The Remaking of a Natural Storyteller

By gmrunner Stories of Egonomics Literature January 13, 2026

I earlier wrote about how I discovered, “I was a natural storyteller.”

Not because I chose it.
Not because I practiced it.
But because people told me I was.

“You’re a natural,” they’d say, with a kind of admiration that felt like relief. As if my ease with words, with rooms, with timing and tone, explained something essential about me. As if it justified the way I moved through the world — alert, responsive, calibrated.

I accepted that label because it fits. Because it gives coherence to something I had never questioned.

However, with time, I now realize that being a “natural storyteller” was not a talent.
It was a consequence.

When you live your life under observation—real or imagined—you learn quickly how to narrate yourself into safety. You learn which versions of yourself are welcomed, which are tolerated, and which must be kept hidden. You learn how to read rooms faster than you read books. You learn when to speak, when to soften, when to disappear. You learn how to shape experience into something digestible, something acceptable, something that won’t be rejected.

Storytelling, then, is not something you learn.
It’s something that happens to you.
It becomes a second skin.

It becomes breathing.

And if you do it long enough, well enough, you stop asking the dangerous question:

Who am I when there is no audience?

What if everything I said, everything I did, had been subtly adjusted—tailored to context, calibrated to response? That I had been watching myself from the outside for as long as I could remember?

Not pretending.
Not lying.

Performing.

The performance was not false. It was functional. It kept things moving. It kept me safe. It kept me intelligible to others. But it also meant that I had never stopped to ask whether there was anything underneath it. Or worse—whether there needed to be.

What if the performance was the thing?

That question did not arrive gently. It arrived as silence.

Silence in rooms.
Silence after stories.
Silence that felt like absence. Or the lack of?

I noticed it first from stage.
At the St. John’s Storytelling Festival in 2018.

When other storytellers spoke, rooms responded. Laughter, murmurs, sighs, nods. Noise filled the gaps between sentences. Even silence had texture—it breathed, it shifted.

When I spoke, the room went still.

Not empty.
Not disengaged.

Still.

The kind of stillness where you can hear someone move their foot at the back of the hall. The kind of stillness that does not soothe the teller but heightens awareness. A stillness that removes reassurance. That offers no feedback loop, no proof of connection.

At first, I assumed this meant something was wrong. That I was misjudging tone, pacing, accessibility. That perhaps I was “too much.” Too heavy. Too intense.

So I adjusted. I added humour at the beginning. Cultural shorthand. Gentle laughter. A poor joke. I let the audience warm up to my voice, my weird accent, my presence. I gave them something familiar to hold onto before I started telling a tale.

The laughter came.

And then, inevitably, the silence returned.

But it was different.

It wasn’t scattered. It wasn’t tentative. It was consolidated. Focused. Collective.

As if room had collectively decided to disengage.

As if the room had synchronized.

I was still confused.

Am I that bad that people are now indifferent?

The same story continued as I travelled. And I told my last story in Oslo on May 8th, 2023.

After that, my mental health collapsed in ways I didn’t have language for.
I stopped performing.
I stopped showing up.
I stopped telling stories.

In January 2025, I was supposed to tell stories at the Marrakech International Storytelling Festival.
Flights booked. Hotels paid for.

I couldn’t get out of bed.
So I cancelled everything.

One year later, I stepped onto the stage again. The same place where I had told my first story. Where everything began. And I told the one—the one I always wanted to tell.

Not to move on.
Not to get over it.

But to remind myself that I am still here.

That was when I understood: the silence was not the absence of response.
It was the response.

What unsettled me was not the silence itself, but what it did to me. Without laughter to regulate my nervous system, without audible signs of approval or recognition, I had nothing external to anchor myself to. The room was not indifferent, it was with me. But, not performing back at me. Not mirroring me.

For someone who had lived a lifetime as a mirror, this was terrifying.

The story I told that night was not an adventure. Not mythology. Not slice-of-life observation. It was the most personal story I had ever told. It was a story chosen deliberately for the theme: Over it. A story about a promise made too young, a dream built as a response to fear, and a guilt that never resolved.

The story did not ask to be healed.
It did not ask to be redeemed.
It did not ask to be forgiven.

It asked to be carried.

And I ended it on a ritual.

That choice was not planned. It emerged in the moment, from the body, not the mind. Standing thousands of miles away from home, I spoke not of hospitals or fire, but of the repetition that sustained life: a balcony, fifty steps, breath shared between mother and child. And I named the ritual.

Then I paused.

That pause did what no sentence could. It signalled an edge. Not closure, not resolution—just containment. The story stopped not because it had finished, but because it had reached the place where language could no longer carry it honestly.

The silence that followed was different from the silence that came before. It wasn’t urgent. It wasn’t tense. It settled.

That was when I realized something fundamental had shifted.

For the first time, I was not using storytelling to navigate acceptance.
I was using it to stop navigating altogether.

This was the remaking.

The natural storyteller, as I had understood him, was someone who could adapt endlessly. Someone who could read a room and become what it needed. Someone whose value lay in responsiveness, in elasticity, in emotional intelligence sharpened by necessity.

That version of me was real. He still is.

But he was not whole.

Because adaptability without rest becomes surveillance.
Attunement without boundaries becomes erasure.

I had built an internal room—Room 101. A place with no darkness, no doors, no windows. Everything illuminated, everything scrutinized. I lived there because I knew how. Because it was predictable. Because it rewarded coherence, explanation, meaning-making.

Storytelling had been one of its tools. A way to stay visible without being known. A way to survive without stopping.

What changed was not the stories themselves, but the relationship to them.

I stopped needing the audience to regulate me.

I stopped offering resolution as proof of worth.

I stopped mistaking relief for honesty.

And in doing so, something unexpected happened: the performance loosened its grip.

The silence no longer felt like judgment. It felt like space.

This is what remaking looks like—not a reinvention, not a rejection, but a reorientation.

The storyteller remains. But he is no longer responsible for holding the room together at the cost of himself. He no longer has to earn belonging through suffering or coherence. He can allow a room to be quiet without interpreting that quiet as danger.

He can tell a story and let it end where it must.

This does not mean the room 101 disappears.
It does not mean the suitcase is unpacked.
It does not mean the guilt evaporates.

It means something subtler and more durable has begun.

Permeability.

The room is no longer sealed. The story is no longer armour. Silence is no longer the enemy.

And the natural storyteller—once defined by performance—has begun to discover what it means to exist when the performance stops.

Not outside the room.
Not beyond it.

But with others inside it, breathing the same air, without needing to explain why.

Maybe I have finally stopped pealing the onion?

That is not resolution.

But it is remaking.

gmrunner / About Author

Gaurav was born and brought up in New Delhi, India, and left home over nearly eight years ago to explore the world. In the process, he ran across India before he landed in Canada and started telling stories of adventures and experiments of his life and India's folklore. He's an Ocean and Climate Researcher by day, and a storyteller by evening.