Lately I've been thinking a lot about the stories we tell ourselves. My entire life is stories--and not just when I write fiction. When I craft content for websites or write product descriptions, my job is to tell a story about a company or a product that interests potential customers. When I edit something, I try to make the story that writer is telling as clear and concise as possible.
Stories are everywhere and in everything, though, not just in books and movies and website copy.
I think that storytelling is so intrinsic to our nature we don't even realize we're telling ourselves stories most of the time, or at least, that we're repeating stories that someone else told us.
Imagine for a moment that you get cut off by someone on the highway. At least in my experience, the first story we tell ourselves is, "That person is a jerk!" and "They could have killed us!"
But both of those stories could be false. We don't know what’s happening with them. Maybe the person was distracted--that doesn't make them a jerk. Maybe they're on the way to the hospital and really stressed--that doesn't make them a jerk. Maybe they didn't mean to cut you off and they're super apologetic but they're in their car so you can't hear them apologizing. And maybe they're an excellent driver and you were in no danger whatsoever of being killed.
So an alternative story we might tell ourselves could be, "Wow, that person is in a hurry--I hope everything is okay."
Because it's just a story: we can tell ourselves whatever we want. And we don't always have to paint other people who don't do what we like as a villain or annoying sub-villain.
This concept is a pretty common one for therapists and self-help gurus to talk about--changing the narrative, though half the time their suggestions are things like, "look in the mirror and tell yourself: I can do it!"
But what I've been exploring lately is the idea that everything is a story.
Everything.
Absolutely everything.
Most recently, I was talking to my therapist about the difficulty of differentiating wants from needs, and she looked at me and said: "Have you ever considered the idea that the spectrum of want and need is a false dichotomy?"
So I started thinking about that, and realized that sometimes wants and needs are the same thing, so if we begin with that premise instead of automatically assuming that they're different, then suddenly a two-dimensional understanding of a concept becomes ... don't worry, I'm not going to drag you down that rabbit hole with me lol.
My point is, the idea that wants and needs are on opposite ends of a spectrum is a narrative that a person or culture or whatever told me, which I've repeated to myself over and over and over throughout my life. And it was a useful story sometimes, like when I made very little money and had to decide whether to pay my rent or go out to eat with my friends--but it was a story nonetheless.
I don't have to keep telling myself that story, though, if it doesn't work for me anymore. If it's getting in the way of becoming a healthier or better person. Or if I just don't like it.
Not that changing the stories we believe is easy, of course. You can't just snap your fingers and "believe" in something. But understanding the power we have over the stories we tell does create a sense of freedom.
I can't control the stories that other people tell me. I can't control the stories I believed in the past. But I can work on disrupting the stories that have rooted in my brain, and I can choose to tell myself new stories moving forward. And I can choose to question any story that someone tells me or which I discover rooted in my brain.
The reason why this matters to me as a writer is because the beliefs that I have, the narratives I tell myself about real life, make their way into my fiction and can either reinforce a reader's stories or provide an alternate story.
Have you ever read, for example, a one-liner in a book (or seen it into a movie or whatever) where a character makes a comment about another character's weight? It's usually supposed to be a joke. Or for example, in early seasons of NCIS, the character Tony likes to "guess" the weights of women who are suspects in a case. (Thankfully, the writers eliminated that in later seasons.)
This reinforces the social narrative that your weight matters. That your weight impacts your value in society. That you "should" weigh a certain amount. That weight is intrinsically representative of your health. And the way that other people perceive your weight matters.
But if you spend any time in the body positivity or body neutrality circles, you'll find that all of these narratives/myths have been thoroughly debunked, not only through personal experience and anecdote, but also by research and science.
Because they're just stories. And we don't have to buy into them if we don't want to.
The worlds I create, the characters I build, and the words I write reflect the unconscious stories I believe about life, the universe, and everything. I have some control, sure. I get to make choices about the themes I explore, the types of people I write, the ideas I spend time on. But my subconscious does most of the work and the stories it believes make their way into my creative works whether I want them to or not.
Thus, I think one of the most important things I can do as a writer is to keep questioning the narratives. All the narratives that swirl around me, in family and media and culture and life--they're just stories that someone made up to explain (or explain away) an experience or a feeling or something they didn't understand.
But I don't have to hang onto those stories. I can choose to let them swirl away into the void as so many stories have before. And instead, choose to tell and believe stories that are more relevant, more useful, and more kind.
