without realizing it, I made a decision to continue speaking around things, as I had back in my country.
I turned humiliation into image. Anger into metaphor. Fear into atmosphere. In time, I became very good at veiling and unveiling. Very good at saying the truth without pointing the finger at anyone. Very good at creating a world where the story was there, but protected.
You, my dear viewer or reader, have to dig for it.
That’s why the Moth story got under my skin. Because a Moth story does not let you stay safely in the fog. It asks: What happened? What did she say? What did you say? And the answer is: I said nothing.
But the silence followed me. It followed me into my art. Into my writing. Into the way I still hesitate before naming a wound directly.
That day, my grandmother’s sentence returned to me fast and furious.
Narrowness had traveled. Condescension had traveled. Ignorance had changed costume, gotten a degree, climbed its little ladder, and was now teaching costume design. And maybe this is the real story I’m trying to tell. Not that my professor was ignorant or condescending. Not even that my grandmother was right.
The real story is that I left looking for better people, and found the same human patterns wearing different costumes. I left looking for open minds, and found that narrowness also knows how to cross borders.
For me, the journey is no longer to find a place where people are better. The journey is to rediscover the courage inside myself, where I no longer have to make the truth sound prettier before I can write it.
Annoyingly, my grandmother was right. “People are the same everywhere.”
And here I am, decades later, discovering The Moth story, taking back the sentence I once swallowed.