Think about the last meal you cooked – the process of preparing the ingredients, boiling or frying them, waiting for them to cook – we remember these things in a linear process of “I did this and then I did this and then I did that”. For mechanical things such as cooking a meal, we generally see the narrative as essentially just a series of actions – there’s no real emotion attached to each of the steps and we’ll soon forget that we ever went through those instances and possibly forget the meal entirely. How many specific meals can you remember cooking last year? The actual act of cooking them? I know I cooked a lot of meals but all I have are non-specific memories of being in my kitchen that I could just as easily be dreaming up in the process of trying to recall them.
Now recall the last time you had a conversation where you strongly disagreed with someone about something you care about. Though we may not remember the words that were spoken we probably remember the frustration of our point of view being rejected by someone despite our protestation and obvious reasoning that we are right. These kind of events leave us with a different kind of story – one invested with emotion and often a judgement that we’ve imposed on the other who couldn’t understand us. We leave with a different opinion of them – they’re stubborn, they’re irrational, etc – but underneath that we’ll invent a story that belittles them or the formation of their opinion so that we can remain justified in sticking with ours – “she’s scared of facing up to the truth because she’ll have to change”, “he’s too emotionally invested in his current position to accept he might be wrong”, etc. These stories we make up may or may not be true sometimes but we need to recognise that there are equivalent stories underlying our own beliefs that we would do well to look at too. I don’t know much about psychology but I imagine one of the purposes of therapy is to help people to recognise and draw out these underlying stories in the hope that bringing them to light will effect or allow for a change in behaviour.
Equally in the way we live our lives we are often trying to live out the stories about us in other people’s heads (by which I mean trying to live up to the real or imagined expectations of others) – “if I can succeed at this, my parents will be proud of me” – or trying to live in rebellion against the stories we imagine other people have about us – “I’ll show him/her/them”.
We can’t help but tell stories to ourselves and each other about ourselves and each other. They may or may not be true. Maybe it doesn’t matter. It’s how we make sense of the sometimes chaotic world – we all think of ourselves as the hero in the ongoing story that is our lives – but sometimes life throws something up that makes it feel like a series of chaotic and essentially meaningless events. This is seen most clearly where life doesn’t live up to the story we thought we were writing – the death of a friend, the break-up of a relationship. When our best laid plans our taken away from us, when a story ends before we’re ready, what then? Suddenly we are orphaned – people without a story. Either we despair or we have to start again and write a new one.
To whom are we telling our stories? Ourselves? Each other? God? Is there any value in deconstructing our stories or will we just replace them with new or deeper stories? Maybe holding onto our stories, grasping them and trying to live them with integrity, is more valuable.
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