Humans of Hartland

I am an avid reader of the Facebook page Humans of New York.  It all stared when a man simply began interviewing the people he met on the street.  As you all know, New York is an amazingly diverse city with people from all walks of life, socio-economic backgrounds, and experiences.  The stories that came out of these interviews range from inspiring to strange, funny to tragic, yet together they create a whole so much larger than the sum of their individual experiences.  They create empathy.

During this time when we are starting to come back as a community after months of social distancing, I'd like to try this idea here in Hartland.  Basically, this is a way to get to know your neighbors and learn about moments or relationships in their lives - positive, negative, or somewhere in-between - that helped to make them who they are today.  They can be small moments or big ones, long relationships or chance meetings, things that affected you profoundly or in a small yet still significant way.  The thought is that by learning more about people, you can start to understand and identify with them thus making you more empathetic towards the individual and our community as a whole.  Like I've taken to saying, "everyone has a story."

If you would like to share your story and are willing to let us post it here, please email Carolyn at cmccullough@cromaine.org.  Stories should be around a page or two but however long it takes you to tell it is perfectly alright.  Send in some pictures that relate to your story to help the audience visualize your experience.  If you would like to remain anonymous, that's okay, too!  

Whether or not you want to share your story, I hope you will follow and read the stories posted on this blog and that you find them just as interesting and insightful as I do.  Looking forward to getting to know you better, Hartland!

Carolyn the Teen Librarian