The stories we tell
I hate him,†my sister said. “Why?†I asked, puzzled. Given that it was my world that had exploded, I thought I should have been the one feeling extreme emotion. But my sister has always been the one to see the world in absolute dichotomies and to her I was the victim. I tried to think of the most accurate thing to say and all I could come up with was, “You don’t know everything.†It was an honest statement. She really didn’t know everything, not the whole story. No one did and no one ever would.
Every time I am blind-sided by an unfortunate event — the loss of a job, a loved one, a hope — I engage in a headless search for a story to replace the one I had been living with till the plot shifted and I lost it. It is only after running through a raft of tearful hypotheses that I eventually settle with the only story that is true. Life, as I knew it, is over and I’m going to have to muster up the energy and will to construct a new narrative. 


Wittgenstein wrote: “The limits of language mean the limits of the world.†More recently, the philosopher Daniel Dennett theorized that who we are, our consciousness, our sense of an “I†stems from the tales we tell ourselves about the world and about our place in it. Simply put, each and every one of us is is a story.
From birth, our parents will imprint on us a storyline we will spend a lifetime riffing off, unraveling or trying to come to terms with. And then there are all the concomitant and consequential stories — the ones we end up creating about and for ourselves, the ones we spin for the sake of other people, including those we are trying to convince to love us. And lurking beneath, running its own course, the unvarnished truth pulsing beneath all the fairy tales we’ve made up, the actual story, our real selves, the truth about our relationships, in all their complex beauty and ugliness, all those secret dreams, motivations, regrets, and weaknesses that constitute the actual who and what. And the actual story is the one that really matters, isn’t it?
I remember standing in an airport at 20 and bawling into a payphone to my mother that I could not get on the plane. It was incomprehensible that I would leave that physicist I was stuck on, his enactments outside of pubs of electrons moving back in time, his green vest and brass trumpet. As I poured coins into that payphone at the rate one does pachinko balls, my mother told me that I would get over it. I just needed to get on that bloody plane. It would not sink in, not for another half hour anyway, because, frankly, the story she was trying to get me to acknowledge was awful — not a grand romantic tale but a mundane story of a pointless passion. Every cell in my body rejected the notion that the love that had turned every cloud in England into cumuli of cotton candy had only as much consistency. But deep inside, perhaps at the level of those time-jumping electrons, I also knew it was the truth. My young man hadn’t exactly chased me through the streets of London in a Mini Cooper packed with his funny friends. I got on the plane.
Actual stories are not pretty; neither are our actual selves. Although we are stories, we are not simple stories. We may be the authors of our own destinies but, like actual writers, we are also prone to losing the plot, falling in love with some beautiful but purposeless phrase and exploring this or that plotline that we knew but hoped would not end up in a dead-end. It takes motivation and courage to develop the ability to parse, defend and assert the very truth of us, who we are and what we really want, against the stories other people, our demons, want us to believe. The effort is worth it. Human beings have the capacity to rewrite their lives, disprove the story society has imposed, a lifetime of trauma or an unexpected tragedy has authored and draft a new and more optimistic tale. But such rewriting has to come from the very pith of us. For it is the actual story that lets you see reality and pinpoint exactly where you ignored it at your peril. It is the true story that gives you the strength to rebuild and that, when accepted, releases the bad blood and heals the wound.
A few weeks after it all came crashing down, someone wrote to tell me he was sorry. For me? For what had been done to me? For what I had permitted? I ran through all the stories I had told myself in the aftermath: He lied to me. I lied to myself. He was a cad. I was a fool. Finally, I responded, “It’s okay… Whatever happened, whatever it was, whatever he did, whatever I thought, all I know is that there was love there.†And as I pressed send, I realized that that was the truth of it, the heart at the heart of it, and I felt the wound begin to heal.
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