Member-only story
The Ceiling We All Stare At
Discovering Your Why Through the Stories You Tell
When I was a freshman in high school I was tasked with writing a short story and orally sharing it with my literature class. There were no limits on what we could write about, so I decided to be a bit unconventional. Veterans Day was that week, so I told a story about an old war veteran dying in a hospital — not the typical choice for an essay.
To get the class more interested in the topic at hand when I came up to the front I asked them to take a moment to close their eyes and think of something they knew who had served, or if they didn’t know any veterans, to think of an older person they cared for.
I then laid down on the floor and invited all my classmates to do the same, as I jumped into the imagined story of an injured man who could only look at the drab ceiling in his room on the 8th floor of the ward.
Sometimes the world needs to be turned upside down for us to learn something new.
The next day I had a friend come up to me over lunch and tell me that they appreciated my story and that it had inspired her to call her veteran uncle who was ill and in hospice care. She said they ended up talking for about three hours that night, more than they had spoken in several years prior.