Good Stories from The Good City: Faye Lane

This is a story about the Chapel that taught me what love really is.

I was nineteen years old, standing on a curb in downtown Dallas, waiting for a bus and trying to disappear.

My jacket was zipped to my chin, my hood pulled tight, my hands buried in my pockets. Downtown Dallas, at the time, was not a gentle place for a young woman already lost in her own head. I had drifted off course. The winds of life had blown me off center, away from myself. I was full of shame and felt deeply, utterly alone.

Then I heard water.

I followed the sound down into a sunken park. As I descended, the noise of the city softened. The smell of grass replaced exhaust. At the end of the park stood a small, round white building. I found an unlocked door and stepped inside.

I looked up and burst into tears.

Above me was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen: stained-glass windows arranged in an upward spiral, refracting the light like a kaleidoscope. It felt as though beauty had found me, rather than the other way around.

As I left, my heart still fluttering, I noticed a small table by the door. There were blank notes, a pen, and a sign inviting visitors to write down something they were thankful for.

I didn’t know what to write. I wasn’t feeling grateful, despite what I had just experienced—perhaps because I had experienced it alone.

But then I read what others had written.

“Today I closed a $300,000 business deal.”

“This morning I had food for my children.”

Those two notes, side by side, did something in my heart.

“I’m grateful for my new shoes.”

“My brother got a job.”

“Thank God, my nephew’s cancer is in remission.”

And one, written in crooked letters that I can still see decades later: “I’m grateful for my dog. He’s my best friend.”

Those notes made me feel less alone. Less singular in my suffering. They gave me a sense of belonging I hadn’t realized I was missing.

That was the moment I understood something essential: we see ourselves in one another. And when we do, something softens.

As a storyteller, I’ve learned that this moment of recognition is the birthplace of empathy. Not through argument or persuasion, but through identification.

I see you.

You’re like me.

That recognition creates a feeling of kinship—of brotherhood—and it is both delicious and quietly addictive.

I’ve witnessed this again and again. Once, I performed in a storytelling show in Detroit. Real people, live on stage, telling true stories. No orchestra. No spectacle. Just a bare stage and a microphone. Forty-six hundred seats sold out in less than an hour.

The audience was racially diverse, age-diverse, economically diverse. At the beginning of the evening, they were individuals sharing oxygen. By the end, they were a collective—laughing, crying, standing together in a joyful ovation. They had seen themselves in one another.

Valentine’s Day tends to reduce love to romance, but the love that sustains a city is something quieter and more durable. It is the love that begins with recognition. The love that says, I see you, without needing anything in return. That kind of love doesn’t belong only to couples. It belongs to neighbors, strangers, and communities trying to remember themselves.

Storytelling bypasses judgment and goes straight to identification. We fall in love with storytellers not because they impress us, but because they reveal us to ourselves. They hold up a mirror to our shared humanity and make us feel less alone.

This matters—especially now.

We are swimming in distraction and starving for connection. We understand our divisions intellectually, but that knowing lives in the head. Stories live in the heart, and that is where real change begins.

I’ve lived in New York for decades now, but recently returned to Texas to teach a storytelling workshop. I always tell my students that a story illustrates change, and an important story illustrates something that changed you as a person.

I asked one participant, “What was your journey? You went from what to what?”

He said, “I went from living in my head to living in my heart.”

He explained that he was the CEO of a nonprofit that stewards a small park in downtown Dallas, with an interfaith chapel dedicated to gratitude.

I asked him, “Is the ceiling stained glass? In the shape of an upward spiral?”

It was the same chapel.

The one that, decades earlier, had quietly redirected my life by teaching me that everyone has a story.

What if we treated storytelling as civic infrastructure—something we intentionally build and sustain? Imagine regular gatherings where people from different backgrounds come together around shared themes: gratitude, courage, belonging.

The way to unite a community is through identification. And the most enduring change begins the moment someone feels seen.

The inception point is simple:

I see you.

And suddenly, the distance between us collapses.

Because when I see you, I see me.

And that—quietly, powerfully—is what love looks like when it’s strong enough to hold a city.

Faye Lane is Artist-In-Residence & Chief Inspiration Officer for Thanks-Giving Square