Storytellers Are Builders

When I was a little girl, I had a collection of stuffed animals. And I don't mean I played with them the way most kids do — gave them names, dragged them around, loved them until their fur went flat. I mean I built entire worlds for them. Each one had a backstory. A family. A history. A whole interior life. I could look at a stuffed animal and just know. A whole universe would unspool, fully formed, just waiting to be told.

When our kids were little, I did the same thing with theirs. There was a tiny wildcat that came home in a Happy Meal bag, and the moment I saw her I knew: she owned a luxury hotel chain. Ran it with an iron paw. Impeccable standards. The sloth was obviously a jazz lover — unhurried, deeply feeling, the kind of person who shows up late but makes it worth the wait. And then there was the raccoon and the mouse. They owned a construction company together. Except their construction was really deconstruction — they got into places, made magnificent messes, and called it a business. They were absolutely up to no good and completely unbothered by that fact.

I could go on. I always could. That was the thing.

Nobody called that a skill. It was just something I did. And somewhere along the way, a message settled in — quiet, well-meaning, not wrong exactly, but not entirely right either — that I was the creative one. The storyteller. Not the math and science one. Not the builder.

I believed it for a long time. Longer than I should have.

The Labels We Give Children

We do this with kids constantly. We sort them early and we sort them lovingly, which somehow makes it stick even more. This one is the athlete. That one is the sensitive one. This one is practical. That one has her head in the clouds. We think we're seeing them clearly. We think we're celebrating what makes them unique.

And we are, partly. But we're also drawing a box around them. And kids, who are paying closer attention to what the adults in their lives believe about them than we ever realize, climb inside that box and start to make themselves fit.

Our kids have been through this too. One typecast as the math kid, the numbers person, the one who builds things you can see and measure. Another as the empathetic one, the feeler, the one who notices what's happening in a room before anyone else does. Another as the creative one. And there's truth in all of it — these are real things about real people. But the truth in a label doesn't make the label the whole truth. And once a label lands, it has a way of crowding out everything else.

What I've Come to Understand About Storytelling

Here's what I know now that I didn't know then: building a world out of nothing is one of the most sophisticated things a human mind can do. It requires systems thinking — who lives here, how do they relate to each other, what are the rules of this place. It requires empathy — what does this character want, what are they afraid of, what would they do when the thing they feared actually happened. It requires logic and continuity and the ability to hold a lot of moving pieces in your head at once and make them cohere.

I was doing all of that with stuffed animals in my bedroom. Nobody called it engineering. Nobody called it architecture. They called it playing pretend.

But storytelling is how humans have always made sense of complexity. It's how we transfer knowledge across generations. It's how we build empathy at scale, how we rehearse situations we've never been in, how we work out what we believe by watching what happens to characters who believe differently. Every leader who has ever moved people — really moved them, not just managed them — did it through story. The data doesn't move people. The story that makes the data human does.

I wish someone had told me that at seven. I've been making up for the gap ever since.

What This Has to Do With DEI

I've spent twenty years in diversity and inclusion work. And one of the things I've come to believe most firmly — and say most plainly, even when it makes people uncomfortable — is that DEI has a labeling problem.

We talk about seeing people fully. About recognizing the whole person, not just the demographic. About creating spaces where everyone can show up as themselves. And then we sort people into categories and assume the category tells us what we need to know. Marginalized. Dominant. Underrepresented. Privileged. The labels are meant to name something real. And they do, sometimes. But they also do what labels always do: they flatten.

A person is not their category any more than I am "the creative one." A person contains multitudes that no framework fully captures. When we interact with the label instead of the person, we are doing something that feels like inclusion and functions like its opposite. We think we're seeing them. We're actually just seeing the box we put them in.

I think about the little girl with the stuffed animals sometimes when I'm in a room that's not going well. When people have been sorted and labeled and are performing their assigned roles instead of actually talking to each other. When someone who has something real to contribute goes quiet because they don't fit the framework neatly enough. When the label is doing all the work and the person underneath it is waiting, patiently, to be actually seen.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

There's research on this — the way early labels shape identity, the way children grow into the expectations held for them, the way being seen a certain way by someone who matters can become a kind of destiny. We've known for decades that what teachers believe about their students changes outcomes, independent of the students' actual abilities. The belief becomes the environment. The environment shapes the person.

I don't think most of the adults who labeled me meant any harm. I don't think the parents and teachers and relatives who tell kids who they are intend to limit them. They're noticing something real. They're trying to celebrate it. But celebration can become definition so quietly that nobody notices it happening.

And the same is true in organizations. The person who gets labeled early as "not leadership material" or "more of a behind-the-scenes person" or even "our diversity hire" — that label does something. It changes how others see them, which changes how they see themselves, which changes what they attempt, which changes what they achieve. The prophecy fulfills itself so smoothly it looks like confirmation.

What I Want For Our Kids

I want our kids to know that the thing they've been told they are is real — and it's not all they are. The math kid feels things deeply. The empathetic one can build things. The creative one can be rigorous, precise, technically brilliant if she decides to be. The categories were always approximations. What's underneath them is much bigger.

And I want them to know that the thing that looked like playing pretend — spinning whole universes out of a stuffed animal, building worlds no one else could see yet — was never a small thing. It was practice. For exactly the work I ended up doing: helping people see each other more fully, building spaces where difference becomes strength, telling the story of what's possible in rooms that have forgotten how to imagine it.

I was always a builder. I just didn't have the language for what I was building.

That's what I want for them. It's what I want for all of us, honestly. A little more patience with the parts of people that don't fit neatly. A little more curiosity before the conclusion. A little more room to be still becoming — at seven, at forty-seven, at any age when someone finally sees something in you that you hadn't quite seen in yourself yet.

That's the work. In families, in schools, in organizations. It's never really been more complicated than that.