When Stories Come Home
Food matters. Stories matter. The work matters.
But presence … being fully there with the people we love … matters just as much.
There was a season in my life when the stories didn’t stay at work.
During the 2010 global financial crisis response, I was part of fundraising campaigns that required me to engage deeply with stories from around the world, especially stories of children lacking food. Day after day, I watched, listened, and edited moments of hunger, hardship, and survival.
I’ve always approached storytelling from the heart. But over time, that became heavy.
Week after week, the weight built up … quietly.
At the same time, life at home was full of joy.
I had two young children that time. Coming home to them should have been a place of rest. A place to reset.
And in many ways, it was.
But something had shifted in me.
Without realising it, the stories I carried during the day began to shape how I behaved at home.
I became focused on one thing: making sure my children ate well.
What started as care slowly became pressure.
Instead of playing with them, I spent more time trying to feed them. I wanted them to eat more … more than they needed. And sometimes, I pushed too far. They cried.
Not because they were hungry … but because I was making them eat.
I still remember the moment I said it out loud to my wife:
“There are children around the world crying because they are starving…and our children are crying because I’m making them eat.”
It felt logical to me at the time.
But it wasn’t right.
What my wife said next changed me.
She said:
“Your children don’t need food. They need you … more than the food … after you’ve been gone the whole day.”
That moment stopped me.
It helped me see something I hadn’t recognised in myself.
I wasn’t just bringing stories home. I was bringing the weight of those stories, and letting them shape my actions in ways that were not healthy, not present, and not fair to the people closest to me.
Reflection
In storytelling, especially in humanitarian work, we often talk about empathy.
But there is a line we don’t always see clearly:
The line between caring deeply and carrying too much.
When that line is crossed, the impact doesn’t stay within the work.
It follows you home.
Why I’m Sharing This
I share this not because I’m proud of that moment, but because it taught me something important.
As storytellers, communicators, and creatives, we are often exposed to the hardest realities in the world. And if we are not careful, those realities can shape us in ways we don’t fully understand.
We can begin to respond to our own lives through the lens of what we’ve seen, instead of what is actually in front of us.
Today, I still care deeply about the stories I work on.
But I’ve learned this:
The people closest to us don’t need us to carry the world.
They need us to be present with them.
Food matters. Stories matter. The work matters.
But presence … being fully there with the people we love … matters just as much.
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