I remember sitting in a UN refugee agency office in Turkey after I fled Iraq with my family. Before our resettlement interview, I had memorised my timeline, names, dates and affiliations. I rehearsed my story until it became second nature. There were rules to this kind of storytelling. No inconsistencies. No ambiguity. No unruly emotion. You had to name the groups that targeted you. You had to get every date right.

The story had to be exact, not raw.

This was my first lesson in cultural safety, or the lack of it. The system did not ask whether the story was safe to tell, only whether it was acceptable to hear.

At the time, I did not think of this as storytelling. It felt like learning the rules of the world. In legal and settlement settings, stories must fit the worldview of the officer across the table and the politics of the system they represent. Cultural differences in how stories are told are rarely accommodated. Memory has to be linear. Emotion has to be contained. Anything that does not fit the framework is dismissed as unreliable.

So you adapt.

You flatten nuance. You condense pain. You learn which parts of yourself make the story credible and which parts make it risky. You shape your experiences into something legible.

I did this again years later when I told people that I had returned to Iraq after finishing my Bachelor’s in the United States. I told them the reason I returned was to work in the humanitarian sector. That version of the story was incomplete. What I omitted was that my family had insisted I return. I was scared. ISIS had control over large swathes of Iraq at the time and I wanted to stay in the US to pursue my education. Returning was not a brave choice, but a pressured one.

At the time, I thought no one wanted to hear that version. So I shaped the story into something more acceptable: conviction instead of fear, agency instead of obligation.

This kind of storytelling is not passive. It requires emotional labour and constant calculation. Over time, it teaches you something quietly damaging: that only certain versions of you are acceptable.

The tension between the official story and the lived story does not disappear once the resettlement interview ends. It leaves an imprint. It shapes how you understand yourself, not just how others see you.

Years later, after visas were granted and files were closed, I realised something else. Once the system is done with you, your story changes.
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You are no longer telling your story to be believed. You are telling it to live with it.
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This is the kind of storytelling that happens at home, not across desks. The kind that tells your children who you are. That lets your community know where you’ve come from. That asks, often quietly, what now?
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This realisation shaped the work I would later build.
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Working with others who have been displaced, I noticed how often people felt alienated from their own histories. Silence was misread as shame or disengagement. I used to think that too. That people who refused to share their stories were part of the problem.
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I no longer believe that.
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Silence can be resistance. A refusal to turn pain into performance. A way of preserving dignity in a world that often commodifies suffering.
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I was reminded of this when I spoke with a council member who came to Australia as a refugee from Lebanon. He had never shared his displacement story with his children. For years, his silence felt protective. He did not want to bring up the pain. But when recent events in Palestine stirred difficult questions, he told them everything.
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His silence, once a shield, became a bridge.
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At that moment, storytelling was no longer about survival. It was about continuity. About passing on something truthful, without turning it into spectacle.

After ISIS displaced families in our neighbourhood in Iraq, I learned another lesson about storytelling – a much harder one.
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Trying to help, I had raised a few thousand dollars for a nearby refugee camp. To report to donors, I interviewed a young Yazidi mother on her conditions to better understand her needs and justify the financial support. She told me her story. She talked about recovering from illness, facing violence and threat in her town, being displaced and uncertain about her future. She generously shared her story. I listened calmly and saw her generosity as a sign of resilience. Her story was difficult to sit with, but I thought that this is what I needed to do to determine if she needs help.  
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I gave her $300 in an envelope and left.
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Days later, her husband came to my father’s shop, complaining she had been having nightmares since our conversation. Telling me her story had led her to relive her traumatic memories, it sent her back to a depressed state and she did not have the appropriate psychological support within her camp. She couldn’t sleep well after our conversation. I was devastated. I had exchanged money for a story and caused harm. Ashamed of this impact and my naive approach, I never returned to the camp. Instead, I worked through local vendors to distribute aid anonymously.
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But that woman stayed with me.
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That moment taught me that storytelling without care is not neutral. Compassionate storytelling is not about intention. It is about impact. Since that experience. I learned to reflect on how we ask for stories safely and how we hold them. This is where storytelling becomes a responsibility. It asks not only what is being shared, but how, and at what cost.

I built Unbound Stories, a social impact initiative that grew out of this question: What would it look like to design systems that do not require people to flatten themselves in order to be heard?

Over the years, I have worked with hundreds of storytellers and a wide range of organisations, supporting them to build more inclusive systems for migrants and refugees. Across this work, three ideas kept coming up.

Cultural safety, compassionate storytelling and attention to the shape of stories are not abstract ideas. They are design choices. They determine whose voice is heard without distortion, whose knowledge is treated as expertise and whose dignity remains intact.

When we stop extracting stories for credibility and start designing systems that can hold complexity, something shifts. Problems are understood differently. Decisions are made differently. Power moves.

Storytelling is something we all do. But when we tell stories with care, and build structures that allow people to tell them without flattening themselves, storytelling stops being compliance.

It becomes authorship.

And that changes everything.