What’s your story?

Everyone has a story.

Whatever your personal story is, it impacts your everyday life. Whether you are whole in spite of your holes, or whether you still struggle with old demons, everyone has a story.

This issue of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman has stories that will live on to haunt the people in them for years.

Maybe the 7-year-old rape victim we wrote about today is a student in your daughter’s class. Or, maybe the 9-year-old rape victim is a child you know from Girl Scouts or perhaps she’s your niece. Maybe the Colony Middle School student who tells the story on our Valley Life page of losing his father at a young age is a student in your classroom.

The events in these stories represent chapters in real people’s lives. Some young victims of violence or tragedy best their demons while others struggle for a lifetime.

Two men face long jail sentences for raping these elementary school students.

But the little girls they are charged with raping will struggle with trust and love and self-esteem, maybe for a lifetime. Lots of their peers, other people who were sexually abused children, are already behind bars. Many of their peers repeat the crime against other children. Some of their peers take their own lives.

Mostly, we don’t tell our stories and certainly not these kinds of stories. Instead, we assume everyone has a mother and father who loved and cared for them, that everyone will mourn the passing of their parents.

We wish that this were true. Love and safety should be every child’s birthright.

But if you ask the Colony Middle School student whose step-father threw him down a flight of stairs, he’ll tell you that bad things can result in good. He now lives with a foster family who loves him, he said.

Elsewhere in our community another family struggles with the shooting death of their father at the hands of their mother. Maybe these young men are in your Boy Scout Troop. Maybe they are your nephews.

We mourn their loss of innocence and we recognize there are hundreds of children in our schools and churches who carry the weight of similar stories of tragedy and loss.

But there is no way to know the struggles a person has endured unless they share their stories. As the saying goes, you can’t judge a book by its cover.

That’s what the teachers at Colony Middle School found when they assigned students there to write personal essays during the school’s first Write-A-Thon fund-raiser last year. Some of the essays from the project will be published in a book called “With These Hearts and Hands: Journeys of the CMS Knight Writers.”

Colony Middle School Principal Mary McMahon said the writing project has proven transformative for students and staff. For some students, the writing assignment was cathartic and was a turning point in their lives. For staff, she said it was the first time they really knew their students’ stories.

At the Frontiersman, we’ve seen first-hand the power of stories to transform lives and bind communities.

What’s your story?