An examination of...

Telling Our Own Stories

Most everyone in my circle of engagement have felt, at one point or another, like everything wrong in the world is because of themselves

I'm certainly not exception. I've spent large swaths of my life in that mode. Perhaps there's a reason. And no, it's not because I was right.

The world is large. Like, incomprehensibly large. No matter how much we quantify it, we are physically incapable of taking it all in. Just imagine a highschool gym full of people. You could count them easy enough. But now imagine knowing the entire movie length film of a story that is every single person's life. Keeping up with Marvel films was hard enough, there's no way I'm keeping up with a thousand stories, or even a few hundred.

And then consider there's (approximately) 8 billion people

Read that again.

You can digest the word 'billion' easy enough. You can write out enough 0's in a couple seconds to represent it. But truly experiencing a Billion is a tremendous feat.

Cool, what's that matter?

Well, that many people is a single facet to the absolute chaos that is our reality. Hundreds, thousands, or billions of billions of interactions and reactions causing the world we see it as it is now, and driving it forward. Yet, our minds have another interesting quirk.

Story telling.

For whatever reason, our minds are inescapably geared to telling stories. Your life is a story, casting yourself as the main character. And if you think back on your favorite, most impactful stories, there's bound to be at least one thing they have in common: actions of agency lead to consequential outcomes.

Whether that's a villain hero making a choice to be evil and causing a hero to rise, or the protagonist deciding to help or abandon a friend, it all boils down to this deeply ingrained concept that characters have agency on the world around them.

Western culture has played a big hand in driving this concept deeper into our psyche. Narratives like “You reap what you sow” bely the nature of our existence; suggesting one that is purely built by one's own actions.

So we tell ourselves stories in which everything revolves around our own decisions. And then we find ourselves in deeply uncomfortable, painful, or traumatizing situations. And our culture is quick to victim blame. So we “logically” run through all the available options we have for ourselves. Maybe we even run through trying most of them to no avail. Given the framework of our life, we are left to a singular, undeniable fact: if I cannot act my way out of this struggle, then I, as a person in their entirety, must be the problem.

If you've read this far, perhaps I don't need to tell you, it's not true. And very likely, you can acknowledge that truth on a cognitive level. But not emotionally. We can't rationalize and argue with that part of our brain. We need to comfort and nurture that part like an emotional child. And part of that starts with gently reminding yourself the narrative you have been raised in is wrong.

It's time to start rewriting our stories.

Mastodon: @kryptonite@astral.camp