“I didn’t want to.” That’s how our conversation got started. She opened the door, jumped in the car, put on her seatbelt and told me she didn’t want to share in group.

“Jamie called me last week. First time he did that in two years.” She stared out the windshield. “I wasn’t ready for that.”

Neither was I, I thought to myself. I wasn’t ready to hear any of that. Nowhere to go. So I listened to Jasmine.

Stories have a funny way of making something real to another person. We show them what it’s like living our life. What the conversations sound like. The smells, onions, garlic, and roasted potatoes filling the living room while we waited for dinner, chatting about our day, who we talked to, and what made it good, bad, or just meh.

But her story? That’s treatment. Talking it through helps us understand why we did what we did. It doesn’t absolve us of responsibility or make it okay. It just helps put it into perspective.

Jesus tells a story in Mark helping us put his life in perspective. He shares a story about a landowner sending his servants to collect what’s owed for tending his vineyard. They beat them. Kill them. Then the owner sends his son, a move no accountant would make, the risk being too great. He can only play this card one time. And he chooses to because he’s carrying something only he can: the owner’s story.

People in treatment have a story too, similar to that of the son. Beaten up. Dismissed. Written off by systems wanting their productivity. Not their pain. And then one Tuesday morning they climb into a Ford Escape and tell a stranger about one phone call. It’s real. It’s hard. And it’s their story.

Jasmines all over the world walk into rooms full of clinicians and peers and say: I am here. I survived. I’m alive. And I am irreplaceable.

You know what donors and funders want? Data and outcomes. I believe those things matter. So do stories like Jasmine’s. Her face will change donors’ and funders’ minds, seeing a person attached to those data points. A life. Someone who got a phone call last week, whose son said her name out loud for the first time in two years.

“I shared how much it hurt. I never cry. I did then.” She said nothing else about the meeting. But she owned that piece of it. That’s what stuck with me.

Every organization has untold stories. There’s one person behind an intake form, underneath the messiness. They handed you the most valuable thing they own.

Share it like it cost them something.

Because it did.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​