Once Upon a Time, I...

The stories we tell about ourselves

We are the protagonists of our own stories. Each of us, inhabiting small worlds that revolve around me, myself, and I. We are the Skywalkers, the Harrys (or Hermiones?), the Atreides, the Dorothys, the Bagginses and Pevensies.

How else could it be really, as we are the ones who experience every moment—dull or dramatic—that moves our plot along toward some hopefully happy-ish end. Fate and the gods are beyond our control, so we can’t see what’s coming around every bend. But we do write our own narrative script. We don’t take ourselves out of context. We know what motivates us, what frightens us, what inspires and worries and soothes us. No one else is privy to all the nattering going on inside our own heads.

(Quick sidebar: did you know that not everyone has an internal monologue? I only learned this a couple of weeks ago when I read this Bustle article.)

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being the protagonist of your own life—I mean, here I sit writing regular essays about myself and my family, and I’m deep in the trenches crafting a memoir about my own childhood. Clearly I’m well-practiced in imagining myself as the heroine of my own tall tale.

So I’m not saying we shouldn’t be our own main characters. I’m just thinking it’s a good idea to be aware of the tendency. And I’m saying it’s an even better idea to be able to set oneself aside now and then and take a look through someone else’s lens, imagine oneself into another person’s shoes. Understand that in someone else’s story we are the villain, the sidekick, the scenery, the footnote. Empathy is a great way to recalibrate perspective.

Also, when we’re aware that we live in a world in which billions of individual stories are playing out simultaneously, it’s easier to understand our place. Kind of the same awareness that comes with staring up into a night sky full of impossibly distant lights: whatever worry is all-consuming suddenly gets redefined as an infinitesimal twinkle in the grand scheme of the universe.

It’s not that we’re unreliable narrators of our stories. It’s just that each of our stories are one small part of an as-yet incomplete whole. We can only see so far.

There’s another facet to this whole limited-scope thing that really interests me, which is the way we tend to build up all this lore about ourselves that isn’t entirely reliable.

As we narrate our own tale through the decades of our lives, we tell lots of stories about ourselves like: I’m an introvert. I’m bad at math. I love horses. I hate onions. I’m not good with kids. I’m a word nerd. And so on.

We tell ourselves these stories about ourselves so often, they become canon, functioning as capital T Truth. Except… they’re completely made up.

Sometimes that’s because we outgrow the person we used to be and need to revise our stories. Other times the stories we tell are bullshit from the beginning. Often the stories we’ve adopted didn’t even originate with us. They are stories other people told us about ourselves, and we just accepted them as fact, folded them into our psyche like they belonged.

Reading Jami Attenberg’s recent essay on The 52 Project got me thinking about this whole notion. She writes: “A strange thing about middle age is looking back and realizing all the stories about your life you told yourself were just that—stories that were made up... To give you a structure to your life. To make you feel safe. To give you a sense of control. Or, alternately, to control you. But they’re just stories. Because there is nothing predictable or controllable about anything in life. Because at any moment anything can happen and then we have to change the story we tell ourselves.”

Lately I’ve been submitting a lot of work for publication in various venues, each of which also wants me to submit a bio. How I hate writing my own bio! How I struggle to encompass the truth of who I am as a woman and a writer in 100 words or less. I read other writer’s bios and see all the places my own falls short. I have failed to accumulate the bookish belt notches all the folks with poetry MFAs from Iowa seem to favor. My pile of accolades is small. My long and varied writing career in the professional world does not give me the cachet I need as I try to chisel my way into the literary world. I’ve got stories about being a copywriter, a newspaper reporter, a brand voice expert, a ghost writer, a poetry slammer, but those stories aren’t the ones editorial gatekeepers are looking for.

It took so long for me to call myself a writer. Even to myself. I had been writing since I was a child—stories, plays, poems, essays. But I would shrink myself and say, “Oh, I just like to write” or “Well, I write these things,” but I would never say “I am a writer.” Even when I was making a full-time, pay-the-rent and buy-the-groceries living by writing words, I hesitated. I wasn’t sure it counted as the right kind of writing. Wasn’t sure I was allowed.

How often have I gotten stuck on a story I told myself about myself that just wasn’t true? A story that said I wasn’t good enough or brave enough or thin enough or strong enough. I was too shy, too much, too emotional, too selfish, too angry, too naive, too rebellious. My stories have limited me, tripped me up, held me down.

I’ve been trying to examine the stories I tell more often, slide them under a magnifying glass and say “What is this made of, truth or fear?”

I’ve been trying to examine the stories I tell myself about people in my life as well—Filha and Marido, yes, of course. But also the “mean” teacher at the middle school, the faceless editor who rejected my essay, the loud Americans in the restaurant, the friend who unsubscribed from my life. What are the stories I tell about other people made of, truth or fear?

In general, comment sections on the internet are harsh places, desolate of nuance or humanity. But the comment section for the Jami Attenberg essay I mentioned earlier is rich with interesting thoughts about the stories we tell ourselves.

Angela wrote: “What I have found interesting (at a few points in my life) is when someone else's narrative of me stops me in my tracks and shows me how shallow, subjective or myopic my own narrative of myself can be. Or how it crystallizes something I had not been able to grasp or articulate. We are often told that what others think of us is not our business and only our own opinion counts, blah blah blah. Yes, in terms of valuing ourselves that can be absolutely true. In terms of showing us the view from the outside it can also be absolutely enlightening.”

From Caroline: “I’m still in the middle of reassessing the narratives I’ve been told about myself and the ones I’ve adopted as my own. Somehow I thought I’d be ‘finished’ at this age, or ‘grown-up,’ or ‘settled.’ I am none of those things.”

Kris said: “Truth is relative, I believe. And what was true yesterday can be less true today… My mother lives in absolutes. I used to live that way too. But now, except for obvious moral issues, I feel that my job is simply to love what is and embrace what is, to the extent that I can. Some days that’s a whole hell of a lot easier than others.”

Summer wrote: “Narratives are fascinating—but so is the lifelong impulse TO NARRATE. How many writers can understand that deep impulse to think in stories? It's how so many of us find joy and meaning, but also? It's how we survived. What I adore about middle age is the view—the ability to lift up out of the valley of living and see it all as not just a series of things, but one giant thing.”

From Petra: “I have been thinking so much about the stories in our lives, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and why we are the way we are and also how I use those stories to try to predict the future. How ludicrous when I see it like that. I’ve spent years following those stories. And yet the past 6 years - in particular - things have happened that I never envisaged. An unexpected and welcome divorce, an unexpected and windy and welcome (mostly?) career, new love where I didn’t think that was possible - none of that was part of the story. So maybe the stories aren’t that helpful. I am trying to stop where I am and see what it is, rather than follow some old story about why it is.”

And one last thought that I love from Jami’s essay: “Lately I feel like there is absolutely no grand plan for myself, it’s just about living as long as I can. I’m glad I’m still here, fumbling along. Bodies surprise us all the time. People surprise us. The wind whips up out of nowhere. I was never in control of anything and neither were you. The narrative is to just keep on living. The story of your life is just to hold on tight.”

All photos in this post feature a mural called “Jardins Efémeros” by Gonçalo Mar. Multiple towns throughout Portugal feature his artwork. This particular piece was painted in 2019 along Avenida de Moçambique in Setúbal.

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I’m still thinking about this whole storytelling thing, and I will be for some time. It’s the kind of topic you have to chew on like a beast with four stomachs—really ruminate and regurgitate, in a not-gross kind of way.

I know my readers are all over the place in age and geography and perspective, and I’d love to hear what you think about the stories we tell ourselves. (I’d especially love to hear from some of ya’ll who are super quiet and don’t usually comment because I know you’re out there, reading and metabolizing. And of course regular commenters are welcome as well.)

What kinds of stories do you tell yourself about yourself? Are they still true, or were they never? How do you use the stories you tell yourself—do they inspire you or motivate you or do you gaslight yourself into a corner? What kind of protagonist do you think you are? Where are you in your hero’s journey? Have you picked up a lightsaber yet, or pocketed The One Ring, or are you out there having tea with fauns, sewing cloaks from nettles and building dogs of bones?

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