Telling Our Stories

Yesterday, my wife Jennifer and I went to a local happy hour and enjoyed two hours re-living old stories. We've been together for over four decades now, so there are a lot.

We've experienced our share of highs and lows, but there has never been a dull moment. We've moved households and changed jobs dozens of times. Our lives have been touched by barons and divas as well as oddballs and crackpots, often embodied in the same person. We've taken wild risks, made stupid decisions, failed, floundered, and f---ed up. Yes, there have been high points, successes, and joys, but the stories we re-told last night, the ones we smiled and chucked over were objectively pretty awful as we lived them. Today, they're vital chapters in our story, ones we would never wish away. 

"(W)e think we tell stories, but often the stories tell us," writes Rebecca Solnit in her book The Faraway Nearby, her brilliant exploration of the human capacity for narrative.

We are all storytellers, it's what our minds do. The world we "see" around us is really nothing but a collection of photons bombarding our eyes. It's our minds that make sense of them, that assemble them into something we can understand. We tell the story of those photons, just as we tell the story of the molecules, vibrations, electricity, gravity, and other phenomena that the totality of our senses take in. We create our stories both alone and in collaboration with one another, weaving together our agreements and disagreements, our insights and misunderstandings, making a reality that is nothing more or less than the story we tell.

And sometimes, like Jennifer and were doing, we tell the story, while other times it tells us. Much of what we remembered together last night were stories that had told us in the moment, but now, decades later, we have mastered them for better or worse. In therapy, we're meant to dig into those old stories, to disassemble them, to discover the "truth" that will bring us to a place where we can then heal through telling our story in a different way. As we told our stories together last night, it was obvious that this is exactly what we were doing.

Sitting with our memories is the domain of the old. Among writers it's said that the young write of feelings, while the old write of memories. The preschoolers in our lives are only just beginning their lifelong narrative, and it is one made largely of emotion and direct experience rather than sepia-toned reveries. As adults, we study children for clues as to what kind of adult they will become, what story they will tell. Sometimes we can guess at parts of it, but more often we can't. One of the children I was certain would one day become an attorney, did just that. The other became an actor . . . But they're young yet, so who knows, there are many chapters to go.

Some adults are desperate to tell a child's story for them. We see it all the time from parents who envision their baby at Stanford or starring in the movies. Our we see them helicoptering over their babies trying to somehow guarantee that there will be no disappointments or injuries or failures to mar their nascent narratives.

When we see this in parents we may have compassion for the instinct, but we worry that they are creating false or harmful narratives that their child will one day have to painfully rewrite if they are to be truly fulfilled. Or, perhaps worse, we worry that they are robbing their children of the opportunity to tell those vital stories of their resilience, recovery, and persistence.

Solnit writes: 

"I’ve heard from many women over the years, of the mother who gave herself away to everyone or someone and tried to get herself back from a daughter. Early on, she assured me that she had measured me as a toddler, doubled my height, and deduced that I would be five foot two, seven inches short than her, when I grew up and that my hair — white blond in my first years, lemon and then honey and then dirty blond streaked by the sun with gold as I grew older — was going to turn brown at any moment . . . This short, brown-haired daughter she decided upon was not terrifying, and she envisioned a modest future for me and occasionally tried to keep me to it."

We see this tendency more easily in parents, but it's likewise a pitfall for us educators. We often can't help but try tell their story right through to kindergarten, first grade, middle school and beyond. We see our role as getting them "ready" for what we think is next in their story. Indeed, we are often explicitly told that this is our job, but it is not. It's each child's job to tell their own story.

These young children have many chapters to go. They will tell and be told. They will sooner or later, whatever we do, find their own narrative. 

I often think that our most reliable guide in interacting with our fellow humans, young or old, is to consider how we will show up in their stories. Will we be friend, villain, or something else, like the Mad Hatter? I certainly don't want to be anyone's Herod or Voldemort or Uriah Heep. Let me be Joseph or Hagrid or Miss Betsy Trotwood and decades from now, when they sit with their memories, let them see that I was one of the people who helped them.

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