Having a Story is Not the Same Thing as Having a Book

My husband is wearing a continuous glucose monitor right now, not because he’s diabetic or even pre-diabetic, but because he’s working on improving his health. This data will give him information to make decisions.

I’ve been watching him navigate it with the fascination of someone who has been doing this for forty-six years. He’s smart, research-minded, and genuinely interested in what the numbers mean. But he still has almost no context for what he’s looking at, outside of what he’s learned on YouTube.

It’s not that he’s not capable, but he’s never had to learn this stuff.

I have a lived PhD in this world. Forty-six years of being a Type 1 diabetic give me an understanding of how protein hits differently than carbohydrate, how stress impacts the number, how altitude, dehydration, and illness all require a completely different approach. I don’t think about most of it consciously anymore. It’s just how I manage my body.

When he brings me his data, I don’t tell him what it means for him. I give him context. I say: I don’t know exactly how this impacts someone without diabetes, but for a Type 1, this is what that number means. This is what’s probably happening and what I’d be looking at.

I give him the framework he doesn’t have yet.

And this is what I do with the women I coach.

They come to me with years, even decades of living inside their story. They know every detail, every decision point, and the conversations that changed everything. They have a PhD in their own experience. What they don’t have is the outside perspective. They can’t see the shape of it because they’ve been inside it too long.

Having a story is not the same as having a book.

A story is what happened. A book is what it means for someone who wasn’t there. That gap, between living the experience and knowing how to convey it to a reader, is not a gap in courage, talent, or time. It’s a gap in context. And context is exactly what someone on the outside can give you, and is what is needed to reach your ideal reader.

When a woman shares her story with me, I’m not evaluating whether it’s worthy or whether she’s a good enough writer. I’m doing what I do with my husband’s glucose data. I’m looking at what she has and saying: here’s what I see. Here’s what a reader will understand. Here’s what matters and what it could be shaped into.

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