Telling stories

When I was a high school principal my kids used to tease me about all the stories I told.  There were stories at assemblies, stories while visiting class and stories during those visits to the principal's office.  There were days when I felt it was total narcissism, that I was acting like Michael Scott in The Office: enough about you, let's talk about me!
But the kidding from the students was gentle, and they seemed to appreciate it.  I think that the stories of older folks embody a form of wisdom for teens.  They come to us with insoluble problems of inconceivable magnitude, which is the definition of a typical adolescent day.  When we offer advice it is only evidence that we fail to understand the situation.  When we tell them it's not as important as they think, they hear us saying that they are not as important as they think, at least to us.
But a good, appropriate story can tell them that we actually experience what they experience and that we lived to tell the tale.  Our only advantage is -- after all -- the long view.  We are not any smarter than they are.  By telling the story on ourselves, we don't diminish the significance of what is happening to them.  We laugh, instead, at us.
J. was a fifteen-year old girl, not a great student, but six-feet tall, athletic and devoid of any regard for her own safety.  Her "friends" got in the habit of using her as a weapon.  They would start some petty conflict with other girls and recklessly escalate it, confident that when it came to an actual fight, they could just launch J. at their antagonists and enjoy the wreckage as spectators.
I told J. that she was endangering herself, but she was fifteen and invincible.  I told her that she could accidentally hurt somebody much more than she intended, and that gave her a little pause, but not much.
Then I told her the story of my own friend S. which I had actually pretty much forgotten until that moment, because S. remains a good friend as an adult and would certainly never do this now.  When we were seventeen, we hiked to a popular pond in the woods.  It is about seven miles from the road, and a 1000-foot elevation gain, so we were not expecting it to be as crowded at it was.  The rocks in the sun near the water were all occupied, so we went back in the trees and sat down there.
Except S.  He went and sat down on a rock next to a total stranger, who looked at him in surprise and then slid over to make some room.  Then S. kind of rearranged himself to take up much of the space between him and the stranger.  The other guy looked at him again, and then made a little more room.
But when S. invaded his rock-mate's space a third time, the kid had had enough.  He stood up, cursed S. out, and challenged him.  And S. looked at me, like I was supposed to go over there and fight the kid for him!
Now had I not been watching this entire drama unfold, from beginning to end (and had I only heard S. get cursed and summon me) I probably would have run over there and fought the kid.  But I was not about to fight a stranger when the entire thing had been precipitated by my friend's oblivious and antisocial behavior!  I just looked at S. and waited for him to join us back in the shade of the trees.
J. understood this story.  It did not stop her fighting.  But it did get her to think twice about getting into other people's fights.  It did get her to realize that she was enabling some behavior that she didn't like, i.e. starting things that you yourself couldn't finish because you had a friend who could finish them for you.
This is no great success story.  J. did not  graduate or go to college.  J. didn't even, at that time, develop much empathy for the strangers she was being asked to fight.  But J. did develop a different sense of who her "friends" were, and more important, of how they saw her.